The rooster crowed again. It was no longer a distant annoyance. With every passing hour, it had grown louder, closer—a constant, grating assault on their sanity.

  The Scrapper’s skeletal feet led their procession, crunching through a knee-high carpet of ferns whose thorns scraped and tore at its ancient bones. Beside it, the zombie rabbit dragged its immense, legless torso with its front paws. The steady scrape-thump of its passage carved a wide furrow in the damp earth. Zeen was sitting atop the macabre mount, his soul-bound trained against the murky gloom.

  Next in their formation, Almitad trudged onward, her low, melodic incantation kept the undead god moving. She held her bone lantern with both hands. Its necrotic bloom cast a green-black glow that failed to pierce the gray mist.

  Trenn walked beside her, his gaze unfocused. He had turned his perception into a landscape of pulsing greyscale. A three dimensional map of their surroundings spread on top of the land’s obscured features.

  His echo location returned a vast, breathing mass that slithered through the gigantic trees. It was forced to climb, squeeze, and contort itself through the gaps between sequoias.

  The Gem-Croc.

  Whenever the rooster crowed, Trenn's sonar registered the One-Eye’s response. The immense, vibrating mass moved in perfect, unnerving parallel to their own path. When the crow’s echo faded, the creature stopped.

  “It's keeping pace. Left flank. A hundred yards,” he said, casting his Message spell through the tethers that connect him to his team. The image formed in their minds, a vibrating echo of what he perceived.

  “Oh God,” Trenn rasped. “It’s doubled in size.”

  Through the tethers, he felt Ezy’s fear, Zeen’s resolve, and Almitad’s purpose. From Mara, there was nothing but a predator’s stillness.

  "It's the ichor. Gods who feed on other gods grow stronger," she said, closing their formation in a predatory crouch. Her white-furred ears twitched with every scrape and rustle, straining for a threat she could neither see nor smell through the fog.

  The thorns gave way to open ground. The mist thinned, unveiling a structure that made the breath catch in Trenn’s throat. A massive arch of braided, silver-barked sequoias stood before them. A clean, resonant hum vibrated from the living gateway, a frequency entirely different from the dissonant buzz of Almitad's necrotic bloom or the wild thrum of his own soul. It was a sound of immense, ordered power. Intricate, glowing runes, the source of the hum, covered every inch of its surface.

  From the arch, a colossal fence of interwoven sequoias stretched from either side, its edges lost in the mist.

  A fifty-foot-wide lattice of woven metal blocked the archway. Set into the wood beside it was a mechanism of stark simplicity: two heavy levers, each with a deadman's switch built into its handle, and a single button on top.

  There were no traps. No riddle. Grip both switches, press the buttons, and pull both levers simultaneously. Simple, but impossible for anything without opposable thumbs.

  Trenn looked from the levers to the lurking, silent mass in the mist. It was close now. Barely thirty feet away.

  Is that why you brought us here?

  “It’s here. It’s not moving. It’s waiting for us to open the gate,” Trenn whispered as the team huddled behind the giant rabbit corpse.

  “We fight it. Here,” Zeen’s voice was a low growl of defiance. “It wants us to open the gate and walk into its real trap. The only move it won’t expect is for us to fortify here. We hold the line.”

  “Fighting a god head-on is how you die,” Mara hissed. “You don’t fight a mountain; you make it crumble. We fade back into the forest, use the mist as our ally—”

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  Neither plan was a solution. They were just different ways to die.

  “—No,” Trenn cut in. “The mist won’t hide us. It has Clairvoyance.”

  Almitad lifted her bone lantern overhead, its necrotic light flickering across her grim face. “Trenn,” she said, her quiet voice cutting through the argument, “Call Bomber. Now.”

  He nodded at the Beaver Kin. The time for debate was over. “We’re not opening that gate,” Trenn declared. “Whatever happens, happens.”

  He sent a silent command through his link to Bomber. The Giant Moth, a speck of color circling high in the grey, folded its wings and dove. Its six furry legs snagged the lantern’s hook. With a powerful beat of its wings, it lifted their precious Mana Source high into the obscuring mists.

  A thin whine escaped Mara’s snout. Her head snapped up. “Something else is here. I smell wet fur. And old blood.”

