Cal slept hard.

  Not well. But the combination of warmth, a full stomach, and four walls that weren’t slowly sinking into a swamp meant he went under fast.

  Dreams came in fragments.

  Stone groaning under impact. Water closing over his head. Elias’s voice, somewhere behind him, saying, “You’re overusing your shaping,” while something huge moved out in the fog.

  Then a different sound cut through it all.

  Screaming.

  Not human. High, tearing bleats that hit the same part of his brain anyway.

  Wood cracked. Something heavy slammed against stone hard enough that he felt the vibration through the floor and up his spine.

  “—no, no, no—” Paulie’s voice, hoarse and furious. “Off with you!”

  Cal jerked awake, half on his feet before his eyes were fully open.

  For a second, the hut was a blur of red-orange light and shadows. The fire had burned low, throwing more embers than flame.

  Jordan was already up.

  Not standing. Coiled. One hand on his staff, the other lifted like he’d been about to grab Cal’s shoulder and thought better of it. His eyes were fixed on the open doorway where cold air poured in.

  “Pen,” Jordan said. The word was flat. No humor. “It’s in the pen.”

  The screaming outside rose to a panicked chorus.

  Sheep.

  Cal grabbed the nearest thing that felt like a weapon.

  His hand closed on the rough stone shaft of his short spear, leaning where he’d left it by the hearth. The familiar weight of the shield dragged at his bracer arm as he snatched it up, leather grip biting into stone and skin.

  Adrenaline scoured the last of sleep from his head.

  He ran for the door.

  Jordan moved with him, half a step behind and to the side, the way he always did when Cal was tired, and the world was sharp.

  “Don’t overbuild,” Jordan said, and it almost came out like a joke until the next crack of wood made it impossible.

  The night hit Cal like a physical thing.

  Cold, sharp air knifed down his throat. Wind clawed at his hair and jacket, carrying the bitter smell of trampled grass and fresh blood. The sky above was a vault of dark blue threaded with too many stars, the Tower’s false night far clearer than anything over Old Atlanta had ever been.

  The world beyond the hut’s threshold was chaos.

  The low stone pen shuddered as something massive slammed into it again. Sheep bodies churned in panic inside, a tangle of wool and horns and rolling eyes. Their bleats had gone from uncertain to outright terror.

  Paulie stood between the hut and the pen, boots braced, a heavy wooden staff in his hands. The staff had a hooked end, the kind used for snagging legs and necks in calmer times. Right now, he was using the straight side like a club, swinging at a dark blur that moved too fast.

  Cal’s earth sense hit first.

  Weight. Huge. Low to the ground but dense—every impact sent a shiver through the stone shelf under the hut. Claws, more than four, biting into the shallow soil just outside the ridged lip Cal had shaped earlier.

  The thing hit the pen again.

  Stone rang. The narrow ridge scraped against something harder than wool or wood. Sparks spat briefly in the dark.

  Cal’s eyes finally caught up.

  For a heartbeat, the predator existed only as disjointed impressions.

  A body the size of a draft horse, stretched longer, too lean over the ribs. Limbs that moved wrong—jointed like a big cat’s, but bending a fraction too far, each ending in splayed, grasping claws instead of paws.

  Its hide looked like fur at first glance, dark and matted.

  The head…

  The head was what made Cal’s stomach twist.

  The silhouette was canine, roughly. Long muzzle, wide jaw. But the mouth split farther back than it should, a Y-shaped opening that carried too many teeth. The eyes sat a little too forward, a little too wide apart—pupils narrow and vertical like a reptile’s, but with a faint second ring around them that caught the light wrong.

  When it growled, sound crawled out of its throat in layers—one low rumble, one thin insect-like chittering under it, out of sync.

  Wrong, Paulie had said.

  He hadn’t been exaggerating.

  The predator lunged again, slamming its shoulder into the pen wall. The stone lip forced its claws up and over, spoiling the angle, but momentum still carried its bulk into the rock.

  Cracks spidered along the outer edge.

  A sheep screamed as the wall rocked inward.

  “Hey!” Cal shouted.

  The beast’s head snapped toward him.

  Eyes caught him clearly for the first time. Reflections burned in them that weren’t the hut’s light—something else, some too-bright glimmer that flickered in a rhythm his brain couldn’t quite map.

