14. Maug
MAUG
Purgonis doesn’t care about my caution.
One breath, and the stillness fractures.
A crack of stone. The sizzle of scorched sand.
Then the sting tail lunges from the ravine like a hellborn demon, its carapace gleaming under the moonlight, armored legs hammering against the canyon edge as it barrels forward, mandibles snapping.
The sound it makes isn’t a roar—it’s a shuddering hiss, a death rattle pulled from the gut of the world.
I see the gap in the fence a blink before it barrels through it—bent wiring, unsecured clamps, lazy human oversight. The marines failed to reinforce it after the last windstorm, and now it’s too late.
She doesn’t see it.
But I do.
Her scream builds in her throat—she hasn’t even made the sound yet, but I hear it before it’s born. Some part of me feels it, the rising panic in her chest, the way her body tenses like prey caught in a spotlight.
I don’t think.
I move.
I explode from the ledge above her with a speed I forgot I still possess, muscles snapping taut as my feet leave the rock and gravity lurches against me. Wind screams past my ears as I drop.
The sting tail rears back, sensing me—too slow.
I hit it full-force in the side, shoulder to thorax, blades already unsheathed.
The impact jars my bones, echoes through my spine.
My claws bite into its armor, but I don’t stop—I drive forward, twisting as I roll across the earth, slicing once, twice, low and fast. Acid hisses from the wounds.
Its legs thrash. It shrieks, a screeching keening sound that would shatter glass if it lasted a heartbeat longer.
I don’t give it that heartbeat.
I surge in close again, under its reaching claws. My blade drives into the seam beneath its carapace—between ribs, just left of center.
The sting tail convulses.
Then stills.
The silence afterward is brutal.
My breathing roars in my ears, hot and fast. The blood from the beast—green-black, acidic—coats my hands, my face, steaming against the cold night air. It runs in slow rivulets down my arms, hissing where it hits the sand.
But I don’t feel it.
I feel her.
She’s still there.
Still alive.
She hasn’t run.
I lift my head slowly. The world narrows. Shrinks. She is the only thing that exists now.
She stands just ten paces away, frozen, breath caught between inhale and exhale. Her eyes are wide, luminous in the dark, locked on me—not the body at my feet. Me.
Not screaming.
Not crying.
Just… watching.
I shift slightly, blades dripping, my breath coming ragged and low. She sees me now—fully, undeniably. There is no shadow to hide in. No clever angles. No distance between the truth of what I am and her fragile, human understanding.
And still she doesn’t move.
We lock eyes.
It’s not a long moment.
It stretches, warps, crystallizes. One breath, caught like sap in amber. The night holds its breath with us.
Her eyes—gods, her eyes—don’t shrink away. They study me. Not in horror. Not even confusion.
In recognition.
And that’s what undoes me.
Because in that moment, with the blood still warm on my skin and the sting tail’s body twitching beside me, I see it bloom in the space between us.
That ancient word.
Jalshagar.
I haven’t thought of it in years. I’d buried it with the rest of my past—alongside the wreckage of war, the shattered oaths, the exile. The rituals of bonding, of trust, of sacred balance—they don’t belong to me anymore.
But it rises now like an echo through marrow.
Unspoken. Uninvited. Unyielding.
She doesn’t know the word. She can’t. No human tongue could shape it right.
But she knows something. I see it. Feel it, in the way her shoulders don’t flinch, the way her breath steadies instead of faltering.
I stand slowly.
Not tall—not threatening. I let the blades retract with a soft hiss, a show of peace. The tension in her face flickers—just a little—but she doesn’t back away.