I would like to say that I didn’t join in on the frenzied spasms of fear that rolled about the mines and replaced every man’s higher intelligence with bestial panic.

  I did, of course, and if anything I was one of the worst offenders. But there really weren’t any men who remained stoic, not staring at that. Some of us had probably seen animal attacks before but this was something else. Let me tell you, there is a world of difference between natural and unnatural fangs. It’s hard to explain sometimes, but you know it when you see it.

  This time it was easy to explain though. The head was not just gone, not just easily gone. Everything above the neck to a stretch of sliced meat almost spanning the shoulders was removed, cleanly and easily. It looked like the work of a headsman’s axe to me, though you could tell by the sight that the removal had come along a much larger area and from a sort of pincering direction.

  So something had bitten down on the man and just taken everything above the shoulders right away. Simple, right?

  Except no. Think about that. You can’t even eat a steak that easily, not without tenderizing the bloody thing. There’s bone there, in a living body, and gristle. But all of that was just cut right through.

  “You’ve noticed it too?” Gruin asked, snapping me out of my horrified stupor with the question.

  “I…what?”

  “The cuts,” he elaborated, gesturing right where I was looking. I hadn’t really noticed myself noticing any of it, at the time, but now that he brought it up.

  “Too sharp to be teeth, surely,” I frowned, feeling somehow distant from the whole affair. Focusing purely on the physical facts, though, actually calmed me, brought that sense of removal to the forefront and left my spasming panic diminished.

  “Too sharp,” Gruin agreed, “...or clamped down with far too much force. Whatever did this was probably very, very strong.”

  A lovely thought, that. Weeks after a bear attack and we were now dealing with the prospect of fighting something far stronger.

  “These tunnels,” I frowned, “they’re not very wide.”

  Gruin glared up at me, “now isn’t the time for complaining—”

  —”No,” I snapped, “I mean, look at them. Look at that body. How big exactly would something need to be to do this in one bite?”

  “...Too big to fit through there,” Gruin finished. I saw the realisation light up on his features and felt a stab of smug pride at having caused it. “Heh. Been above-ground for too long, I suppose. You’re right.”

  “What the fuck are the two of you talking about!?” Eryn was the one demanding it, and his eyes had that wide madness I’d learn to recognise later in life. “Orig is fucking dead and you’re just sitting here smiling? We need to do something! To…To call the overseers!”

  Gruin’s face lit up at that as the rest of the miners grunted their approval. Most were less fearful than Eryn, but none by a lot. There were only so many ways to respond when one saw a man with his head bitten off, I supposed.

  “Excellent idea,” Gruin grinned, “you run off and do that.”

  Eryn paused, looking as if he were trying to scrutinise Gruin for some hint of subterfuge or deception. It didn’t work of course—the faces of Grynkori were different enough from ours that picking up on their expressions was an acquired skill. I hadn’t gotten it down by then, despite knowing Gruin for several weeks, and Eryn certainly didn’t have a hope.

  “We might as well,” one of the other miners noted, which seemed to finally decide him. Eryn nodded, perhaps more to himself than us, and people started heading back.

  “Don’t want to stay here anyway, it might come back,” one of them muttered.

  They peeled off at that, giving Gruin and myself a bit of privacy.

  “What are you planning,” I asked, knowing full well the Grynkori had a reason for most of what he did. Sure enough, I was right.

  “If this creature is this strong at this size, it’s probably magical,” he said eagerly, “seriously magical.”

  I could see his excitement, it was so clearly there. What I could not do, for the life of me, was fathom why in the world he would be feeling it. The prospect of being attacked by something that was both aggressive and magic fell somewhere near the bottom on my list of desirable pastimes.

  “Yes, so we should follow the others before it finds us.” I knew, intellectually, that the monster had thus far attacked only in intervals of several days to a week. That didn’t make me eager at all to remain isolated with just the two of us and a pair of pickaxes for protection.

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

  Gruin seemed fearless as ever though, scoffing as if the very thought of not being in danger were somehow absurd.

  “Bah, you’re not thinking about this properly. Magical creatures have magical bodyparts—expensive bodyparts.”

  That, finally, actually had me thinking about something other than the prospect of my own life and its very sudden end.

  “We could save ourselves more work selling them, you mean?”

  Gruin’s eyes glinted the way any Grynkori’s did when they pictured gold. I was not yet experienced enough to recognise the wealth-lust for what it was, had I been I might have realised how much his judgement was being coloured by it.

  But then again, was I any different? Now without a home among the merchants, I’d been thrown out into the world without sense for direction or destination. Getting rich all over again seemed like a pretty good place to start. After all, if my ancestors could manage it once then I could just do what they did—the blood responsible for their success flowed in my own veins after all.

