Zo stopped and stood at the lip of a ridge, one of the larger ones, maybe forty feet above the valley and looking down. The valley opened below us, wide and long, running between the mountains. A frozen river cut through its center, the ice thick and blue-white, cracked in places.

  "Fish…"

  I followed her line of sight down into the valley floor. Where a pack of massive dire wolves were blending with the snow with their white-grey fur. The smallest was the size of a fucking horse. The largest, which was probably the alpha was at the center of the pack, and stood taller than a truck.

  But they weren't what had made Zo go quiet.

  The thing in the valley was following the frozen river, and the dire wolves had turned to face it. Their pack had shifted the alpha to the front, the rest fanning into a crescent behind it, breath steaming in thick white clouds.

  Two hundred feet. Maybe more… Its body was covered in dark grey scales. Its belly scraping the ice, its mass distributed across dozens of stubby, powerful legs, each one driving it forward. Its head was a wedge of armored bone, wide as a house, with eyes set deep in recessed sockets.

  The worms went dead still inside me. Every single one of them. They stopped their constant shifting and coiled tight against my bones, pulling inward, reducing their essence, and I understood the message without needing Mabel to translate it.

  I dropped to the ground . Zo was already down, pressed against the frozen edge, her body low and her breathing soft. Her magenta eyes were locked on the valley below.

  The dire wolf alpha howled its essence flared, its fur crackling with energy that hardened the air around it into a shell.

  The Wyrm’s opened its jaws. The inside of its mouth was a deep, saturated blue, the color of glacial ice and the air in front of it distorted, the atmosphere itself contracting as energy ripped out of it in a cone-shaped wave that hit the dire wolf pack at the speed of sound.

  The alpha's shell shattered. The wolf behind it froze solid in its escape. Instantly turning into a statue of ice, every hair preserved, her mouth open, her legs extended in an eternal running position.

  The alpha lunged. It was fast, covering thirty feet in a single bound, jaws wide, aiming for the wyrm's soft underbelly.

  The wyrm's head snapped sideways and caught the alpha in the air. A wet crunch carried up to us. Blood sprayed across the frozen river, steaming where it hit the ice, and the wyrm shook its head and chunks of the dead wolf scattered along the ice floor.

  The rest of the pack scattered, one stood frozen in place with its tail between its legs and its bladder emptying onto the snow. The wyrm's tail swept sideways and caught the frozen one, sending it spinning across the ice in a tumble of limbs and fur. It didn't get up.

  The two heading south ran directly beneath our ledge..

  The wyrm pursued the wolves. It fired another blast of that blue energy and the lead wolf's back legs froze mid-run, the beast crashing forward onto its chin, sliding across the ice. The second wolf turned to its left and ran off, the wyrm let it go. The wyrm settled over the alpha's remains and fed.

  Zo's hand found my wrist. Her fingers were cold… the Leviathan's warmth suppressed, pulled inward, her own Origin hiding just like mine. She squeezed.

  We lay on that ridge while the Wyrm ate.

  When it finally moved on… I still didn't move for another ten minutes. My worms stayed coiled. My body stayed flat. The animal brain kept its grip on the wheel until the wyrm's essence faded below the range of my perception, and then, slowly, one joint at a time, I unclenched.

  Zo had found a crack in the mountain side that led down its face. The walls were slick with ice.

  We didn't light a fire. Instead we sat in the dark, backs against opposite walls, close enough that I could hear Zo's breathing and she could hear mine.

  The worms had loosened from their death-grip on my skeleton, but they were restless. They circled under my skin in slow agitated loops, and I could feel them testing the air through my pores. The worms didn't trust anything tonight.

  A distant sound cut through the dark. It was miles away, maybe more. I crawled to the cave entrance and looked out.

  The sky to the south was lit up. Flashes of light, each one painting the underside of the clouds in cold fire before fading. The wyrm, firing its frozen death beam. Hunting something in the dark. Between the flashes, I could hear other sounds… beastial screams, high and ragged. And underneath all of that was the singing.

  The whole valley was awake.

  Zo was beside me. She watched the light show with her arms crossed under her chest.

  "It's flushing out the whole valley… everything that can run is running. Everything that can't is dead."

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  "Even the singers are running."

  "Wouldn’t you? Look what happened to the wolves."

  The flashes moved further away. Then they stopped and the dark was just dark again.

  I was on my feet before the light was strong enough to see by, my body protesting every movement. The worms stirred, hungry. I'd burned through reserves keeping warm, and they wanted to be fed.

  Zo was already outside. She stood at the edge, looking down into the valley, her axe in her right hand. The wind had died overnight and the air was still and cold.

  We dropped into the valley, which was now a slaughterhouse.

  Frozen wide smears of blood, some of it still tacky where the cold hadn't fully set. Corpses littered the valley floor. Further on, a cluster of ice-hares had been caught in the radius of an energy blast meant for something bigger. They were frozen in a solid block of blue-white ice, their bodies preserved in mid-flight

  Zo moved through the carnage with detachment, checking the bodies. I did the same. Most of the carcasses were useless… the wyrm had consumed the essence-rich organs and soul cores leaving the rest, and what remained was too frost-damaged for my worms to extract meaningful nutrition from.

  The dire wolf alpha's body lay near the center of the frozen river. The wyrm had ripped it apart. The ribcage gaped open, frost already forming on the exposed muscle and fat. The alpha's head was intact, jaws still locked in a snarl, eyes frozen open.

