Propped against a stack of grain sacks, he was awake, present—a relief so profound it still hummed in Faizan’s chest. But the man’s solidity had been hollowed out. His face pale, the skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, and the steady, river-rock grey of his eyes clouded with a deep-seated pain. He wore simple sleeping clothes, a thick blanket over his legs, a stark departure from the sturdy, practical kurta and leader's vest that usually marked him. The ashen blue vines of the Burn had climbed past his wrists, a stark, sickly contrast against his skin. His voice, when he finally broke the five-day silence of his recovery, came as a coarse whisper, scraped raw from disuse and strain.
“Faizan,” he said, the name both a question and an anchor. “From the beginning. Leave nothing out.”
Faizan himself sat perfectly still on a rough stool, his tall frame coiled with nervous energy. The lantern light deepened the cosmic blue of his eyes and made the single, stark white streak in his espresso-brown hair gleam like a sliver of moon against the shadows of the room. He spoke with the flat, factual tone of someone reciting a report, the trauma packed tightly beneath the words. The chase. The leap. The fall. The silence. Waking under a serene, mocking blue sky. The crater. The strange, light-drinking tuft of fur. The smell of ozone and crushed sap.
“And the beast?” Kamran pressed, his gaze sharpening.
Here, Faizan’s crisis-clarity served him. Faizan’s jaw tightened, the sharp line of it casting a slight shadow. He took a slow breath, the lazy grace of his movements completely gone, replaced by the tensile readiness of a drawn wire. The memory was a frozen tableau in his mind. “Shaped like a huge cat. But… malnourished. Starved-looking. Fur the color of dead ash. It had these… crystals. Jagged, ugly purple things, sticking out of its back and legs like they’d grown from the inside. Its eyes were just… pits of that same seething light.” He swallowed, the image vivid. “Where it stepped... it left a kind of blight. Not dust, but... the plants didn't look crushed. They looked sickened. As if their color was draining away where its paws touched. And the air around it felt... thirsty. Dry.”
Kamran nodded slowly, absorbing the horror. "And you are unharmed. How?"
Faizan hesitated. His eyes, that deep blue with its swirling silver specks, lost focus for a moment as he turned the memory over, searching for a logical shape to give the impossible. "I don't know. I woke up... whole. But when I ran, I saw the Guardian. The Mist Goat Nilaab from the waterfall. It was following me, keeping its distance. I think... I think it might have intervened. Scared the beast off."
Kamran's eyes softened with relief at the plausible, comforting explanation.
But Hassan leaned forward, the lantern light catching the map of silvery scars on his arms and the restless energy in his pale gold eyes. "A good thought, Faizan," he said, his voice low. "But Nilaab protects its glade. It wouldn't chase a beast that far. And that crater..." He shook his head. "Nothing in our forest makes a wound in the land like that. And if that beast made it, what scared it away?"
A colder silence followed. Faizan had no answer. Kamran caught the exhaustion etching lines into his son’s young face, the unnatural stillness that had replaced his usual easy grace. He dismissed him with a gentle look that held a world of pride and worry. The boy slipped out, the weight in the room lessening by a fraction, leaving the adults to the grim heart of the matter.
Kamran’s stern expression crumpled. The leader vanished, leaving only a father raw with terror. "Hassan," he whispered, his coarse voice breaking. "He said it struck him. A claw to the back. Did you see…?"
"I saw the tear in his jacket," Hassan said, his own voice grim. "I didn't want to frighten Leyla further. Aliya checked him when Madad brought him in."
"And?" Kamran's knuckles whitened where he gripped the sack.
Hassan met his friend's gaze, his pale gold eyes uneasy. "She didn't understand it. She told me this morning. She wanted to speak to you about it."
"Get her. Now."
Minutes later, Aliya entered, her healer's shawl drawn tight around her. She acknowledged the hunters with a nod, her focus on Kamran.
"The wound," Kamran demanded, no room for preamble.
Aliya knelt by the lantern, her face all sharp, professional concern. "It is… unique. It's a clean claw rake, shallow. But the flesh around it… for the first day, it showed signs of aggressive decay. Not infection. Not external mana. It was as if the tissue was being unmade from the inside out. Everything I tried to cleanse or seal it failed."
Kamran's breath hitched.
"Then, it stopped," Aliya continued, holding up a hand. "The spread halted entirely. It was not my doing. It was his body. His own vitality fought it off and contained it. Now, it heals, but slower than any wound I've seen. It is still a battle, Kamran, but one his system is winning. From my estimation, it will heal. But what caused it…" She shook her head, a deep frustration in her eyes. "It is not of our world. It is not mana. I have no tools here to learn more."
A heavy silence filled the room. The beast was not just a predator; it was a poison.
"Thank you, Aliya," Kamran said, the words heavy. "Tell no one of this. Especially Leyla."
"I already haven't," she said, rising. She gave his shoulder a brief, firm squeeze before slipping out, leaving the men with a new, more intimate layer of dread.
