12. Maug
MAUG
The fang lies where I left it.
Half-buried in dust, the edges smoothed, polished. I’d spent too long doing that—rubbing it clean until it gleamed like obsidian glass, until it no longer smelled of blood but of ash and quiet memory.
I don’t know why I gave it to her.
No, that’s a lie.
I know exactly why.
I just don’t want to face the answer.
In Odex tradition, a fang from a sting tail is a token. It means you survived. You fought. You bled. And you earned the right to keep breathing. We give them to each other after battle—to honor courage, to seal trust. Sometimes as apology. Sometimes as challenge.
But never… never to a human.
Never to someone like her.
I crouch beneath the outcrop of shale that overlooks the human camp, wrapped in the stench of scorched dust and static hum.
The wind tastes like iron—sharp, dry. Below, her silhouette moves with slow deliberation.
She steps outside the bunkhouse, arms wrapped around herself like armor that doesn’t quite fit.
And then she sees it.
Her breath catches. I can hear it from here—just a little shift in air, a ripple in stillness. She kneels, fingers trembling, and picks the fang up like it might vanish if she blinks too long.
She doesn’t drop it.
Doesn’t throw it away.
She holds it. Studies it. Then—gods help me—she smiles, just a flicker of warmth at the corner of her mouth, before slipping it into her pocket like a secret meant only for her.
A strange feeling stirs in my chest. Not hunger. Not tension.
Something else.
Something warm.
Something terrifying.
Hope.
I shift back into the shadows before she can glance up.
The urge to run hits hard—flee into the deeper caves, bury myself in silence where no one can touch this.
.. this thing inside me. But I stay. I watch the light linger on her hair.
Watch the way she presses her hand to the pocket like the fang is something precious.
Why?
Why did I answer her?
Why didn’t I ignore the whisper in the night, like I have every other time?
Because she asked.
And not with anger. Not with fear.
With belief.
I’ve seen that look before. In another life, in the eyes of a dying soldier who still trusted me with his last breath. But this is different. More fragile. More dangerous.
Because this isn’t about duty.
It’s about her.
And I don’t know what that means.
Not yet.
All I know is, she does feel a connection. She waits.
Every night, she comes to the edge of the light. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t run. Just… looks. Out into the dark, into the wilds where things move with teeth and hunger and fury. Where even the planet itself shifts beneath your feet.
She waits, and I watch.
No one else does this.
The others turn their backs to the wilderness, pretend the fences are enough. Pretend the world ends at the flickering boundary line. But not her.
She looks.
And because she does—because she sees—I can’t keep pretending I don’t care.
So I start leaving signs.
Not big ones. Not obvious. Just… enough.
A scrape in the dirt, angled like an arrow, pointing toward a ridge trail that won’t collapse under shifting pressure.
A stone, black-veined and stacked beside another, warning of a vent below that will boil the bones out of you if you get too close.
I leave them in places I know she’ll wander, quiet breadcrumbs meant only for her.
I don’t want her to see me.
I don’t want anyone to see me.
But I want her safe.
Isn’t that the same thing?
It’s not much, this ritual of watching and marking. But it keeps my hands from shaking when the wind carries the wrong kind of scent. When I hear the crunch of boots somewhere too close. When the earth murmurs beneath my claws and I know another faultline has shifted.
I’ve seen what this place does to arrogance.
Purgonis doesn’t kill you.
It undoes you.
Takes your pride. Your certainty. And strips it until all that’s left is survival—or silence.
Two of their soldiers go missing.
They were chasing a heat spike—probably thought they’d found a thermal cache, or maybe another Odex lair to bomb. They didn’t listen. They never listen.
The report says they vanished just past the western ridgeline.
I don’t need to read the rest.
I know what happened.
The steam vents there pulse irregularly—fast enough to cook a man mid-step. The rock sweats acid. And the tunnels beneath hum with something older than even I can name. I told them, once. Long ago. When I still believed there was a point in trying.
They didn’t believe me then.
They won’t believe it now.
But maybe… maybe she will.
Because she looks.
Because she waits.
And every time I see her slip down those trails alone—toward places no one else dares go—I feel something stir in me I don’t have a name for.
Maybe it’s duty.
Maybe it’s madness.
Or maybe, it’s hope.
And hope is a damn dangerous thing.