  It bared its teeth. All of them.

  Then it dropped low.

  And charged.

  It covered the distance between them in a blur of muscle and plates.

  Cal barely had time to raise the shield.

  The impact—predator meeting metal and stone—ripped through his entire frame. The shield slammed back into his chest, driving air from his lungs. His boots scraped, then lost purchase on frost-hardened grass.

  He slid backward, shield angled just enough that the beast’s head glanced up and over instead of straight through him.

  Its claws hit the ridged lip circling the hut, trying to dig in for leverage. The stone turned force sideways. The predator’s front half skidded along the curve, gouging deep lines, leaving it half-up on the lip, half-down in the grass, legs scrabbling.

  Cal didn’t think. He reached for the earth.

  “Stone Shape!”

  Pressure surged from under his sternum, raw and unready. He shoved it down his right arm and into the ground ahead of him, not caring about finesse.

  Spike, he thought. Spike.

  The stone obeyed—clumsily.

  A jagged shard of rock heaved up from the soil at an angle, waist-high, its point rough and uneven. It wasn’t the clean spear of bedrock he’d pictured. It was more like a broken tooth.

  It still hit.

  The predator’s foreleg slammed into the rising stone as it lunged again. The spike drove into the softer flesh just behind a plated patch, punching through muscle.

  The beast screamed.

  The sound started as a roar and frayed into a higher, almost human pitch at the edges, like a chorus out of sync with itself. It tore its leg free in a spray of dark, too-thick blood that steamed in the cold air.

  Cal’s vision went gray at the edges.

  His head pounded. Nausea surged up from his gut, aether strain reminding him he’d gone from dead asleep to heavy shaping without any ramp-up.

  No time.

  The predator whirled, wounded leg already tucked up, weight shifting to the other three—and something else. One back joint stretched in a way nothing with bones should, bracing like a fifth limb.

  It didn’t retreat.

  It went for the easier prey.

  It vaulted sideways, hitting the pen again. This time, it latched onto the top edge with its claws and hauled itself partly up, that too-wide mouth snapping for the nearest sheep.

  “Off!” Paulie bellowed.

  He swung his staff with both hands, slamming it into the beast’s muzzle. Bone rang under wood. One of the jaws snapped shut, teeth clacking together.

  The predator twisted, one eye rolling toward Paulie.

  Cal saw its weight shift.

  Jordan saw it too.

  He moved like he’d been waiting for permission.

  “Hey!” Jordan snapped, voice suddenly bright enough to cut through the wind. Not a joke. A command dressed in heat.

  Something in the air tightened.

  The predator’s head jerked toward him, attention snagged by instinct the way a dog turned toward a thrown stone.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Jordan stepped in closer than Cal liked—close enough that the ring stones’ light caught the hard set of his mouth.

  “Wrong target,” Jordan said, and the last word came out edged.

  Cal didn’t have time to figure out what Jordan had done. He only saw the result: the beast’s focus peeled off Paulie like a scab and snapped to Jordan instead.

  Jordan kept his staff up, stance angled, giving ground on purpose.

  Cal didn’t think. He moved.

  He threw himself toward Paulie, shoulder hitting the older man’s side, shoving him out of reach just as the creature lashed out.

  The claw that would have taken Paulie’s chest raked across Cal’s shield instead.

  Metal shrieked. Deep gouges scored the already abused surface.

  Cal hit the ground hard, back stinging from the impact, shield over both of them. The predator’s claws scraped along the rim, searching for a gap.

  “Stay down,” Cal gasped.

  Paulie grunted, breath knocked out of him, but he didn’t argue.

  Above them, Jordan’s staff cracked against something—wood on bone—buying a half second that felt like a whole breath.

  Sheep bodies hammered into the pen walls, crowding away from the flailing predator. One wasn’t fast enough.

  The beast’s jaws found wool.

  It clamped down on a sheep’s hindquarters and wrenched. The animal screamed, a high, tearing sound that cut straight through the night.

  Bone cracked.

  The predator hauled, dragging its prize halfway up and over the pen wall. The stone lip Cal had shaped along the base did nothing now; the attack came from above.

  “No,” Cal snarled.

