It was that word again. Jiharu. They had heard it countless times in the ruins. Now, it was time to find out what it meant.

They had found the perfect place, the perfect moment. There were a dozen or so levin, none too many, and they were away from their rock paths where other travellers could warn them to danger. Even better, they were here to extend that path, and that meant more whiskers to the ground. Only one or two sentries cast their tiny eyes over the plateau while the rest laboured with their stones and pebbles. The skern had waited long for their enemy to pin themselves within this foolish corner of the outcrop. They knew they would, for here, there were many old walls and tumbledown turrets, long-forgotten remnants of a mighty fortress. The race that built it were equally forgotten, but Venn didn’t care much for that. All that mattered to him was that the defences provided perfect cover for a pair of skernish attackers to creep upon their informants.

They had found the seed-pod alarm where they had thought to, against the very corner of the closest existing path. Below, where the ground dropped away, there were other furred shapes, pouring water on bushes and rolling groaning tubs of berries along the paths, but they were out of earshot. They knew from experience.

When Venn sounded the pod and the ears of the sentries pricked to attention, he was way off to the east, crouching within the buckling core of a fallen tower. He let go of the plundered twine and watched as they raised their spears, watched as they looped round towards the sound, watched as the workers jolted and plunged straight into the trap.

Guff was there, at the edge of the plateau where the unarmed flurried. He had been there for some time, in a rough Guff-sized burrow they had prepared last moon. His spines were pinned with dried leaves, concealing his presence, and now they scattered in clouds of red and yellow as he leapt from his hide. The scent of fruit choked the plateau like noxious fumes, camouflage raked from a raided store down the hill last night. No wonder the builders had not detected the iron stench of their rightful kings.

Guff’s proximity sent the mouse-men wild with panic. One toppled from the edge of the rock and fell to its cowardly end with a fading squeal. Others wheeled about and pounded for the decaying watchtower at the centre of the ruin. Three spun on their heels and doubled back straight into the leviathan bulk of Venn.

Times had changed for the exiles.

Venn had long reconciled himself to using slyness against slyness. No matter the way, the skern were predators, and in the end, predators always prevail. He felt like a predator now as he smashed a foreleg into the lead mouse and crushed it into the ground. One claw, the size of a scythe to the trembling levin, curled around its neck.

The builders, and the sentries with them, scattered and were gone. To fight back would have been guaranteed death.

Was Venn’s prize guaranteed death? Of course. That was its place, but perhaps it would not know it.

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“What Jiharu?” Venn spat in halting levinese. They had watched and listened from secret hollows for so long, but only with the patience a gaunt and shrivelling stomach can conjure. “Where? A farm? A roadway? Big?”

The levin did not speak, only cried.

Guff came up from above and grinned. It was a slow grin, and it revealed the full length of his fangs in agonising detail. “Say,” he said, slowly.

The levin wept. It thrashed its head, looking for aid, or a way out, but found neither. It began to wipe its face frantically with its paws.

Venn revelled in his dominance. He was almost disappointed when it began to babble.

“Jiharu... it’s our home. Where we came from. Let me go back! I have family-”

“A tower?” Venn roared. Spittle drenched the levin into silence. Guff, still hanging mockingly above the captive, extended a claw towards the one erect watchtower. They had learned the word verik, the leftover doings of whatever clan had lived here before them. They dotted the hillsides of this sprawling, verdant jungle they had descended into from the Green, where they had stayed and spied. They heard it often, and followed, and discovered the stores of twigs and planks hidden in rotten trunks and collapsed skern burrows, and witnessed the work parties drag them up their cobbled paths to seal the gaping holes in the towers with new walls. The mouse-men lit fires up there freely at night. Once repaired, there was no way in for their hunters.

The levin thrashed its head gain. “No-ooo! Please, free me or end me. Please...”

Venn adjusted his grip and felt bone give way. One of the vermin’s forepaws mushed into the loamy ground. It screamed. “I’ll tell!”

Balance was restored. He wanted this moment to last forever.

“Jiharu... it is not... verik. It is our own...” Eyelids fluttered. The weakling was fading.

Guff rattled the creature up and down. “Say!” he shrieked. “Where?”

“D-d-down the roadway. East to the copse of the Fiery Grove. Along the river to the sss-stone bridge...” And then, it smiled into the waiting maw. “It’s the heart of the union, the spring from which peace floods the land. I want you...both to see.... what could be.... before you die.”

It wasn’t looking at Venn any more. It was looking over his flank.

“Away!” boomed Guff.

Instinct told Venn not to look, but to act. He left the beast where it lay bleeding and squirmed away through the vines.

A second later, flame scorched his tail as the dragon engulfed the levin in annihilation.

A minute, and the plateau was blackened to a crisp.