And there in the center, grazing on clover that glows faint silver in the light.

  A doe.

  Not a normal deer though, this one is larger than an elk. Her coat shimmers with colors that shift when she moves, like oil on water, like light through crystal. Patterns trace across her flanks, too regular to be natural, too beautiful to be accidental.

  She's alone, no herd, no protection. Head down, sleeping, seemingly completely unaware of my presence.

  Vulnerable.

  The golden thread I've been following ends where she lays and concentrates on the shape over her heart.

  I don't move.

  The doe continues grazing. Calm, unhurried, she’s fifteen feet away with no cover between us, and she hasn't bolted. Hasn't even raised her head.

  She has to have heard me. She must have heard me. The wisteria rustled when I pushed through. My boots crunched on the gravel path before I even came into the clearing. I was not being as quiet as I could be.

  She's choosing not to react.

  I watch her for a long moment.

  Something is wrong here.

  Deer don't ignore predators, not even System-touched ones. Every creature I've encountered in three weeks has had the same survival logic burned into its brain: detect threat, assess threat, flee or fight. It's instinct. It's logical. It's possibly the only reason any of us, monsters included, are still alive.

  Not running, not even turning. She must know I'm here, she's waiting.

  For what?

  I scan the clearing. The oaks, the shadows beneath the Spanish moss. The gaps in the wisteria where something larger could watch without being seen.

  I examine the space again and my quest pops into existence before me.

  A pocket sanctuary implied something I can move for Lily's sake. Protection that doesn't depend on walls or generators or nights spent killing everything that comes through the door.

  I think about the fever chart, the timestamps. The correlation I decided to file away without sufficient data.

  I think about the many hours of future generator runtime and the compromise it will cost us.

  I think about Lily's hand in mine. One squeeze. All she could manage.

  Then the way she squeezed three times after I had finally found a solution for her that would work.

  The doe raises her head and looks at me.

  Not startled, not afraid, just... looks directly at me. Dark eyes holding on to something I can't read. Recognition, maybe, or resignation.

  I've hunted enough to know what prey looks like when it freezes. The locked muscles, the wide eyes. The body betrays the mind's desperate need to flee. But nothing like that is happening here, her muscles are loose, her breathing is steady.

  She rises and steps toward me, a single deliberate movement that closes the distance I hadn't crossed. Fifteen feet becoming zero with a subtle displacement of air. She stands before me now, and her head dips to expose the spot behind her front leg, the kill zone on a doe, offered like an answer to a question I hadn't asked.

  Something brushes the edge of my mind then. Not words or images, but a feeling vast and sorrowful and tired. Of too many small voices crying out in confusion, voices who don't understand the sharpness of everything and the challenges pressing down upon their fate. Voices like Lily's. Then the feeling recedes and leaves behind a single impression, the sense of it all being necessary.

  I feel the spear in my hands, the angle clear.

  But I passed territorial markers on every tree walking in here, antler gouges wider than my palm carved into bark and stone. A creature this intelligent, holding this much ground, doesn't exist in isolation. Nothing this valuable is ever alone because that's not how territory works, not how power works, not how anything in nature has ever worked since the first predator learned to hunt in pairs.

  She's offering herself, showing me exactly where the blade should go, which means she knows what happens next. This isn't predation, this is transaction. And whatever is out there holding the other half of this territory, it's going to come looking for what I'm about to take.

  The doe watches me with a stare that feels older than anything I have ever met, clearly waiting for me to come to a decision. I can swear she even nods at me.

  I drive the spear home, angled inward toward the heart the way you're supposed to do it when you have commuted to take a life and now you need to be the instrument that causes the least amount of pain.

  She falls without a sound.

  I kneel beside her and pull the knife from my belt. I’ve field dressed a deer before but this quest for a core, it must want something different. The System gives quests, not instructions, one still has to go through the motions to extract what it is that you want.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The knife moves almost on its own. Sternum to ribs, too quick, too clean and the flesh parts like it wants to be opened.

  My fingers find something warm.

  And the doe opens her eyes.

  Alive and aware, looking at me with an intelligence that has no business existing in a body I just slew...

  I freeze as I feel a pressure behind my eyes. A stream of consciousness being pulled from me.

  Lily on the cot. The fever chart. The hand squeezes. One squeeze, all she can manage. Books, textbooks, mountains of medical research. Then finally the way Sofia pleaded her problems to me, her mentions of what was happening to the children across the GW, the city, the metroplex and maybe even the world.

  The doe sees it, all of it and somehow I can feel her mind thinking of me as she vanishes, leaving a fragment behind.

  And yet still I can't shake the feeling that I just made a terrible mistake.

  The world turns red then.