  He shoved himself to his knees, ignoring the way his stomach rolled, and slammed his spear’s butt into the ground.

  “Stone Shape!” he choked.

  He didn’t have time for careful picturing. He thought wall and pushed.

  The earth in front of the pen surged.

  A slab of stone heaved up from the ground like a slow wave, waist-high, then chest-high, forming a partial barrier between the predator and open fields.

  He felt it misalign as it grew—too thick at the base, hairline fractures forming near the top where he’d overstrained weaker rock. The aether cost hit him like a punch. His vision blurred.

  It was enough to change the angle.

  The predator yanked its kill, trying to drag the sheep clear. The new wall got in the way. Wool and flesh slammed against stone instead of open air.

  The beast snarled, adjusted, and leapt.

  It didn’t go over the wall.

  It went through it.

  The cracked upper edge exploded in a spray of stone fragments as the creature’s shoulder hit. The barrier held just long enough to rob it of momentum, turning what would have been a clean retreat into an ugly tumble.

  Beast and bleeding sheep crashed into the grass beyond in a tangle.

  Cal staggered around the ruined wall, spear raised.

  Up close, the sheep’s injuries were worse than he’d hoped.

  The predator had taken the hindquarters almost cleanly. Bone and muscle hung in ragged strips. The animal kicked weakly, eyes rolled white.

  The beast itself was already trying to disentangle. One foreleg dragged, the spike wound leaking.

  It saw Cal coming.

  Its lips peeled back over too many teeth.

  It lunged—not toward Cal, but sideways, using the broken wall as part of a tight, unexpected pivot. One clawed foot hit the stone lip circling the pen, pushing off. Another caught the stump of the shattered barrier and used it like a step.

  It moved wrong and fast, zigzagging in a pattern that made Cal’s eyes ache to follow.

  Cal thrust with the spear on instinct.

  The stone point bit into one of the overlapping plates along its flank and skidded off, gouging a shallow furrow but not punching through. The impact jarred up his arm, making his abused channels scream.

  The beast twisted out of reach, that strange rear joint extending, then snapping back like a spring. It covered ten meters in two bounds, bleeding from leg and flank but not slowing.

  Jordan flashed into Cal’s peripheral—moving to cut it off—then stopped when he saw the truth of it.

  They weren’t catching it in open grass.

  The predator paused just at the edge of the hill’s slope, looking back once.

  Its eyes found Cal.

  Then, like it was filing him away for later, it slipped over the rise and vanished into the dark.

  Silence slammed down, broken only by ragged breathing and the thin, pitiful sounds of injured sheep.

  Cal stood there, chest heaving, spear tip lowered, as wind tore at the last of the scream from the air.

  The night felt bigger now.

  The stars were too bright. The plains were too wide.

  Behind him, the two remaining sheep pressed into the far corner of the pen, bodies jammed together, sides heaving.

  Three others lay where they’d fallen.

  One in the grass just outside the pen, neck broken, eyes staring. Another crumpled against the inner wall, throat torn out in the first rush. The third lay twitching near the gap in the smashed barrier, hindquarters a ruined mess.

  Paulie was already moving.

  He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt, one hand pressed to his ribs where Cal had hit him. His face was pale under weathered skin, jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked near his ear.

  He limped to the wounded sheep.

  Cal followed, steps unsteady.

  Jordan lingered a fraction back, shoulders squared toward the darkness beyond the ring as if he expected the predator to change its mind and come back for seconds.

  Up close, the damage was worse.

  The predator hadn’t just bitten and let go. It had torn. The wound gaped, edges shredded. No amount of shaping or bandaging would fix that.

  The sheep’s eyes rolled toward Paulie as he approached. It tried to kick, legs scraping uselessly against the ground.

  Paulie set a hand on its neck.

  “Easy,” he murmured. His voice had gone rough and soft at once. “Easy now. You’re done.”

  Cal realized what he was about to do a half-second before he did it.

  “I—” he started.

  Paulie shook his head once, not looking at him.

  “Don’t watch if you don’t want to,” he said quietly.

  Cal watched anyway.

  Jordan’s jaw tightened. He looked away—not from the act, exactly, but from Cal, like he couldn’t stand to see Cal take another thing into himself.

  Paulie’s hands were steady as he took the knife from his belt. One quick, practiced cut. The sheep jerked once, then went still.

