A golden stain spread across the black water, from the spot where the ancient god disappeared. The air was heavy with the sweet scent of nectar. The tether of benevolent peace in Trenn's mind had snapped, leaving a raw, psychic fear.

  Skate hummed anxiously on Trenn's head, its obsidian surface a solid weight against his skull. Above, Bomber’s vibrant wings beat a frantic rhythm against the oppressive grey, a silent, circling sentinel. A scrape of metal and bone sounded behind him as Ezy climbed into the Scrapper’s barrel-like cockpit.

  In the fog ahead, a luminous wisp of blue-green fire ignited. It hovered patiently, a silent, beckoning lure. From the featureless grey, a distant rooster's crow echoed; a constant, unnerving rhythm muffled by the oppressive quiet.

  From her cockpit, Ezy’s one good eye was narrowed. Her voice was a low, furious whisper that sliced through the stillness.

  "Why didn’t the One-Eye attack? It could’ve crushed us,” she said, frowning. “It let us go… It's using us again, Trenn. Like it did when it was around your neck. This isn't a hunt; it's a process. It's herding us."

  The empathic terror, a reflection of the Giant Turtle’s dying emotion, was throbbing in his chest. He pressed a hand to his ribs.

  "You're right. It wants us alive. It needs us for something."

  He turned, his gaze finding Almitad. The Beaver Kin stood serene, her hand resting on the bone lantern that housed her undead Mana Bloom. His face felt pale, drained of blood.

  "I have a powerful tether with the One-Eye, and with its host, the Gem-Croc. I felt it when it killed the turtle. I felt the turtle's fear, and the croc's satisfaction… it wasn't hunger. It wasn’t cruelty. It was a success, a victory. It wants ichor. But it doesn't need us to hunt other ancient, giant animals. Especially not in a valley full of them. What does it want from us? Why bring us here?"

  “When the monster was killing my people, it said to follow the Trail of Tears,” Almitad said.

  "Is that it, then? It wants us to lead it to Dawn?" asked Trenn.

  A rustle of leather. Mara was already in a defensive posture, her bow half-drawn. Through their braided tether, Trenn felt her focus and resolve.

  "Couldn't it do that by itself? All it has to do is follow the tears. But instead, it's stripping away our allies. It started with the Dam, to get us here. Now the turtle, to isolate us. It wants us to reach Dawn, alone, with our backs against the wall."

  Zeen slammed the butt of his soul-bound musket into the black sand. "So what? I don't care what the trap is, as long as the bastard is at the end of it. I say we walk in and start shooting."

  All eyes turned to Zeen. His face was masked by grief.

  “What else can we do?” Trenn asked. No one had an answer.

  Satisfied, Zeen pointed to the blue-green wisp of the Tear of Dawn as it drifted in the gloom. “Nothing. We see it through, armed with the knowledge that this is what our enemy wants.”

  With no other choice, they left the sandy shore, heads low, with a prayer for their murdered savior on each lip. Mara took the lead, her hand never straying from her bow; a predator moving through an alien hunting ground.

  The rooster crowed again. Louder, clearer. This time, the sound came from a fixed point in the mist, a point located beyond the Tear of Dawn. The sound became a needle in the back of Trenn's mind, an unnerving metronome for their grim journey.

  They moved in a tense, tactical formation into a forest of silver-barked sequoias crowned with blood-red leaves. The forest floor was a flat expanse of thorny ferns, their barbs scraping and tearing at their legs with every step.

  The trek was a slow grind, the thorny ferns tearing at their legs with every step. The Tear of Dawn led them to a clearing dominated by a single silver tree.

  Hanging upside down by a massive branch was the fifteen-foot corpse of a Giant Rabbit God. Its white fur was stained with dirt and golden ichor, and its throat had been slit with brutal precision.

  Its powerful hind legs had been expertly butchered and removed, the cuts clean and professional. The rest of the carcass was largely intact but had been bled dry.

  Beneath the rabbit, the ground was a stained, almost dry patch of earth, suggesting the ichor was systematically collected in a large vessel. A thick, woven steel cable was cinched around the rabbit's tail, its metallic texture a jarring violation in the organic world of the mists.

  Behind him, the rhythmic clatter of bone on packed earth ceased. Ezy dropped from the Scrapper's barrel-like cockpit. She landed with a soft crunch on the thorny ferns, her one good eye narrowing as its focus swept over the hanging corpse.

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  Mara’s vulpine nose twitched, her hunter’s senses tasting the acrid air. She knelt, a single necrotic claw extending to trace the edge of the wound on the rabbit's throat.

  "This wasn't a feeding." She pointed as her claw retracted. "That's a blade-cut. Precise. And look at how the legs were cut... the remains were butchered,” she said, standing up.

  “This is not the One-Eye's doing,” she turns to Trenn. “There’s more than one god-killer in these mists."

  The word ‘gods’ snagged in Trenn’s mind. He processed the idea against the evidence hanging from the branch—a carcass. Immense, yes. Powerful, certainly. But it was also just meat.

  The concept of a deity being butchered felt fundamentally wrong. His companions, however, spoke the word with a casual, biological certainty, as if classifying a species.

