Chapter 25: Lyndwyrms I

Kren severely regretted not packing for the cold. Not even the brutal sun beating down on his head could burn off the chill riding on the wind, and then there was this damned ravine on top of it. The way the wind funneled through the rock walls produced a sound like a thousand ghosts howling for help.

But the wind wasn’t the real problem. It was the scent riding down through the ravine on its back. "Is that—" Kren started to ask.

"Yes." Fima cut him off. "That’s the scent of blood in the air." Kren shared a look with Aki.

"Your Majesty, wait—" Aki called, but Kren was already gone. Fima and Toa fell in right behind him just as fast. Aki cursed under his breath, sharing a worried glance with Ruhu, but the two older members of the party had little choice but to follow the younger ones in, before they find themselves dealing with somethung beyond their capabilities.

The ravine served as a gateway — likely the only real way into the mountains, since every other approach required scaling sheer cliff faces you were near-guaranteed to fall from. It ran narrow, barely wide enough for three men to walk shoulder to shoulder, curving through the earth like it had been carved by some ancient, great serpent.

For all its winding beauty, every step deeper assaulted Kren’s senses with the thickening scent of blood and turned earth. The passage widened and narrowed unpredictably, until it finally opened out into a broad clearing. Kren stopped short, white sand crunching under his boots — sand that, ten feet further in, was stained dark with dried blood.

Kren stiffened, fighting down the urge to be sick at what lay in front of him. Toa wasn’t so lucky — as the Snake-kin turned aside and lost his breakfast on the spot. Kren spared him a glance, then turned to Fima.

"Unshackle him. We might be fighting sooner than we planned." Fima moved to comply immediately. Kren pulled the two pistols he’d looted off the dead Snake-kin from their holsters, along with a belt of Aura cartridges taken from the same source. Both guns settled into his hands, loaded, before he turned his full attention back to the carnage ahead.

Bodies lay scattered across the clearing, torn apart by what could only have been rabid beasts. Avians, from what he could tell — seeing as they had feathers, instead of hair. Kren counted as he scanned the area, his eyes moving quickly across the wreckage until the tally settled on a grim twenty-seven. Every single one shredded beyond recognition.

Aki and Ruhu caught up just as Kren finished counting, and both men transformed without a word. Their cultivation had been capped at Beastform for the last decade, courtesy of the crest’s loss, but they’d once stood as Beast Manifestation powerhouses — and apparently that raw strength hadn’t fully left them, even if summoning their inner beasts and holding it’s form now took real effort.

Still, they were strong. Frighteningly strong, even with a limited base to draw from, which showed clearly in how easily they slipped into their transformations. Both men grew taller, broader, their human features folding into those of their inner beasts — a seamless blend of man and white cat, and then man and snow leopard. The legendary Were-form.

"Stay behind us, Your Majesty. Whatever did this might still be close." Aki’s voice came out as a guttural growl in his Werecat form, far more intimidating with the added height behind it. He and Ruhu split left and right, sweeping the clearing — clearly some kind of rest stop or meeting ground carved out of the ravine. Whoever these people had been, they hadn’t seen this coming.

Kren studied the surrounding walls and noted three more paths branching off from this point, the rock face here dropping to a shorter — though still considerable — fifty or sixty feet. Scalable, if barely. Which meant whatever had done this could have come from above just as easily as from any of the branching paths. He swept both pistols toward the ravine walls, eyes tracking every shift in shadow.

"These people have been dead about a day." Toa observed, crouching beside the pile of bodies. He reached out, grabbed something, and drew it slowly free, pulling every eye in the group toward it.

"Is that a Lyndwyrm?" Kren asked, staring at the creature in Toa’s grip. It looked like it had taken three Storm Eagle tribesmen to bring the thing down.