  Blood steamed in the cold night air.

  Paulie stayed there for a moment with his hand on the animal’s neck, eyes closed.

  Then he pushed himself upright.

  His gaze went to the other two bodies. He counted them without speaking.

  Three.

  Half the flock.

  The lines at the corners of his eyes looked deeper in starlight.

  “I’m sorry,” Cal said.

  The words felt useless as soon as they left his mouth. Thin and small against the scale of what had just happened.

  Paulie let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in his lungs for years.

  “It’s not the first time,” he said. “Won’t be the last.”

  He turned his head and spat into the grass, as if to get the taste of the lie out.

  “No,” he corrected quietly. “If it keeps up like this, this was the last time. There’s not enough left for it to come back for.”

  Cal’s throat tightened.

  “I should’ve—” he started. “If I’d built a full wall instead of that lip—”

  Paulie’s gaze swung to him.

  “You built more in one night than I’ve had in…longer than I can say,” he said. “You hurt it. Drove it off. That’s more than most.”

  He glanced at the smashed barrier, at the shattered upper half where the predator had punched through.

  “Monster didn’t even slow for those boards I put up last season,” he added. “Your stone made it think. That’s worth something.”

  “Not enough,” Cal said. The words came out sharper than he meant.

  Paulie didn’t flinch.

  “Nothing’s enough, some nights,” he said. “Doesn’t mean you didn’t try.”

  Jordan’s voice cut in, low.

  “You didn’t do anything,” he said.

  It wasn’t a pep talk. It wasn’t polished. It was the kind of statement you made when you were holding yourself together with teeth.

  Cal looked at the broken wall, at the jagged spike still jutting from the ground, dark blood clotted along its side.

  He replayed the fight in his head, step by step.

  The way he’d thrown Stone Shape out like a reflex. Big spike, big wall. Same instincts he’d used in the swamp—throw mass at the problem, fix it with brute force.

  The predator had gone around, over, and through. Like water around a badly placed rock.

  He heard Elias’s voice in his memory, flat and unamused.

  Use stone to control the field. Not to win the fight for you.

  They worked in silence for a while.

  There wasn’t much else to do.

  Paulie fetched rough canvas from a lean-to and ropes from inside. Together, they hauled the two intact bodies to a patch of ground a little farther from the pen—meat to be salvaged before rot set in.

  Jordan took one end without being asked, face set, breath coming hard through his nose, as if he were angry at the world for having to do this at all.

  The third, the one with the shredded hindquarters, was beyond even that.

  Cal dug with his earth sense more than with his hands, coaxing a shallow grave open in the soil near the pen. It was the smallest thing he could shape without his channels screaming—just a depression big enough to hold what was left, edges smoothed so the earth would settle cleanly when they covered it.

  He did it because it felt wrong not to bury something that had spent its life penned and tended.

  Paulie didn’t comment.

  Jordan didn’t either. He only stood close enough that Cal could feel him there, a quiet body at his shoulder, like he was making sure Cal didn’t tip over into the hole by accident.

  When they were done, Paulie stood for a moment, hat in his hands, head bowed. He murmured something under his breath, too soft for Cal to catch.

  Then he put the hat back on and turned away.

  “Come on,” he said. “No sense freezing out here. The live ones’ll settle better if they can smell us nearby.”

  Back in the hut, the fire had burned low, but the coals were still hot. Paulie added a log with hands that didn’t quite shake and set the stew pot back over the rekindled flame, more out of habit than hunger.

  Cal lowered himself onto the nearest chair and realized only then that his legs were trembling hard enough to rattle the wood.

  His head throbbed. The aether backlash he’d held off outside surged now that he’d stopped moving—nausea, a buzzing under his skin, the faint sense that if he stood too fast the room would tilt sideways.

  He set the spear down and pressed his elbows to his knees, head in his hands.

  Jordan stayed on his feet.

  He hovered near the door, eyes on the latch like it had personally betrayed him. He checked the bolt. Checked it again. Then, like he couldn’t help it, he glanced at Cal’s bracer arm.

  “You good?” Jordan asked.

  It was a stupid question. Cal still answered.

  “Fine,” Cal lied.

  Jordan’s mouth tightened.