  The word god, a direct output from his Translation spell, landed wrong. Trenn’s gaze fixed on the butchered carcass. This was just meat.

  Almitad knelt, her palm hovering inches above the stained earth where the hanging creature’s ichor had seeped into the ground. She frowned.

  “Mortals who hunt gods in the Valley of Dawn are never allowed to leave. It is the highest form of sacrilege."

  “Then, why do it?” Trenn asked, stepping closer to examine the dried ichor clinging to the corpse’s fur.

  Ichor. The black sand beach, the golden fluid blooming in the water, smelling of sweet nectar. The Gem-Croc had bled that same substance when Skate exploded in its face. And now this rabbit…

  “Is that it? Anything with ichor in its veins is a ‘god?’”

  A short, surprised puff of air escaped Mara’s snout, a sound of incredulous amusement. “You… I assumed you knew that.”

  "Yes, Trenn,” answered Almitad, her expression perplexed by the Wild Mage’s question. “What else would a god be?”

  Trenn’s gaze drifted from Almitad’s perplexed face back to the mutilated corpse. Gods. The Gem-Croc, the ancient turtle, and now, this giant rabbit. They all bled ichor.

  “So what, they’re… poachers?” Trenn asked, the words tasting like ash. “There's a market for ichor?”

  “More than one market. Ichor is a powerful reagent. Necessary to achieve the highest arcanas of alchemy,” she said as her amber eyes went to Trenn.

  “But its biggest market is the Anurys Mirror.”

  Trenn’s head snapped to attention. “The Grimoire mages?”

  “Yes. They are notorious consumers of ichor. They fill their hollowed-out bodies with the stuff. It’s the resin in their paper, the ink in their quill, the pigment in their cloth.”

  Zeen moved to the corpse, his eyes scanning not the butcher's cuts, but for signs of the kill itself. His fingers probed a small, almost invisible puncture through the fur, and he expertly dug out a small, flattened lead pellet.

  He rolled the deformed piece of lead in his palm. “Flintlock rifles,” he stated, his voice flat with the certainty of a professional. “That means… Bunnyling, or Ratling-made”

  Ignoring the corpse, Ezy’s one good eye went wide, her gaze locking onto the woven steel cable. She approached it, her left hand running over its braided, greasy surface, her fingers tracing the tight weave of the strands.

  "It's a high-tensile winch cable. The weave is flawless… but it’s not gnome-made," she said, her voice a mix of admiration and confusion. "The tolerances are too tight for Bunnylings... It could be Gnome or Ratling-made. But hauling the dead god up there? Without a full steam-winch, it has to be—"

  "—Wolf Kin." A tremor ran through Almitad’s frame. The serene calm vanished from her face, replaced by a palpable fear that made her fur stand on end.

  Ezy’s focus returned to the cable, then to the immense corpse. Her engineer's mind ran a frantic calculation of weight and force. Her one eye widened further, a flicker of disbelief warring with the grim numbers.

  "By the Schedule," she whispered, her voice barely audible. Then, with a tone of chilling, scientific certainty, she confirmed Almitad's unspoken assumption.

  “It would take only one Wolf Kin to haul that corpse up there."

  “What are... Wolf Kin?"

  “They are raiders. Apex predators," said Almitad. "In their homelands, they’re noble warriors who fight the Husk—beetle-like monsters easily the size of Spider-House. The only thing keeping the Husk menace contained is the Wolf Kin's warrior pride."

  Zeen scoffed. "Those who wander outside Wolf Kin territory are thugs. Dethroned leaders, or pretenders who failed their coup. They believe strength is a license to take whatever they want. They steal. They enslave. If it's profitable and violent, a Wolf Kin raider will sink his teeth in."

  Almitad gave a solemn nod, confirming Zeen's grim assessment. "He is right. Their entire culture is built on a hierarchy of strength. Everything that is not them is lesser," she explained. "And that prejudice extends even to their own clans. It is a constant struggle for dominance, which is why so many are exiled."

  “They sound horrible,” Trenn said.

  “They are strong, they are smart,” Mara stated, her voice a low, flat growl. “And they will eat you without a second thought because, to them, you’re talking meat."

  A tense silence fell over the clearing, so thick it swallowed the distant rooster's crow. Mara’s words hung in the air, a final, chilling verdict.

  The fear in Almitad’s posture receded, replaced by a grim resolve. Her shoulders straightened. Her gaze lifted from the team to the massive, hanging corpse, and she raised her bone lantern, its necrotic light washing over the butchered god.

  Her voice was shockingly casual, a cheerful, melodic line that cut through the dread. "Good," she declared, after a moment of scanning the corpse with the bloom's light. "The spirit has already passed on." Her gaze dropped back to the team.

  "Let's get the bunny down." A beat of stunned silence washed over Trenn. "It'll make a powerful ally," she explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  "A giant zombie... too bad it has no legs."

  A slow, predatory grin spread across Mara’s vulpine features, and a soft SCHLICK echoed in the clearing as her jagged claws slashed through the steel cable.

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