Its head was roughly the size of a full-grown dog, distinctly reptilian, ridged along the crown. A thick, muscular torso housed two powerful forelimbs, tapering into a long serpentine tail with no rear limbs at all. Small, half-formed wing stumps sprouted from its shoulders, too fragile-looking to be much use for true flight — which lined up with what he already knew. Lyndwyrms didn’t fly so much as glide, launching from high ground once they’d caught scent or sight of prey, much like a bird of prey stooping on a target. This particular specimen was roughly the size of a horse.

"Juvenile." Aki said, coming to a stop nearby. "They grow much bigger than this — but an alpha never lets anything else in its clutch outgrow it in size, or outgrow it in strength. The tracks scattered around here back that up. None of the others look much larger than this one." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"Any idea which direction we head now?" Kren asked Ruhu. The Snow Leopard-kin pointed toward the rightmost of the three available paths.

"Northwest. Some of them clearly fled that way, and the Lyndwyrms gave chase." He hesitated, glancing back at the bodies scattered around them. "My concern, Your Majesty, is that Lyndwyrms aren’t naturally savage. They kill to eat, and they’re solitary by nature — they keep to their caves and perches scattered across these peaks. This isn’t typical behavior at all. There’s nothing precise about this attack. It looks like whatever did this simply wanted to cause as much damage, as painfully as possible." Ruhu’s discomfort with the scene was plain on his face.

"I’d love to give them a proper burial," Kren said, "but we’re too exposed here, and we still don’t know how the Lyndwyrms managed to ambush a group of Storm Eagles in the first place. We need to make contact, or at least get out of this open ground." He turned toward the northwest path — only for a scream to tear through the air from the leftmost route instead.

They all froze. Aki let out an audible sigh, already certain of exactly what came next. Sure enough, Kren didn’t disappoint — he took off toward the danger at a dead sprint, the rest of the party falling into formation behind him without needing to be told.

Aki and Ruhu dropped to all fours, closing the gap and flanking Kren as they ran. Neither man spoke, but their eyes carried the focus of long experience, and an unmistakable willingness to spill blood in their king’s name. The path ended abruptly as they broke free of the ravine entirely. Its walls still stretched away to the west, but the rest of the mountain rose ahead of them now, this section thinly forested, trees climbing the slopes in scattered patches.

More bodies here too — Lyndwyrms and Storm Eagles both. Two more Lyndwyrm corpses lay riddled with arrows, forged from something that gleamed like pure, polished steel. Kren couldn’t help but fixate on that detail. What bow could possibly fire pure steel arrows? And even setting that aside — was it even aerodynamically possible for shafts that heavy to fly true at all?

This was exactly why he’d come. Storm Eagle craftsmanship had no rival on this continent. The knowledge behind weapons capable of felling something like a Lyndwyrm was priceless, and Kren had no intention of leaving these mountains without securing it. Another scream split the air, this one layered with hissing and a pained cry as something crashed hard into a tree nearby. Aki and Kren traded a look and pushed their pace even harder. They were close now.

Another full minute of running at top speed brought them into a clearing carpeted in purple wildflowers, all in full bloom. A massive boulder dominated the meadow — fifteen meters tall, two or three times that across. Four Storm Eagle tribesmen stood atop it, bloodied and clearly running on fumes. Nearly half a dozen Lyndwyrms circled below, snapping and clawing their way up the rock face without success.

Seeing the beasts in the flesh made Ruhu’s earlier warning feel almost understated. They were monstrous — and the moment Kren’s party stepped into the meadow, every one of those Lyndwyrms tore its savage attention away from the rock and fixed it on the newcomers instead.

That was when Kren felt it. The pressure radiating off them wasn’t simply the product of ferocity. He could sense the Aura underneath it, and for a moment, the sheer weight of it staggered him. Every single one of the five Lyndwyrms sat within the Aura Awakening realm — an utterly overwhelming threat for a people with no clan or kingdom crest to draw on.

They roared as one, abandoning the Storm Eagles entirely to fix on this fresh, closer prey. Kren suddenly felt extremely eager, a small smile crossing his lips as the feeling settled over him.

It was time to find out exactly, just how strong he’d actually become.