  Trenn’s sonar sense snapped from the Gem-Croc to a new set of targets. Five large people, each standing roughly seven feet tall, armed and armored. They moved from the cover of one sequoia to the next, their paths converging on the team’s position in a coordinated flanking maneuver.

  “We're surrounded, ” he sent through the tethers to the rest of the team.

  “We see you,” he said, loud enough to be heard through the mist.

  “And smell you,” Mara growled. "You're the Wolf Kin. The ones who butchered this," she finished, pointing at the zombie god they were using for cover.

  Predatory laughter echoed from the mist, cut short by the rooster's crow as the Wolf Kin emerged from the grey fog.

  Seven-foot-tall frames loomed across the mist, forcing Trenn to crane his neck.

  The leader was a massive brute with blue-black fur underneath a leather armor reinforced with heavy plating. A sneering scar that split his snout. He stepped forward, flintlock rifle in hand, modified with a boxy magazine and a reinforced stock. An oversized straight sword was strapped to his back, its edge honed to a silver gleam that hummed with power.

  A low whistle escaped Zeen. "A Ratling repeater. By the Schedule."

  From the Scrapper’s cockpit, Ezy’s one eye narrowed. "If we live, I want one for the Scrapper."

  “The sword on his back is enchanted,” Trenn added, his voice low. “I can hear it hum from here.”

  The leader’s scarred snout twisted into a grin as a red-furred woman stepped from the mist. She also wore reinforced leathers, but with a lighter plating, stained in dried ichor. At her belt were four flintlock pistols and two scimitars.

  She licked her chops. “Looks tender, Vavnaar.”

  A voice rumbled from a figure still masked by the gloom. “Too bad my belly’s full of god-meat.”

  Vavnaar’s contemptuous gaze swept over Trenn’s team. “A couple of bite-sized ‘lings,” he growled, nodding towards Ezy and Zeen. “A fox, a beaver… and… what are you? Some kind of Pig Kin?”

  Barking laughter rose from the fog, punctuated by the rooster’s crow. The red-fur grinned, unholstering two of her pistols.

  Vavnaar’s gaze fell on the undead rabbit god. “But this,” he purred, “is the interesting part.”

  “That’s what made the dragging sound we followed here,” a brown-furred Wolf Kin muttered. His shield came off his back with a scrape of leather, his flintlock pistol already in his other hand.

  An older Wolfkin, his fur gone to grey and his face a roadmap of scars, shifted the weight of his spear and shield. “A god… reanimated,” he rumbled.

  “They’re Hedge Mages, Vavnaar.”

  He pointed his spear tip at Mara. "The fox is a Guardian, a long way from home.” He moved along the line, pointing at Almitad. “The beaver's an Exorcist—she’s clearly the one controlling the undead creature.” Finally, the spear pointed at Trenn. “And the piggy heard Silver Flash’s hum, warned the others about its enchanted nature," he concluded.

  “Three hedgies.” The old Wolfkin’s gaze swept the area again, narrowing on the zombie god. "And they have a Mana Source nearby, to maintain a zombie that size."

  A chorus of wary growls rippled through the pack.

  The red-furred woman trained her pistols on Almitad. “So if I silence the beaver, the undead-god falls?”

  Trenn and Mara instantly shifted, their bodies moving to shield their friend, which only made the red-fur laugh.

  Vavnaar’s sneer twisted his scarred snout. “Enough. Janaree, put the pistols down. The real prize is beyond that gate. The Hedge Mages are a distraction.”

  With a grunt, Janaree holstered her pistols. “Dawn,” she said, her voice filled with avarice. “I can’t wait to shut that rooster up and clear the Morning Mists for good. We’ll have gods to hunt for the rest of our lives!”

  The old, grey-furred Wolfkin licked his lips. “Just like the One-Eye said.”

  Trenn flinched at the name, and the grey-fur caught the reaction. “They know the One-Eye, Vavnaar! And they’re scared of it!”

  Vavnaar leveled his rifle, the muzzle aimed directly at Trenn’s chest.

  His pack responded instantly. Janaree’s pistols were back in her hands. The others raised their pistols, a chorus of metallic clicks in the sudden quiet.

  “Stand aside or die,” Vavnaar growled, his voice a final, grinding stone.

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