  Not in a metaphor, not something emotional clouding my judgement. But actual red, bleeding into the edges of my vision like someone spilled wine across my peripheral.

  Threat Hierarchy activates. The ability I chose less than two hours ago, already earning its keep. Colors bloom across my vision, painting the environment in threat levels I've never seen before

  The trees behind me: Amber, moderate threat.

  The shadows beneath the Spanish moss: Orange, elevated threat.

  The direction of the park, back the way I came: Crimson so deep it's almost black.

  Almost, only because more of it is literally turning black as I continue to stare at it.

  Something is coming!

  Something the System considers beyond dangerous, beyond lethal...

  I yank my hand free from the doe. The core comes with it, warm and pulsing. Smaller than I expected, maybe the size of a plum, wrapped in light that shifts between silver and gold.

  No time to examine it. No time to understand what has passed between me and the dying creature at my feet.

  I jump to my feet instead. Barely aware that no blood lingers on the ground, from the wound, on my hands, or around my feet.

  I run.

  Not toward the clubhouse. The red is thick there too, spreading like fire across my vision. I cut left instead, toward a Japanese garden, toward what I remember leads to a botanical library, back toward urban terrain where buildings break sightlines and size becomes a liability.

  Behind me, something screams.

  Not a roar, not a howl, a gut wrenching scream. The sound of grief and rage compressed into a single note that shakes the air, that vibrates in my chest, that signals that whatever was coming to find me was going to take it all back.

  In the old world, before the great mechanism descended to rewrite the laws of flesh and hunger, my kind were whispers in the wood. Legends told by firelight to frighten children into obedience.

  Stay close to the village. Do not wander past the tree line. Something watches from the green dark, and it does not love you.

  They were correct, those old stories. We never loved them. For their meat was tasteless and stale.

  Time has not done them well.

  I return now from my eastern territory carrying tribute for my beloved. A soul, young and foolish, who believed speed sufficient defense against inevitability. His blood slick like his screams, still warms my tongue. His untainted being will nourish the life she carries, the continuation of my line, the promise that what we are shall persist long after the last of these hairless apes has returned to the jungles their ancestors crawled forth from.

  The soft ones cower as I pass. This is proper. This is the natural order reasserting itself after the many millennia of their absurd dominion. Panicked they still are, they way they press themselves against their crumbling architectures, their hearts drumming that ancient rhythm of prey-recognizing-predator, and I permit them their continued existence for no reason other than that I am sated by the sheer quantity of them and that she waits safely for me in the garden we have cultivated together.

  She waits.

  She has always waited, patient as moonrise, this I know. Since the first evening I found her drinking from the silver stream in what the hairless apes once called Piedmont. Before their fall, when they still believed themselves masters of a world that merely tolerated their presence.

  My newest garden approaches.

  And the air speaks to me of …

  Wrongness...

  Copper and absence, silence that follows violence.

  Who dared to disturb her?

  Then beneath it, threaded through like poison in wine, the scent of her. Of what was her. Of what spilled from her onto soil we blessed together under the shining light of my moon.

  The tribute, the hairless ape, falls from my jaws. Forgotten and meaningless, just another material for me to spend.

  I move through the wisteria, through the veil between the world and our sanctuary, and I find her.

  My beloved!

  Opened like a letter, read and then discarded. The light that dwelt within her, the warmth I pressed myself against through countless cold evenings, harvested by hands that understood nothing of what they touched. Of what I am. Of the lineage I represent.

  Inconsiderate, every single one of them. How do they conceive, standing above the hollow architecture of what they thought they could be.

  The bond between us, that thread I have felt humming at the edge of consciousness since the moment our souls recognized kinship. Has been severed! The absence howls where connection once sang.

  Yet I feel something faint.

  It is clear.

  She is not merely dead. She has been taken from me. Stolen from me.

  There is a distinction. These hairless apes, they forget the distinction. Nor do they understand it.

  I deign to sniff the air, the ape that did this has fled. I can taste the trail of its terror, the salt-fear leaking from its inadequate pores, the particular stench of a creature that knows, in whatever passes for its weak soul, that it has committed an unforgivable trespass against the legends told of my lineage.

  Soon it will believe itself to have escaped. It will believe distance and walls and the company of its wretched kind will preserve it from consequence.

  How precious. How pitiable. How utterly incorrect these apes are.

  I lower my head to her face one final time. Breathe in what remains of her scent. Commit it to the place where memory turns into purpose.

  I will find this ape that killed her, I will find something precious of theirs, worthy of sacrificing to her.

  And then I will make art from their innards, sculptures from their bones, monuments from their skulls.

  So that even in death, these hairless apes can remind one another of their place.