Chapter 3
THREE
KASTER
The scout dies before it knows I’m there.
One moment, it’s crouched behind a bone ridge, focused on the distant horizon. The next, my claws tear through the base of its skull, severing the connection between brain and body. It drops without a sound. Clean. Decisive. Final.
I crouch over the corpse and wait.
Thirty seconds. Sixty. The flesh stays still beneath my hands—no residual pulse trying to knit it back, no regeneration forcing me to kill the same creature twice. This one remains down.
For now.
I wipe my claws on the sterile earth and move on.
The Ash Wastes stretch in every direction—flat, scorched, unforgiving. I’ve burned this ground so many times that the soil itself has forgotten how to grow.
Stored dragonfire bleeds from the ground in waves. The temperature never drops below comfortable. Never offers relief to creatures that need cold to function. The scouts hate this terrain.
They come anyway.
That’s the problem.
I pause at the edge of an old kill site—a creature I ended three years ago, bones picked clean by wind and time. The skeleton is massive, easily four times my shifted size. A god-made thing, built for destruction. It took me six hours to bring down and another two to confirm the death.
Now it’s a landmark. A warning.
None of the warnings seem to matter anymore.
Three more scouts enter my territory before midday.
I’ve been killing them for decades. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. I stopped counting because the numbers don’t matter—they always send more.
But I never questioned what the dead ones taught the living.
I circle wide, approaching from the northeast where the terrain provides concealment. The scouts continue their patrol pattern, unaware.
I drop the first from above, angling my descent to catch it mid-stride.
My hand blurs into a heavy, scaled talon mid-swing.
I don’t just cut the throat, I crush the windpipe under the weight of a limb that belongs to a monster ten times the scout’s size.
The sound of snapping bone is a symphony I’ve perfected over centuries.
The second one breaks cover and runs—not toward me, but away.
Fleeing to preserve information rather than fighting to avenge its packmate.
That’s new.
I catch it before it reaches the territory’s edge. The kill is messier than I prefer—it twists at the last moment, forcing me to adjust. The creature screams once, high and thin, before I crush its skull.
I stand in the silence and listen to the wind carry ash across open ground. My heartbeat stays steady. My breathing stays even. The fire in my blood burns low and controlled, ready to flare but not demanding release.
The third scout escaped.
I let it.
That was a mistake.
I spend the afternoon reinforcing territorial markers.
Dragonfire scorches the earth in overlapping patterns—fresh burns layered over old, keeping the boundaries visible for miles. The process is meditative. Fire and stone and the absolute certainty that this ground belongs to me.
Nothing else needs to matter.
I’ve lived alone longer than most mortals can conceive.
Centuries of solitude broken only by violence.
Other dragons avoid my territory because I’ve made it clear what happens to trespassers.
Humans learned the same lesson. Even the gods seem content to leave me alone as long as I don’t interfere with whatever they’re building.
I don’t interfere.
I hunt what enters my territory and ignore what stays outside it.
Clean boundaries. Simple rules.
The sun tracks across the sky in its slow arc while I work. Burn. Move. Burn again. The repetition focuses the mind. No room for distraction. No space for thoughts beyond the immediate task.
I’ve built this routine over centuries. Perfected it. The territory stays mine. The monsters stay down—temporarily. The world continues its slow collapse without requiring my attention.
The sun drops toward the horizon. I circle back toward the eastern edge, toward the shallow caves I use for shelter. The ground trembles occasionally—geothermal activity venting pressure from deep below. Sulfur taints the air.
Then I catch it.
Magic.
Not dragon. Not standard witch. A signature that makes the air taste like endings. Like—
The magic signature registers at the edge of my territory. Miles away, but clear as a beacon.
Irritation flares beneath my ribs.
I should ignore it.
Whatever fool wandered into my territory is either lost, desperate, or stupid enough to think warnings don’t apply to them.
The signal moves steadily eastward, skirting my marked boundaries. Smart enough to avoid the worst of my burns. Stupid enough to think the border zone is safer.
The scouts will find her eventually. The gods will send bigger monsters. She’ll die the way everyone dies when they attract divine attention—messy, painful, alone.
The blood scent intensifies. More of it now. Too much.
My feet turn toward the border before conscious decision catches up.
Need to know what the scouts are doing differently. Whether their new patterns pose a threat to my actual territory. Whether this witch might draw attention I’d rather avoid.
That’s the reason.
The trail leads through broken terrain—hills and ridges that mark the transition between my territory and the wastelands beyond. The ground is less stable here, more prone to rockslides and unexpected drops. Natural chokepoints that hunters use to corner prey.
The blood scent grows stronger with every mile.
I move faster.
The magic signature stutters ahead of me—bright, then dim, then bright again. Using power in short bursts. Conserving. Whoever this witch is, she understands her limits.
She’s still losing.
The fire curved around her without conscious direction on my part.
Interesting.
The aftermath hangs in the air—scout ash drifting gray, sulfur and char mixing into an acrid haze. The ones that escaped are already reporting. I feel their absence like negative space, the information they’re carrying back to whatever controls them.
The witch is on her knees in front of me.
I don’t point out that her magic nearly killed her anchoring a single scout. Don’t mention that whatever reserves she has left won’t survive another attack. Don’t acknowledge the obvious value of what she’s offering.
I turn and walk toward my territory.
She follows.
The blood scent clings to her—copper and salt and that underlying note of Anchor magic. My senses track her presence without permission, noting details I have no reason to care about. The rhythm of her breathing. The pattern of her footsteps. The exact distance between us at any given moment.
Night falls in slow stages—orange bleeding to red bleeding to purple bleeding to black. The stars emerge cold and distant overhead. The temperature drops everywhere except my territory.
She must feel the gradual increase in temperature as we move deeper into my domain. The shift from cold wasteland to fire-baked earth.
She doesn’t comment.
Smart.
The path winds between ancient burn scars and newer ones.
The ash of burned interlopers. The silence of a place where only one predator is permitted to exist.
She keeps walking.
Her footsteps are quieter than mine—deliberate placement, weight distribution calculated to minimize sound. Hunter’s instincts, even in a body that’s clearly not built for hunting.