“Move your lazy tails before I kick them for you!”

“If you aren’t moving in the next thirty seconds, I’ll rip your fangs out and make you a gummy child myself!”

The swarm was beginning to snap at each other as my trusted elites forced them into waking and getting moving quickly. It wasn’t a common sight for keelish to wake and start actually doing anything quickly, usually more of a lumbering waking followed by a slow acceleration into a steady lope… If we were lucky. I knew we weren’t fully cold-blooded, but there was some aspect of our bodies that differed wildly from others, and waking wasn’t our strong suit. In this case, however, I was not about to let the swarm take their sweet time to get moving, and did everything short of setting the wolfstags on them to instill in my lazy subordinates a sense of urgency.

It felt like an eternity, but it was only maybe a quarter of an hour before the swarm was moving, following the tracks left by whatever it was that had approached us the night before. We hadn’t seen anything, and once I’d fully woken, Sybil had better explained it to me: Something, somehow, had come nearby while staying wholly silent. The creature, whatever it was, had left massive, round footprints all around our camp, before it then strode away into the surrounding grasslands. Foire hung his head in shame at his inability to have detected whatever it was. As the initial panic at how I’d been woken had faded with time, and I forced myself to take in the ever changing surroundings for the first time since we’d left the Sheer Pass.

The new environment we’d entered was impressively featureless: An unfathomably wide and long plain filled with nearly endless amounts of gently bending browning grasses. According to what I’d been told by Ana about autumn, these grasses were probably green in the spring and summer, but since fall was truly under way, getting towards winter even, and the plains’ potential greenery had transitioned back into a more inert winter form.

The plains spread open before us, and I couldn’t help but appreciate their uniformity, so different from every other place I’d been before. The only difference between one area and the next seemed to be only which part was swaying in which direction in the wind, and that difference was only visual at best. A good part of the plains was that following the fading tracks of our silent observer was lightly but obviously marked; there was a broad track of pressed down grass and occasional steps that we followed ever onward.

Onward and onward we traveled, the minutes changing to an hour before anything could be noted to have changed, that mere change being one of direction. Before, the tracks had been moving generally east, just as I wanted to, but their tracks made a sharp left turn, heading nearly due north.

“This is a branching path.”

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I sighed and looked at Sybil. “You don’t say.”

“You know what I mean. THIS,” She gestured in a broad swathe before me, “is a branching path. What direction do you want to go? What actions do you plan to take? Do you follow suspicious tracks or the directions of our goddess? Do you allow yourself to be led by impulse or schedule?”

“... I know. I just… don’t know. But Nievtala burn me, I’m going to do something, and I’m not going to do it by halves.” Steeling myself, I channeled my magic to my throat and, to the thrumming power of [Innervating Address], “We will chase the observer’s tracks for one more hour! If we do not see whoever it is that left them by then, we will continue on our path to Nievtra. But make no mistake! If they escape today, we will seek them out and find them eventually!”

With that, I sent the thrum of power out of my throat and to the surrounding swarm who recommenced the pursuit with howling shrieks and cries of excitement, plans about what we would find and how we would deal with whatever this creature was echoed from dozens of throats.

With renewed vigor, the swarm rushed to follow the path left by the escaped suspicious creature. In the lead, I was the first to notice when there was, for the second time in our hours long pursuit, a change in the surrounding environment. The earth underfoot changed, the grass thinned until it was only a sparse covering over the ground instead of the thick foliage of before. Firm earth changed to loose sand, slipping underfoot and flowing through and over my toes. Even consumed with the rage and frustration of following some new creature, a new threat to me and my people, a part of me wanted to indulge in a true sand bath. These sands would be perfect to luxuriate in…

Though I wanted to stop the pursuit and instead indulge in a true bath, I attempted to tear my focus away from the sand underfoot. My musing over the earth quality, however, saved my foot, since I felt the sand falling away underneath my step. With a lunge and subconscious hiss of anger, I jumped up just early enough to avoid snapping jaws from amputating my foot.

Beneath me lunged out what could only be called a sand fish. I’d heard stories about Isnanna and Ishtar, legendary twins from the stories of the all the Veushten peoples, fighting hordes of things like this, but I’d never thought those stories could be true. These ambushers were, supposedly, called ishabaak, which meant sand shark in the ancient common tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to think about any more than that since the gaping maw of the beast was coming dangerously close to eviscerating me.

I kicked out and sent the ishabaak flying, making its head snap to the side with the strike. I grinned and lowered my jaws, fangs snapping at the beast’s belly. It wriggled in an insane bid for survival, trying to get down into the earth, but I lunged out with both arms and hugged it tight to me, both arms wrapping completely around it while my jaws continued snapping deeper and deeper into its viscera. Its rough skin scraped roughly against my scales as I ripped deeper and deeper into its vitals. After just a moment, the ishabaak went entirely limp and I drew my head back, victorious and ready to glory in my kill.

That was when I noticed that the beast wasn’t alone–all around and through the swarm, individual ishabaaks were appearing and beginning to hunt my swarm.