  Paulie didn’t comment. He just breathed out through his nose like he’d heard that lie before.

  “I can patch whatever I broke in the wall,” Cal said after a moment. “Rebuild it thicker. Higher. Make real barriers this time.”

  He heard Paulie let out a slow breath.

  “I appreciate the thought,” the older man said. “But I know how this goes.”

  Cal looked up.

  Paulie stood by the hearth, firelight painting his lined face in red and gold. He looked older than he had a few hours ago. Not fragile. Just worn thin.

  “You’re a climber,” Paulie said. “You came up from below. You’ve got more floors ahead of you than you can see yet. You gave it a shot tonight. Lost more than I’d like. That’s usually the part where the delver tips his hat, says ‘sorry for your trouble,’ and heads on to whatever’s next.”

  He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug.

  “I’d be a fool to expect different.”

  Something inside Cal twisted.

  He thought of the Tower’s invisible conditions. Of how Floor One had wanted him to clear the goblin nest. Floor Two had wanted something bigger dead in the swamp.

  If he walked away now, what would happen?

  The predator came back as soon as the scent of blood faded. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe a week from now, when the scars in the stone had just started to blend into the landscape.

  It would finish what it’d started. Two sheep left, then none. Maybe it would test the hut again, just to see if the walls tasted different from the pen.

  He pictured his mother sleeping more easily under the clinic light. Sammy’s thin shoulders relaxed when he saw the drip.

  He pictured walking back into their apartment and telling them he’d left someone else’s fight half done because it was hard.

  His jaw set.

  “If I go now,” Cal said, voice low, “it just comes back. And next time, no one’s here to hit it in the face.”

  Paulie’s mouth twitched.

  “I’ve been hitting it in the face for a while,” he said. “Didn’t seem to help much.”

  “You didn’t have shaped stone and a busted shield arm,” Cal said. “I do.”

  Jordan let out a short, humorless breath.

  “And you have me,” he said.

  Cal looked up.

  Jordan’s eyes met his without flinching.

  Not brave. Not swaggering. Just there.

  Paulie studied Cal for a long moment.

  The hut creaked softly in the wind. Outside, the two remaining sheep bleated once, then fell quiet again.

  “You’re not obligated to stay,” Paulie said. “Floor doesn’t owe you that. Neither do I.”

  “I know,” Cal said.

  He pushed himself to his feet.

  Every muscle complained. His channels buzzed with latent strain. He could feel the tremor in his bracer arm as he lifted the shield back onto its stand by the door.

  He didn’t sit back down.

  “We do this right,” he said, “or we don’t do it at all.”

  The words surprised him a little as they left his mouth. They sounded like something Elias might have said, or Jordan, or his mother on a good day when the aether hadn’t hollowed her out too much.

  Paulie’s brows rose.

  “‘We’?” he asked.

  Cal met his eyes.

  “I’m not leaving you with two sheep and a monster that thinks you’re easy pickings,” he said.

  He glanced toward the dark window, toward the invisible horizon beyond.

  “And I’m not failing my first real plains test because I treated it like a swamp brawl,” he added. “Tomorrow, we set the ground up so that thing walks into its own grave.”

  Paulie’s gaze held his for another beat.

  Then, slowly, the older man nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  He reached for the kettle, poured hot water over whatever herbs he’d used earlier, and handed Cal a cup that smelled sharp and bitter.

  “First step of doing it right,” Paulie said, “is not collapsing before the sun’s up. Drink. Sleep what you can.”

  Cal took the cup.

  His fingers shook as he lifted it, but less than they had a few minutes ago. The steam warmed his face. The first sip burned his tongue.

  Jordan made a face like the smell alone had offended him.

  “Can we do it right with literally anything else?” he muttered.

  Paulie’s eyes flicked to him.

  “No,” Paulie said.

  Jordan sighed like a martyr, then took his own mug and drank anyway, because Cal was doing it.

  Cal let the heat sit in his chest for a moment, anchoring himself there instead of out in the dark where the predator’s eyes had watched him.

  Outside, the wind howled across the plains.

  Inside, in a hut with cracked stone and a battered shepherd who refused to run, Cal made himself a quiet promise.

  Tomorrow night, the thing that hunted these hills would bleed in a way it couldn’t shrug off.