The creature he hunts sleeps about once every forty days. This was a rough estimate and in that Max and the Wraith were simir. But, this is where the commonalities stopped.

  A Wraith can be a mother and a father at the same time. Not needing an opposite to procreate as animals do. Often a Wraith's young would end up dominating their surroundings, wreaking havoc upon the natural order. At least, that's how he understood it from Vantium's schors, almost half a dozen decades ago. There are stories about entire forests being overrun by such fiendish descendants.

  Max is aware he can't kill the Wraith in a fair fight and so he must wait for the beast to fall asleep and then he will strike. It must eventually go to its cave to rest and Max was fairly certain the rge creature had its brood there. He thought about sughtering them while the Wraith was away but this would alert and enrage the creature making the long-pnned surprise attack a daydream, really. Younglings were like a lesser copy of the beast. Formidable but not really a challenge to Max.

  His dark blue skin was not ideal for this environment so he wore a soft long-sleeved purple shirt made of silk with an even twill weave, hard-wearing cotton pants, and robust boots with a matching cape—the hood cuddling Max's blue-bck hair. It was a visually pleasing coincidence how the bde of his hepatizon broadsword, secured firmly at his back, had a dusky purplish patina, almost matching the overall outfit.

  Max had decades of experience in forging swords, axes, daggers, armors, and so on, and so on, but not even these twenty-five days of waiting tested his patience like working with hepatizon did. You had to know how to read the secret nguage of bzing metal and hepatizon had quite obscure letters. Still, Max loved forging and it showed in the artisanship of the final product. The bde was a masterwork. It will do the job, the rest was up to him.

  Having red eyes also didn't help when it came to prowling but he was well hidden. Both Max and the broadsword were parallel to the ground—half covered with violet and dark red leaves and some twigs.

  Mostly purple with a tinge of gray, the brush around him was poking everywhere but it was just a minor inconvenience. The cave in the distance ahead of him was wide, much wider than its height.

  The hazy sun far above marked the twenty-fifth day since he first began staring at the damn cave. Max felt like he knew its every nook and crevice by now. No sign of the occupant and yet he understood it was only a matter of time. Once committed to the task he wouldn't stop even if Theia herself showed up and told him to.

  When was the Council meeting? Sometime in the middle of Sardon, he thought, answering his own question. Max will probably have to miss that. Time becomes fluid when you pretend to be a rock for more than half a month. It didn't really matter, the meeting was just a formality. Only Kali was always regur and another behemothic attack was not yet close. Well...hopefully. Max kept thinking of Maeve and time went faster. He would love to have stayed in Vantium to hopefully spend more time with her but the city often became suffocating. The air there just didn't feel right.

  Maeve the Comeliest. Of course, no one called her that except him—and even then, only within the deepest chambers of his mind. She was formally known as ''Maeve of Vantium'' or ''Maeve the Fairest.'' He preferred his unvoiced version, though. She told him to avoid these...excursions of his. There was a method, a proper way of hunting for these monsters involving multiple squads communicating and encircling the beast in a manner of an ever-tightening noose. His method was a borderline crackpot one, but Max, perhaps selfishly so, wanted this kill for himself.

  Some schors guessed that Wraiths were made by humans in their unnatural experiments, long ago. Others specuted that they were born from the bowels of Equiya, but it was only a guessing game in the end. There were also theories that---