When a gaggle of rats intruded upon the owl’s domain, the frog knew it was time to move.

  If it kept hesitating, it would never go. At some point it would make a mistake - a wrong step, the ground shifting under its feet too loudly or a creature fleeing in its direction. The owl would find it, and then there would be no escaping.

  A future it would rather avoid.

  Rats were the kind of predators weak individually and relying on numbers. Only, they were so weak that even together they wouldn’t amount to much. The frog could handle a swarm of them with little effort.

  Which meant the owl would have a blast. With how it liked to treat weaker creatures, it would kill them by pulling out a single strand of hair at a time. There was never going to be a better opportunity.

  So when the monstrous creature darted past, screeching in that way so horrible that almost made it give up, the frog got out of its nook and moved as fast as it could without dropping its sneakiness, very careful to stay far away from the clearing.

  The path wasn't long or particularly dangerous, but still unnerving. After the owl had passed through, it was always eerie here.

  Usually there would be a few small creatures around, despite the thing’s best efforts. Critters too small for even the owl to bother with for the most part, or daring – and very short-lived – scavengers. But after the giant predator had passed through, all was completely quiet and still, and every small sound felt like a bang.

  Its own steps along the way made the frog flinch. But had the owl been able to hear them, then it would already be dead, wouldn’t it? They were going different ways, so there was nothing to worry about!

  Soon enough, it crossed into the right area, full of rock formations, crevices and various hiding places. All around the central clearing, everything was jagged and craggy, but here even more so. Perfect for skulking about, and almost opposite to where the owl was, with respect to the center.

  That unfortunate creature had truly died in an ideal place.

  There was a bit more activity here, judging by the sounds bouncing off the walls, over a background of soft screams from afar which might be from one of the many fights that sometimes broke out in the wider world. Or more likely the owl had already dug out the rats. There was really no time to waste.

  The place was twisted and hard to traverse, and it might have taken a lot of wandering about and backtracking to find the body’s whereabouts again, if it weren't for that easy-to-follow feeling of specialness. Which the frog cherished immensely when it finally found the spot: such carnage had formed since the last time it had been here. With all the pieces of different long dead creatures strewn all about and mixed together, it might as well have given up, had it needed to turn rocks over and inspect each of them one by one.

  Still, even with the mysterious feeling guiding it, now came the troubling part.

  Because while the smaller clearing here was full of hiding spots, the lizard hadn't died in one of those. Wherever it was exactly, to dig out the gem the frog would have to step out into the open, for the first time since it had emerged from the crevice after the failed transformation.

  Out into the open, where it was exposed. Out into the open, where the owl could find it. And that might not even be the end of the problems, if its instincts were right...

  But the frog was brave, and not easily intimidated.

  Maybe that thing was terrorizing everything in sight; maybe it could move through the air, so silent that it could be a moment away and there was no way to know; and maybe it had mauled things that could squash the frog like a critter, as if they were nothing… But the frog was not scared of it!

  It had escaped its notice this whole time, hadn’t it? While the owl had been stalking the place with every advantage possible and determined to use them to kill everything around, the frog had opposed that. It had survived.

  Triumphed.

  And it was about to do that one more time, in a grander way than ever before!

  So it pushed down what little hesitation it still had. It got moving.

  And then there was a scraping. The sound of rocks rolling out of sight, but close. Very close.

  Evidently the frog was a tiny bit scared after all, because it was halfway down the closest burrow before knowing. Only once it was at the bottom did it realize: that sound couldn’t have been the owl. The thing would either screech its head off or be completely silent. No in-between.

  … what was it doing? Clearly, it must have been some small critter, nothing to worry about. Time was running out and it’d better stop wasting it!

  Still, calming down before it made its way back out took a while, and even longer before it stepped into the open once again.

  This time there were no scary sounds, and it managed to examine the surroundings properly, the carnage around. Pushing its trepidation aside, it wasn’t hard to follow the special feeling to a piece of the lizard’s flesh still attached to an intact filament. Then it was just a matter of following it. Easily done, even with the creeping crawling of unknown eyes – that obviously weren’t real – on its back.

  Unfortunately, that was where its luck ended, for the thing led to a very small crevice, far too small to get into.

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  Many more filaments converged there, possibly the majority of those that were left. Which meant that the gem had rolled down.

  …

  Getting the treasure out would be very awkward and very dangerous. Hopefully the gem hadn’t gotten too deep, which would force the frog to painstakingly search around for some other, wider access point that might not even exist.

  Well… nothing to do for it.

  It walked up to the crevice, leaned down and reached inside with its arm.

  The space was really cramped and twisting, forcing it to rummage up to its shoulder. Of course, the hardest part was doing this while aware of how vulnerable it was, showing its back to the open.

  In the end, it was sooner than expected when a familiar jolt of disgust rushed up its claws.

  Very careful to keep its mind away from dangerous thoughts, that would have it locked up with fear in such a vulnerable position, it seized the gem and started to pull very carefully, in an attempt to extract it. The lumpy thing was strangely heavy, but progress was good… until it stopped dead.

  The frog wiggled the thing around some more, trying to shake off whatever was blocking it. But the resistance was strong, as if some antagonistic creature down there were pulling in the other direction, just to spite it.

  Which was clearly absurd.

  But there was no denying that something was blocking the gem, and feeling around it… the frog realized just how awkward the situation was: it wasn’t as it had thought before, that the gem had rolled down into the crevice.

  Rather, it must have been a few chunks of flesh – more than one, judging by the filaments coming out the other side – that had somehow ended up down there, and dragged the gem along with them. Only the flesh up here must have kept them from tumbling even deeper into the ground.

  And no matter how the frog wiggled and pulled, they kept getting stuck, most likely because they’d fallen in different side-channels. Which meant the frog had to decide.

  It could either give up the whole thing and retreat safely. Maybe try for some other gem that was less disgustingly dangerous.

  Or it could get stuck in the worst possible place, in perfect view, knowing full well that the owl might be moments away. And having a clear precedent on what would happen then.

  What needed to be done was pretty obvious.

  However, things weren’t going to be as straightforward as it had hoped: too many filaments had been damaged for a proper transformation.

  Which might be a good thing after all, since this creature had been weaker than the frog in about every way possible, if by a very tiny amount.

  Usually, this would be a dead end: the gem didn’t feel that appealing to feed on, and a transformation to scrape at whatever it really wanted was impossible. Let alone that whatever it tried probably wouldn’t play nice with its sneakiness.

  And yet, perhaps because of this strange feeling, there was another path opening up. Not something the frog could see itself doing again in any other situation. But somehow, this feeling of specialness and... connection with the lizard pulled at it. Allowed it to spot exactly what it was that it wanted in here.

  And if only it let itself be guided along, it could pull the real treasure out, only the minimum amount of faulty filaments coming with.

  numbers go up!