Hassan’s two hunters, their faces grim in the lantern light, broke the silence by laying out the physical evidence. They spoke of the perfect, scoured bowl of the crater, the ring of sheared trees, the utter absence of tracks leading away. Then, they produced the leg.
Not a fresh kill. Desiccated, twisted thing, its form increasingly lost under a crust of pulsating, sickly violet crystals. Less like a limb and more like a cursed geological specimen, humming with silent, wrong energy.
The unspoken question thickened the air, more terrifying than any answer: What force could obliterate a beast that left such a crater, and vanish without a trace?
“Double the perimeter patrols,” Kamran commanded, his voice gaining a sliver of its old strength. “No one speaks of this. Not to their families, not to each other. Panic is a beast we cannot fight.”
Hassan’s pale gold eyes gleamed. “That’s a stopgap, Kamran. This,” he pointed a scarred finger at the crystalline leg, “is a key. We use it against the Guild. Their Investigation Division has to respond to something like this.”
"And if they ignore this like they've ignored everything else?" Kamran's head fell back against the sacks. "Or worse, they come, with their machines and their arrogance. They'll turn our forest inside out, trample the grounds, scare off the game. They'll 'help' us until there's nothing left of us in Firstdawn."
"They left us no other path!" Hassan's retort cracked like a whip-crack in the quiet. He seized Kamran's wrist, turning it to the lantern light so the blue vines seemed to writhe. “Look at your hands. Look at Naveed. Look at Rahim, at Halim! We are already paying with our lives, Kamran. In blood and pain. They left us no other path.”
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His words hung, heavy and final. The lantern flame guttered, and in the sudden shift of shadows, the past reached into the room.
---
Six Years Ago
The awe came first. The soaring arches of the city gates, the buildings faced with intricate tilework that glittered in the sun, the clean, wide roads teeming with people in fabrics far finer than any Firstdawn loom could produce. Kamran had felt like a piece of raw earth tracked onto a polished floor. Around him, the very air shimmered with a low hum—the presence of a thousand minor Channels in the walls and streets, absorbing ambient mana to power gentle glows in the buildings.
He had come, heart heavy with the first five cases of Channel Burn in Firstdawn's history, to beg for a medical inspection.
For the occasion, he had worn his best clothes: a sturdy, earth-brown kurta of good fabric, neatly pressed, over his usual trousers. The dark hair combed back, the grey at his temples more pronounced under the city's harsh sun. A respectable frontier leader. But among the city's men in their tailored waistcoats over fitted trousers, their coats subtly embroidered with geometric patterns, he felt like a farmer at a royal feast.
A horse-drawn taxi had clattered past, wheels hitting a rain-filled dip. A fan of muddy water arched through the air, drenching his worn traveler’s trousers. He’d started, then simply looked down at the stain spreading on the carefully brushed fabric of his kurta. A resigned smile touched his lips. Part of city life. From the departing cart, the driver shouted a curse back at him for being in the way.
The Guild Liaison Division hall: a temple of noise and polished indifference. The air cooler here, scented of ozone and stone. The high ceiling paneled with wood inlaid with the faint, perpetual glow of inset crystal dust. He waited in lines that led to more lines. Finally, before a clerk who didn’t look up from his ledger, Kamran stated his business.
“The Manager for Eastern Frontier Supply is unavailable. File a written request.”
“I have. Three times. I need to speak to him.”
The clerk sighed, the sound conveying the immense burden of dealing with the persistent and unimportant. “He’s in meetings all week. You can wait if you want.”
Kamran waited. For three days, he slept in a cheap inn that stank of stale smoke, the safety of his village a constant, tightening knot in his gut. On the fourth morning, a junior clerk with pity in his eyes handed him a pre-printed form. “The Assistant Manager has reviewed your case file. All future inquiries must be submitted through the proper channels.” The same form he had sent months ago.
Defeated, he had turned for home.
The neatness he had arrived with was gone. Hair mussed. His good kurta now carried the permanent smell of cheap inn smoke and disappointment.
---
Two Years Ago after the Nurmir Festival
Hassan’s carried no awe. Standing on the same spot, he registered only obscene extravagance. “Bunch of show-off weirdos,” he muttered to himself, squinting at the gleaming spires whose domes were clad in tiles that shifted from sea-blue to gold in the sun. “All this stone just to hoard the light. It’s pissing me off.”
He had come with a list of ten names of the Afflicted to demand an investigation.
Hassan had made a different calculation. He wore black, close-fitting trousers and a high-collared tunic under a leather vest—a cleaner, darker version of his hunting gear, meant for motion, not ceremony. His wild, steel-grey hair was as tamed as it ever got, and a sharp, assessing glare had replaced his usual rakish smirk. He looked less like a supplicant and more like a blade that had been reluctantly sheathed.
The same taxi sped by on the same route, aiming for the same puddle. A sudden, electric prickle shot up Hassan's spine—his Adaptability aspect, a innate danger-sense firing before his eyes could register the threat. His body moved on pure instinct, a subtle shift of weight that read as luck but was born of a hundred unseen, forest-bred reflexes. The filthy water splashed harmlessly against the curb. He brushed an invisible speck off his dark tunic, a gesture of pure contempt for the city's filth. The driver cursed. Hassan shot back, louder and more inventively, earning a glob of spit on the cobbles at his feet.