  HA!

  Gruin and I took one detour, and one only. We headed out for our weapons.

  Or rather, I did by myself. His ability to move at speed over distance was roughly comparable to my ability to do a quadruple backflip, so we both agreed—silently and without pricking his ego, mind—that it was better for me to sprint ahead while he kept an eye on the discourse among the miners. This didn’t yield anything of note, as in the twenty minutes I took to run to and from our room at the inn nothing much had been agreed on. For a bunch of tough and practical fellows, they sure did bicker a lot like old housewives.

  Sorry, that’s mean of me. I apologise to any housewives reading this. Especially those who tolerate marriage to miners.

  Gruin deftly took his hammer and started down into the mines with me, though we were stopped near one entrance by Nelson.

  Nelson was a large man, about as tall as me but probably one quarter again broader at the arms. He had a mean face that looked rather like he’d spent most of his life using it as a mining instrument, and I had personally seen him split a boulder the size of a child’s torso in half with one swing of a pick. He was roughly as intelligent as that boulder, too, which would be more hindrance than help here.

  “Nobody’s allowed down the mines until this has been taken care of,” he informed us both. While I was busy thinking of a lie, Gruin opted for a simpler, quicker and somewhat more practical approach to removing our unexpected barrier.

  He stepped forwards and thumped Nelson in the stomach.

  Now, Gruin was probably lighter than the human through sheer shortness, but I reckoned the weight they did have was skewed in his favour if one counted it by fraction of musculature making it up.

  The Grynkori’s arm probably weighed over a stone, and it hit like someone swinging a club. Nelson was big and tough, but that didn’t make him used to sudden violence and it didn’t help him an iota against this. He practically folded.

  Gruin punched him again, taking the chance to hit his head now that it had lowered enough and flattening the big man then and there. We both stepped over him. Probably, we’d be fired for this after leaving the mine again. Better leave with enough money to compensate then, and hope that a bounty was put on the thing while we were hunting.

  It was really quite dark in the mine. We’d brought a lantern—stolen it, rather—-but even still there was a world of difference between having a full team of men to light the place on rotation and needing to make do with one source of illumination.

  Of course, Gruin didn’t seem to mind at all. He practically danced his way down along the corridor. I suspected the orelings had a power of night vision far beyond those of humanity. Sometimes I saw his eyes seem to glint in the light, almost flashing briefly like sunbeams played across mirrors. Cats did that, too. Lots of dark-dwelling creatures did.

  As a human, my eyes did not.

  Every step deeper we went, my nerves grew sharper and less controlled. I heard my own breathing, so loud it seemed to smother everything else in the silent cave. Deafening me, blinding me. It took my senses, my awareness, left my world a compressive bubble of fear when I needed to expand my perceptions.

  If something came up behind me then, it would be touching my skin long before I heard it. And so I sent constant glances over one shoulder, furtive and fearful. Gruin’s motions were of some reassurance to me, for their confidence was unerring and flawless. But only some.

  “Keep close to me,” the Grynkori grumbled, “I don’t want to get split up.”

  There was no fear in his voice at all, not even the echo of it, not even the ancestor. Not even a primal thing that might one day be bred into fear a hundred thousand generations later. I marvelled again at the difference between a Grynkori’s brain and a human’s even as I followed after him.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, our mineshaft did not stay tight for long. We ended up slipping through into one of the larger ones, the now-abandoned ones. That was a risk in and of itself, because it meant the wooden beams holding everything aloft might have gone untended for years or more. Wood rotted fast, underground.

  Time stopped having much meaning to us as we ventured around, slowly mapping the area out. In our heads, that was. I’ve always had a good memory—helps me keep track of the various, sometimes conflicting lies I’ve told everyone—and Grynkori apparently had a near-supernatural talent for spacial recollection, at least within a subterranean setting.

  But that didn’t mean we could confidently section off any cleared areas, whatever peace of mind it brought. After all, this still-unknown creature may simply have moved from one uncleared place to another we’d already looked through. If it were at all man-clever, and able to navigate and track underground, it might have figured out what we were doing and chosen that course as a deliberate means of confounding us.

  I confided in Gruin about this, and he seemed equal parts impressed and irritated.

  “We’ll have to keep our guards up then,” he grumbled. And so we did. Or rather he did, I merely sustained my now-perpetual state of spasmodic panic as we trudged further through the mines. Every moment, I was certain, would prove to be my last. And it somehow occurred to me only when we were very deep indeed how shit a bloody sword was for fighting in such conditions. Hadn’t I learned that lesson already?

  But there was no more time for regret or reassessment. The thing came.

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