They circled the burrow deep within the marsh, where their stout legs could still just reach the slime beneath the festering pools. It would not do to be caught disobeying again.

Once they were beyond the reach of the master, though, it felt good to be out hunting again. The skern take little time to reflect. Now they had escaped, now a choice had been made, they could turn to matters of flesh and battle. They were exiles, and that was that.

The dry, golden scrub that was more familiar to their clan rolled out beyond the marsh’s last tendrils of water before them. They looked along the valleys uncertainly and kept low. “The elders may still patrol here,” Guff said quietly. “We could be brought back.” To their rightful fate.

Venn looked out across the bushes to his left. They rustled fretfully, stirred by the burning, scented breeze or hunters’ spines he did not know. “Then let us pass by the Corner Column and into the Green.” It was a risk. The protruding sandstone marker just visible above the foliage showed the edge of their clan’s territory. If the clan of the Green did not take them for exiles, then they could be shredded for pursuing their shared prey across land that wasn’t theirs. But those skern had not been sighted for many moons. It would be a landscape unknown to them, but also a landscape their elders feared.

The two hunters turned and slunk by the towering column. Sandstone hillocks rose on all sides out of the shrubbery. Shadows grew thick in the secret crags and crannies between. But no hunter leapt from those shadows as they wriggled from tuffet to tuffet, listening for long periods between. All was silence.

It was not silent for long. A few moments beyond the point where the baked mud turned to soft moss beneath their bellies, Guff halted. Venn pushed his maw through the screen of saplings they had been skirting and focused. From somewhere up ahead, there came the weakling squeaks of the levin.

“Do we hunt?” Guff hissed. He was still peering back at the strange stony landmarks that flanked their way.

Venn considered. They were beyond the laws of the clans now. “What else are we here for? Go on!”

The wind was blowing in great, long gusts, and it was easy to time their advance to the rattling of branches and grass. Venn could smell them now. It was a sweet, beautiful smell, vital in a way dried cussock strips could never be.

Guff glimpsed a huddle of fur ahead and tapped his tail lightly. They drew together beside a small clearing in the shrubs. They strained to pick out targets in the glare of the sun, but the levin were too close together. Another charge it would be.

The ambush was successful. The chase was not. Venn and Guff’s deep roars turned to snarls of rage as they clattered into the clearing. This time, the levin had been caught completely unawares, and they burst from their huddle in a dozen directions, shaking and terrified. One even fell heavily from the crest of a tumble of rocks by the scrub’s edge and lay limply for a while in the moss, squealing and shrieking, until its brothers and sisters came to drag it away. But the skerns’ anger was aimless and unfocused. They whirled and scrabbled, tearing up the earth with hunters’ claws, snapping at hindlegs, thrashing at tails, and catching nothing. Anger had rendered them impotent.

The levin had been preparing a feast of nuts and leaves. Sacks of their forage lay torn and scattered all over the clearing now. What so many had been doing in the heart of the Green to warrant such a gathering was not clear. But whatever it had been, they had been doing it in the great hollowed out bowl of a skern burrow. Toiled earth trickled down its crumbled walls. Tiny cloaks and smoothed seed-shell bowls and ceremonial polished wooden rods, the plunder of centuries, lay broken about its edge. Larger rods had been erected around it, and the intruders had pulled an intricate sheet of woven grass across one half to grant respite against the beating sun.

Venn stalked about its margins, ravenous and wild with fury. “’Tis a vile land, this Green, where filthy mouse-men can sit dining on the ruins of our kin.” He crushed a seed bowl easily beneath one scaled pad. Skern knives, the sharpened fallen spines of the griffletree some elderly hunters took to strapping onto themselves, tumbled out in a shattered pile. He roared his anger again. “I should never have brought us here, friend.” They had known of the attacks across the marsh, but to see the fall of their rivals for themselves was too much.

Guff nosed through the disturbed mound. “No bones. Did the mice do this? Could they really best the clan of the Green?” Then he fell silent. However it had transpired, the skern had forsaken this place.