  I crouched beside it and let the worms out.

  They spread through the carcass, probing, tasting. Most of the flesh was useless… the wyrm had been thorough. But the bones still held essence. Not much. Scraps from the table of something that outclassed us by two full Grades.

  A pulse. Faint, buried deep in the alpha's chest cavity, wedged between two cracked ribs where the wyrm's jaws had missed it. My worms circled it, prodded it, and sent back a sensation I recognized.

  I reached into the carcass. My hand went in past the wrist, past the forearm, fingers sliding through cold meat and frozen blood until they closed around something hard. I pulled it out.

  A pale blue crystal with veins of white running through it. Cracked down the center, a fracture that split it nearly in two, held together by a thin bridge of intact material.

  Damaged. The crack had disrupted whatever the crystal's energy had been, turning a functional Regalia into a broken vessel leaking power in all directions. Useless for its original purpose…

  But the energy was still there and the worms in my hand were already pressing against my skin, straining toward it.

  I tucked it inside my jacket, close to my chest where the worms could keep it warm and start the slow process of leeching energy through the casing.

  "What'd you find?" Zo called from thirty yards away, where she was checking a second carcass.

  "Broken Regalia... it's cracked, but the worms can eat it."

  I pulled the worm-blade free and the worms in its edge woke up, cold and alert to vibrations moving toward us.

  They came out of the tree line in a wave. Beetles each one the size of a large dog, armored in plates, mandibles clicking. There were dozens of them, maybe forty, and they were panicked, running blind, driven from their burrows by the wyrm's overnight rampage, flooding into the valley in a chittering, scrambling mass.

  Behind the beetles, something bigger. Horned monstrosities. They had bull-like bodies, a crown of horns branching from their skulls.

  "Zo!"

  The first beetle reached me and I split it down the center with a single overhead strike. The worm-blade went through its armor with a crack and the two halves fell apart, twitching, leaking yellow fluid. The worms in the blade's edge drank the fluid before it hit the ground.

  Three more came in fast. I drove the blade through the first and second skewering them, and kicked the third hard enough to flip it onto its back. A worm tendril shot from my left hand and punched through its exposed belly, draining it.

  The beetles were easy. The beetles were nothing. I cut through them and kept moving, blade and worms working in a dance of death, each kill feeding the next. My reserves climbed in small increments.

  The first horned bastard hit the beetle swarm at full charge and scattered them, its legs ripping through the frozen ground, its crown of horns lowered. It was running blind, terrified, and everything in its path was going to get trampled.

  The thing blew past me close enough that one of its horns caught my jacket and tore a strip of leather off my shoulder. The ground shook. It weighed as much as a small building and it was moving at a dead sprint.

  Zo didn't dodge. She planted her feet, set her axe, and let it come. The monster's skull hit her axe head at full speed and her origin ate the impact and converted it into raw power that Zo redirected through her arms and back into the axe blade. The creature's momentum died. Its legs skidding on ice, horns locked against Zo's axe, and for one second they were frozen there, beast and woman, force against absorption.

  Then Zo twisted the axe and drove the edge up through the creature's lower jaw, through the roof of its mouth, and into its brain. It dropped. Its legs folded at once and it hit the ground so hard the ice cracked beneath it.

  Zo pulled the axe free. Yellow-grey matter clung to the blade.

  The monster turned back. Confused and angry, its tiny eyes locked on the nearest moving target… which was me.

  I didn't have Zo's ability to eat a charge. If that thing hit me at full speed, my bone plates would hold for a second before the mass behind the impact turned me into a stain.

  I sent worms into the ground. Spreading in a fan ahead of the creature's path. When its front legs hit the spot, I hardened the worms into rigid spikes that punched up through the frozen earth and into the soft tissue between the beast's toes. It screamed—a bellowing, guttural sound—and its front legs buckled. It pitched forward, chin slamming against the ice, momentum carrying its hindquarters up and over in a half-roll that left it on its side, legs kicking, horns scraping against the ground.

  I was on it before it could gather itself. The worm-blade went in behind the horn crown, where the skull met the spine, and I put my weight behind it and drove it through. The creature spasmed once, hard enough to throw me off, and then went still.

  More beetles. Another ten minutes of cutting, stabbing, draining. My arms burned. My reserves climbed. The worms fed and fed and the hunger that was always there—the gnaw that never fully went away—dulled.

  When the last beetle stopped twitching, I stood in a field of chitin fragments and yellow blood and frozen dirt, breathing hard, the worm-blade dripping, my bone plates speckled with insect fluid that was already freezing in the cold air.

  Zo leaned on her axe. Her monstrosity lay behind her, its skull caved in. She had a cut on her forearm and her left hand was shaking again, pressed against her thigh.

  "There'll be more..."

  "Yeah."

  We moved again. Pockets of chaotic beasts, panicked and aggressive, blundering into us in twos and threes.

  By the time we cleared the zone and reached a somewhat safe area, my reserves were higher than they'd been in weeks. The broken Regalia was cold and steady, the worms already working on it.

  My boots were soaked through with beetle blood. My back ached. My hands were cramped from gripping the blade for hours on end. But we were alive, and fed, and moving.

  I followed her into the dark between the pines, where the wind couldn't reach us.

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