His entrance to the Liaison hall was not one of patient queuing. He moved with a hunter’s intensity, his spiky steel-grey mane and hawk-like eyes parting the crowd of clerks. He stormed into a carpeted office area, his voice cutting through the hum. “I need to see the Manager for Eastern Frontier Supply. Now.”
The atmosphere chilled. Employees found sudden interest in their paperwork. A man with the pinched face of a low-level functionary emerged, his gaze dripping with disdain. “Hunter, you are disrupting Guild operations. Your village’s financial allotment is under review. Further inquiries must be written.”
The patronizing tone was the spark. Hassan’s temper, always closer to the surface than Kamran’s, exploded. He shoved the heavy oak desk, sending papers flying. The functionary yelped. Two guards in Guild tabards rushed him.
Hassan didn’t get overwhelmed. He fought. His city-smart clothes now a liability, the fine fabric of his tunic tearing as he twisted free of a grab. He was a master hunter of Firstdawn, and in the close confines of the office, he was a whirlwind of efficient, brutal violence. A jaw cracked under his fist. A knee buckled from a sharp kick. But the blaring alarm that filled the hall—he had no answer for. The understanding that he had just crossed an irrevocable line cut through his rage. He fled.
The chase blurred: shouting, slipping on the clean patterned tiles of the commercial district, bursting into a sunlit alley where the walls were plain and durable. They cornered him near a stinking midden where the polished urban facade gave way to the grime of the Outer Ring's service alleys. He fought again, taking down two more, but a club caught him across the ribs, another on the shoulder. As he grappled with a third guard, gasping for air—a figure in pristine, archaic armor of enameled white and gold, observing silently from a shadowed doorway.
In the next instant, all the air left his lungs. A force like a falling tree trunk hit his abdomen. He was on the filthy ground, vision swimming, agony so profound it stole his scream. The Old Blood member stood over him, gazed down. The face impassive, the eyes cool. Not mockery. Not pity. It was the simple, cold assessment of a master viewing a flawed tool.
The guards surged forward to seize him. The Old Blood raised a single, gauntleted hand. Absolute silence fell.
“Throw him beyond the city gates,” the voice came calm, melodic, and utterly final. “His hunter’s license is now city-void. He does not enter again.”
Sprawled in the stone-cut ditch beyond the walls, where runoff from the city's aqua-conduits flowed surprisingly clear but cold, his dark clothes torn and stained with alley filth and his own blood, clutching his screaming ribs, Hassan’s first thought: furious, blinding injustice. Then, the cold clarity of the frontier washed over him. Prison in a Guild cell? A “trial”? Disappearance? This exile was a severing. A clean, brutal punishment. The Old Blood hadn’t saved him; he had removed an irritating speck before the Guild bothered to crush it. Dismissal, not mercy.
---
The lantern flame steadied, pulling them back to the storehouse, to the crystalline leg, to the slow death creeping up Kamran’s arms.
Hassan subconsciously rubbed the old, deep ache in his side, his eyes locked on Kamran’s. “We have sent seventeen letters. We begged. We pleaded. I fought. They didn’t just ignore us, Kamran. They showed us our place. This,” he hissed, gesturing to the alien limb, “is not a request. It is a report of a catastrophic, unknown mana-hazard on their doorstep. They have to respond. And when they come to investigate this…” His finger jabbed toward the leg. “…we make them look at everything else. At the Burn. At the Siphons. At us. We won’t hand them our only hope without a fight. We will force them to see.”
The silence that followed was the sound of a decision being made. Kamran gaze moved from Hassan’s fierce, scarred face to the sinister, crystal-encrusted leg, and finally to his own blighted hands. The weight of leadership, of his failing body, of his endangered people, settled on him. He had tried the proper way. It had led only here.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the helplessness gone, burned away in the furnace of necessity. “Draft the report,” he said, his coarse voice now edged with stone. “Mark it with every urgent seal we have. Hazard. Unknown Entity. Immediate Investigation Required.”
Hassan nodded, a fierce, grim satisfaction in his eyes. The meeting broke up. The hunters lifted the leg onto a cloth to carry it to a locked chest. As they moved, the lantern light swayed.
In the flickering shadow that passed over the severed limb, for a single, impossible instant, the jagged violet crystal claws twitched.
The past is a foundation, whether it's made of stone or scars.
Chapter 7 was about the weight of years of silence. Kamran's weary hope and Hassan's furious grief—their failed journeys to The Great City of Nurmir (or Nurmir in short) made their final decision feel inevitable to write.
- What hit you hardest: Kamran's resigned defeat or Hassan's violent expulsion?
- What do you make of the Old Blood's "mercy"?
- How do you think the Guild will react to a "hazard report" from a village they've ignored?
If you're curious to see how the Guild responds, please consider following the story or leaving a rating. It makes a huge difference. Thank you for reading.