Venn stared at the ruins and took sudden comfort. “It is but one burrow. The clan of the Green are mighty indeed. This was just a hunting lodge, surely.”

“But who now is the hunted?” Guff spat.

They regarded the scene as the sun dipped towards the west. Without speaking, they purged the skernish place of the evil foods of the prey and returned the loot neatly to what was left of the burrow. The rage that had begun with the first sight of the sorry feast had not simmered down. It was boiling up within.

Venn stalked the perimeter of the clearing, looking up at the sandstone formations. “From which way did we come?” he pressed. “It is time to return to other lands.”

“From that way,” Guff said at once, flicking his tail towards the smaller hillocks. “And so we go opposite. It is time for revenge. For is that not why we left, brother?”

Venn plunged into the bushes. It was just the answer he was waiting for.

The sun fell as they walked, and with it, their spirits. The desire for revenge was high, but no means presented itself. A few times, they smelled mouse-meat and closed in, only to become entangled in unseen threads which caused strange pods above to boom and crack when pulled. Whenever they got to the cave or grass nest where the levin had been resting, they were long gone.

Then, the sentries began to appear. Deep in the Green they were now, scraping through plants they had never seen before, and smelling more things that remained unseen. There were fruits aplenty adorning the whispering branches above, in greens and golds and purples, and these were the treasures of their prey. So it could be gleaned from the flat pebble roads that broke their path often, and caches of drying stores left beneath leaves on polished wooden scaffolds. All of it now within the layered shadows of the twisting rocks that clustered in this unknown world, and beheld by the levin atop them.

They did not run in fear as the two intruders set about the stores with their claws. Only watched.

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At first, Venn was pleased to have witnesses to his meagre vengeance. He growled happily up at the mouse-men, so awfully out of reach, but so trapped by the horrors he wreaked upon their work. Onwards they pressed, spying and sniffing out the fruit and their enclosures wherever they could and pounding them into mush and dust, as had been done unto their kin.

In a forking chasm between two outcrops, however, the sentries moved.

There was one atop each tower, looking down on them as they passed. The shrubs here were too low and too thick with moving berries to hide, and besides, they hadn’t seen a levin on the ground for hours. Guff had muttered suspicions about secret symbols passing from the guards to direct their harvesters to safety, and Venn reluctantly agreed. They had to get out into a more even hunting ground, where they weren’t so obvious. That was why they were in the chasm, squeezing past the powdery walls towards an area beyond where the cursed rocks seemed to be thinning.

But when the levin above raised a foreleg, he shook the earth beneath their feet.

It took them a while to collect what was happening. Stones rained down upon their backs, hard enough to crack spines. They scurried beneath a thicker bush and waited until it was over. When the dust cleared, one of their paths had disappeared. “Like a mudslide but with rocks,” Guff snorted. “They must be cutting off the way to their herd.”

Venn scrabbled forward angrily. One of his greatest thorns atop his shoulder lay discarded by the shrub. It would never regrow. “And yet their foragings smell strongest upon the way left.” He glanced up, but the scouts had gone. “We’ll find a way to get to them. They can’t keep us away for long; there’s not enough valleys like this. And when we find them, we will feast.”

Slowly, they strode forward. Venn was right; if anything, the scent of fruit was even stronger here.

They crossed a gently rising lawn of flowers towards the better cover beyond. From the slight height, they could see more of the landscape before them. The greenery went on, but they were through the worst of the towers the levin used to avoid them. “Do you think they live in the rocks?” Guff ventured.

“It doesn’t matter. The ones ahead cannot.” Venn had had enough of this dreadful place. They had caused some chaos in the levin-farms, but a true reckoning, a resetting of the scales to the right way of the world, could only be exacted by teeth. “Let’s get beyond these rocks. I smell a river ahead. We can stop for mudfish at least.”

