The silence that followed Boaris's death was not a true silence. It was a vacuum, a deafening hollow punched into the world where the beast's telepathic rage and pounding heart had been. For three heartbeats, the very air seemed to hold its breath. Then, what happened was a flash of event and sorrow, a violent unraveling. First was the beast horde. Their minds, leashed and focused by Boaris's will, were suddenly cut loose. The chain of command was not merely broken; it was vaporized, leaving behind only raw, base instinct. The effect was not orderly panic, but a synaptic collapse into pure, hungry chaos. A giant wolf, its muzzle already stained with blood from earlier kills, let out a confused snarl and lunged—not at the humans on the wall, but at the scaled lynx beside it. The lynx screeched and raked its claws across the wolf's eyes. This sparked the tinderbox. The coordinated army dissolved into a seething mass of tooth, claw, and blind predation. They were rabid d...
Kaelen lay against the cold, unyielding stone, a universe of pain centered in the cage of his ribs. Each shallow, hiccupping breath was a betrayal, sending fresh lances of white-hot agony through his torso. The world swam in a blur of grey rock and ochre dust. He could hear the beast horde's eager snuffling, the grinding of Boaris's hoof on gravel as it prepared to finish him, and beneath it all, a high, thin scream that he knew, in some detached part of his mind, was his mother's. Movement was an impossible concept. Yet, he had to move. He tried to push himself up with his left arm—the absent one—a phantom instinct that sent a fresh wave of nauseating wrongness through him. Gritting his teeth, he planted his right palm flat on the gritty earth. The muscles in his arm trembled violently, threatening to buckle before he'd even begun. He managed to get his elbow under him, a maneuver that made the broken ends of his ribs grind together with a sensation that was less sou...