Chapter 1 #2
They were filling up with new snow, but they were fresh enough to trace with my eyes.
Where they came from was already mostly obscured, but where they were headed was still visible.
The tracks were deep, long furrows, like those my sled made when I traveled, only much bigger.
I knew of only one thing that could make giant tracks like this out here, where practically nothing lived: a Revenant.
Not a small, harmless one like the Varkarsa likeness back in my tent on my workbench. No, a big one made for war and killing.
My hand went to the weapons and protective gadgets hanging from my belt.
Should I go after that thing or not? It was dangerous to confront a Revenant, but I was much better equipped to deal with one than most. While I wasn’t as notorious for it as, for example, Zeidon and other Water Weaver Naga, I definitely scavenged a lot.
Unlike them, I actually had the skills to figure out what I’d found and how to use it.
Why was it here? And had it simply not noticed my tent, or had it chosen to ignore it?
What if this Revenant was key to finding out what the Shaman Council had sent me here to discover?
I could not let the chance pass me by, and though it was slightly terrifying to follow the tracks of a deadly killing machine, that’s what I did.
If I kept enough distance, what could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, I didn’t really believe that either. This was a bad idea.
I still couldn’t stop myself from doing it. The quicker I found answers, the quicker I might be able to get out of here. That was worth a little risk, wasn’t it? How bad could it be? There had been a handful of Revenants I’d seen in my lifetime.
Once, it was a sand one near Serqethos, with six legs and a huge, curling, barbed tail.
It had already been destroyed by Serqethos warriors and their dragons, and I’d been called to heal the injured.
They’d been lucky, and only one warrior had been killed.
The others had all been during my time as a student at the Shaman Training Grounds.
Those had seemed like confrontations barely worth mentioning.
Chen and Fraersosh, now two of the three Shaman Elders, had been in their prime then, and I’d watched them be part of those takedowns with awe. So really, how hard could it be?
The answer was hard; I knew it the moment I saw what kind of Revenant I was dealing with.
For one, it was one of the absolutely massive ones, sliding smoothly along the snow like a giant Rakworm.
Except Rakworms looked tiny in comparison to this hulking thing.
My pulse spiked at the sight of it, and at the knowledge that it had passed right by my tent and I’d never even noticed.
Ten times as long as I was, this snaking creature slid along the snow, smoothly and silently.
It was made for burrowing in ice, I soon discovered.
Rearing back, it lifted its massive, flat-faced front end, and a whirring noise started up that made the ground tremble.
Blue light flared, and when it angled down and slammed forward, that light shone even brighter.
Like a burrowing insect, it tunneled into the blue ice.
Ice splintered and flew up into the air like a fountain of crystalline shards.
In a matter of minutes, that entire massive machine had chewed a hole into the ice slab and vanished.
My heart was pounding in my chest from the excitement and the fear.
I touched the gadgets I’d been so confident in before and knew that if I had to face this thing in a fight, it was very likely I’d die.
That was not the same kind of Revenant as the ones I’d seen my teachers face.
But as I dared to slither closer to the edge, I wondered if this particular Revenant wasn’t built exactly for what it had just done: burrow.
What if it wasn’t a machine of war at all?
The hole was deep, and it angled sideways before it appeared to level off.
I could perhaps climb down and continue following it, but what would that achieve except a cold tail?
The snow wasn’t coming down so hard now, which allowed me to see the track the Revenant had left behind right up to the edge of the hole it had created.
Where was it going? And why was it going anywhere at all?
I pulled free one of the handheld scanners I liked to work with.
It was not as powerful as the sensors I’d placed in circles around my tent.
This scanner was really meant more for analyzing samples at close range.
What it could pick up from much further away was always weak and unreliable.
To my surprise, the readings on the small screen seemed to indicate a power source nearby.
This wasn’t some random fluctuation; this was something new, or I’d have seen it on the sensors hooked up to the controls in my tent.
Something had just powered on, something big.
I had made my choice before I could think better of it. My body slid over the edge, claws digging into the smooth ice wall the Revenant had created. I went down in a whoosh, my descent only barely slowed by the strength of my clawed hands. Then darkness closed over my head, and I was in the tunnel.