Onwards. The smell of fruit grew ever more pungent, and yet they still did not see it. “Be silent,” Venn hissed. “We might surprise them.” He could just imagine the mice now, backs bent, eyes on their supper only, raking through the next bushes arrogantly, their confidence in their cheating eyes high above complacent and unfounded against the raw power of the skern.

There was another rumble, and another. The ground shook again. Two of the ways out had gone. “Hurry,” said Venn. “They are escaping. Into the valley!”

The sickly haze throttled the air as they sniffed for its heart.

A wide, shallow gorge ran down towards the river on the other side of the incline. The other paths had been reduced to rubble by the little creatures that perched safe on their watchtowers. They sensed their prize slipping away when they had come so close.

A crack, a rolling stone, and a deafening roar. Guff pulled Venn beneath the overhanging wall of the gorge just as a flurry of rocks plunged into the path behind. It was only when they were forced from their alcove by the crumbling earth above that they saw a similar dam in front.

“What trickery be this?” Guff grated to the echoing enclosure. “You cannot avoid us forever! You cannot-”

Levin poured over the banks and into the gorge.

The skern whirled in the dust. The mouse-men were everywhere, and all at once. The stonefall had hemmed the hunters in, and the levin were quicker. Venn was snapping at anything that moved, but when he tried to lift his legs and bowl the foul creatures away, he found his limbs too heavy. They were doing something to him and suddenly he was scared. The scent of fruit was overbearing, and he smelt no prey, and then he realised the scent was there to deceive him. To mask their approach.

He looked over to Guff and hissed as the levin descended upon his friend. He managed to crush one up against the cliff as it jabbed at Guff's eyes with something long, but then Guff was on his back, rolling desperately, and now Venn could see the woven threads that bound him. Bound them.

He hadn't released the jabber's bones from its pelt like he wanted to. It tottered back to its feet, and looked at the two groups of its kin, surrounding the powerless skern, and twittered in its squeaky tongue.

"Izin mikrin?" It sounded like a question, even Venn could tell. Guff was still and silent on his back.

"Init mikrin. Mikrin virli vuin." The squeaking was coming from above them. The levin that weren't holding bundles of threads close looked away from their quarry, saw the one who replied, and relaxed their twig spears. Venn fought against the biting twine in his neck and raised his head.

There was another group looking down on them. The one in the middle was clad in a shawl of gleaming nutshells.

"Virli rek? Ner rennin pa ra mikrin."

The shawled one scrambled down the bank, nimble as the wind. Guff sensed the distraction of his captors and struggled to be free. A sharp spear deep into the exposed flesh of his belly rendered him still once more.

The clad levin was angry. He was approaching Guff, waving his forepaws. “My maro mikrin! Verelo arkin? Na!” The captors backed away slightly.

Venn struggled to speak. His mouth tumbled around the word. It came out like the feeble cough of the sick.

The shawled one was jabbering away still. Spears poised inches from Guff. Finally, Venn managed to spit out the foreign word. “Mrrrrk... mikrin! Mikrin!”

All eyes turned to him. Some looked startled.

“M-murk-mikrin!”

He felt his bonds slacken. The mouse-man in nutshells was striding towards him purposefully. It addressed him and him alone. “Maru mikrin?”

“Mikrin! Mikrin! Mikrin!”

The new levin waved. His kin scrambled to loosen the twines around the skern.

Venn waited until they were completely bundled away before he lunged and tore the face from the leader.

There were wails and screams. Spears raced at him from all sides. Most clattered harmlessly from his scales, broken and twisted. Dozens of levin flurried up the walls. The scratching of their tiny claws rippled about the confines of the gorge.

“Guff!”

Venn barrelled through the billow of fur towards his friend. But Guff was already rolling and struggling to his feet. Venn didn’t stop, only pushed him onward. The ambushers parted before them like sheaves of grass as the skern breached the wall ahead and on towards the river. It was only a levin trap, a pathetic wall of debris no match for the hunters, once surprise had gone.

Yet they knew they did not advance. They fled.