Point, aim, shoot.
She adjusted her grip on her rifle, scanning the brush for any signs of life. A fat hare, a small deer, a wild boar—it made no difference. With her gun in hand, they were all made equal.
The rush of water over stones permeated the foliage, blending with the sound of rustling leaves. They broke through the brush and crossed onto a rocky bank. Florence scanned the edge of the small river they had come across.
“I don’t see anything.” She sighed heavily. “I’m going to track upstream a bit.”
“Don’t go too far, it’s almost twilight.”
“Just around the bend.” She kept her voice low to avoid scaring off any potential quarry in the distance.
“I’ll wait for you.” He slung the water bladders off his shoulder and they fell to the ground with a dull splat. Derek began to unscrew them, his skin almost the same shade as the dark leather in the fading light.
“I won’t wander,” Florence promised. She knew the dangers of wandering. It was what had separated her and Arianna in the Underground. She would only stay along the stream.
Derek vanished behind her as she trekked onward. Time and again, Florence ran her hands over the hinges of her rifle. She felt the tension in the trigger, assuring her that it was cocked and ready. She needed just one creature, and she could return back victorious.
With a grand stroke of luck, a pheasant made its way along the bank with an enticing little coo. Florence dropped to her knees, gun at the ready. The noise of her footfalls was covered by the sound of a nearby waterfall, seemingly the font of the river.
It rushed down around craggy rocks, determined to smooth over the rough hillside in long white strands that seemed to glow in the pale twilight. Florence brought the gun to her shoulder, adjusting her crouch so that one knee was up and the other was planted firmly in the river rock. She lined up the notches down the barrel of the gun, tracking it over the bird.
Florence took a deep breath and fought the urge to close one eye. With the bird securely in her sights, she brought her finger to the trigger and held her breath.
The creature raised its head suddenly, turning in surprise. Florence hadn’t heard what spooked the animal, but she didn’t hesitate; she took her shot.
With a crack, the bird was dead.
Satisfied, Florence stood, slinging the rifle over her shoulder. It wasn’t as much as she’d bagged previously but it would be enough for a night, even split five ways. So relived was she that Florence never bothered to heed to what had nearly scared the bird away from its watering hole.
She didn’t realize she wasn’t alone until she had the pheasant’s clawed feet in her grasp.
The sound of the water rushing over the rocks began to fade. Her head filled with a numbing white noise that set her inner ear to spinning. Florence blinked, turning, looking between the darkness of the trees. She grabbed for her revolver, waiting with heart-pounding dread for something to emerge.
Movement caught the corner of her eye and Florence looked up to the top of the waterfall. Long, clawed, horribly joined and gnarled fingers curled over the edge of the rock. Cresting the edge was a set of horns woven like frozen flame. They were attached to a skeletal face, skinless and pointed in a sharp-toothed snarl.
Eyes like those of a Dragon glowed in spite of the darkness. White on a field of obsidian sockets sunk far into the depths of the creature’s head. It was all arms and legs and sinew, a monster that looked as though it had woken from a thousand-year slumber and now sought its first meal.
Its low breathing dulled her senses. There was a wicked sort of magic at play here. Not like the Dragons, not like Chimera. This was a creature born of malice and murder...
And it was not alone.
One by one, horned monsters crested the rocky bluff. Each sang their sense-dulling requiem. Their eyes turned to her with instinctual purpose.
Florence’s sweating palm slipped off the handle of her revolver. Her legs had been disconnected from her body. Her hands didn’t move as commanded. She could hear nothing other than the mind-numbing, low breaths of the monsters. She could see nothing other than their glowing eyes.
In the fading twilight, she stared at a nightmare made flesh.
13. Arianna
The sun and moon were not even close to the same thing. While they both gave off light for nearly equal portions of the day, one was bright and painful to stare at, while the other was muted and ghostly. Arianna had known this before arriving on Nova, but even after nearly two months of her useless tenure in the Xin manor, she remained fascinated by the moon’s shifting phases.
The sun was constant. Every day it shone in its perpetual orb-like manner. Bright, blinding, and filtering down through the clouds onto Loom below. But the moon shifted. It went through its phases with no regard for any who might be depending on its light for guidance through the dark night. And once every month, it winked out of existence entirely, as if to remind the world below that they were lucky to have it at all.
Arianna had been forced to be like the sun on Nova: constant, present, dependable. On Loom, her true nature was that of the moon. She could be an evolving creature, growing with every turn of the calendar.
The stagnancy she found herself in was nearly coming to an end.
She’d moved the small table over to the western facing window so she could watch the moon trail through the sky. Arianna enjoyed its ghostly play on her papers, the way it set her firm black lines of ink against the white. She kept diligent records of everywhere Cain showed her, adjusting her map regularly.
There was something in the rock of Nova, Arianna had decided, that made it defy gravity. The islands floated, that much couldn’t be argued. Why they were floating she had yet to fathom, and likely never would. Magic was as good an explanation as any. But even magic had rules it must follow, and if some of the rock could float, then why couldn’t all rock float?
Arianna continued to push the question aside, focusing on what was of most direct importance to her.
The second she’d wrapped her mind around accepting that rock could float, she threw out the parameters she’d been relying on for her mental reconstruction of the manor. If there was no need of support beams, load bearing walls, or secure foundation, the structure could indeed evolve in whatever way the Dragons saw fit. That led her to her next string of logic: What way did they see fit?
Cain had been hard to unravel, but unravel he had. Day by day, Arianna had prodded and worked her way under his thick skull to try to understand what was important to him and the other inhabitants of this world. It was surprisingly simple from there.
Gods. Hierarchy. Beauty before reason.