Every Hunt demands a Sacrifice
Coming Soon
Every Hunt demands a Sacrifice
Coming SoonThe harpy came in low over the livestock pen with its wings folded tight for speed; its talons extended in a descending rake with the killing geometry of a raptor built for the strike.
He intercepted it at the pen's edge, the Cruach-blade coming off his back in a practised draw, just as his father had taught him; the leaf-shaped iron catching the harpy across its leading right wing at the apex of its descent.
It hit the mud, skidded, and came up and around on its talons, with its wings half-spread and its mouth open in a gaping and indiscriminate display of a predator which had never been challenged at this range.
A stranger walks out of the northern wilderness. Something nests in the fields nearby.
A frontier settlement starving after sabotage. Something shrieking in the dark beyond the tree line. And a stranger arriving from the north, gaunt and scarred, carrying marks that haven't been seen in a generation.
The first hunt. The first cost. A question that will define everything that follows: what is Tarahn willing to destroy in order to protect the strangers that may never understand what he is?
A brood of shrieking, raptor-bodied creatures led by something far worse — a creature whose wingspan blacks out the sky and whose intelligence makes the lesser harpies look like animals. She has nested somewhere she should not be. What she has built her nest from is the reason Tarahn cannot walk away.
Every hunt demands a sacrifice. This one is personal in a way Tarahn did not expect, and the things he carries away from it — small enough to fit in his hands — will weigh on him for the rest of time.