The longer Dalric flew, the more certain he felt he’d stumble upon an Enlightened beast. Almost assuredly more than one.

He had to fend off the attacks of four more would-be apexes. All four could cast lethal spells and all four ran away at the first sign of resistance. It had just become a running theme, a troubling one, when he encountered his sixth beast of the night. A seemingly long-limbed, almost spider-like, orangutan-esque creature.

They didn’t run.

His wings fluttered as they guided him away from another barrage of projectiles. The beast had a notably high degree of skill. Even though a great distance separated the two of them, great enough that Dalric had only caught glimpses of the spider-orangutan, they weaved both their own and the ambient ahjer into jagged stone javelins and rained them on him.

The most recent barrage had lethal intent, but that was a fresh adjustment. Originally, they were lures, sent to bait him toward one of the several traps he had sensed around the canopy. Those traps mostly came in the form of poisoned threads, but he had also noted a number of petrified trees that they had tried to usher him towards. He couldn’t quite tell what they were for, but he didn’t need to, to know to stay away from them. The entire area was clearly the spider-orangutan’s domain.

These were positive signs.

Dalric could have met the aggression with his own, but if he wanted to converse with what he thought might be an Enlightened beast, he needed them alive and grudgeless. Avoiding damage was rather simple for him anyway, it was actually locating his future informant that was proving difficult.

While he strained himself to try and find them, he sensed another cluster of ahjer pooling above him. A blink before it materialized the stone javelins, he prepped his wings and drifted to his left. When the javelins arrived, they could only fall on the trees below.

He turned toward a new direction. Each time the beast cast their spell, they sent out their ahjer from their hiding place. Or places. Between the last two casts they had moved over fifty feet. Whether they had caught on to what they were revealing about themself or they were simply practicing good caution, they managed to keep Dalric at a distance.

Not for long though. After a few more evasions, he finally found them.

Ah…

He caught it on the move. Despite the web of threads spanning across the dozens of trees, it seemed more orangutan than spider. It was also just another beast. Another highly powerful beast, but a beast all the same.

Its aggression did not come from being a higher tiered creature, but rather the fact that it was a parent. It was protecting its young. It had a set of triplets attached to its back. Though, it seemed only two would survive the night. The last had a more than notable bite mark across its entire body.

The beast touched one of its stone trees and the family of four disappeared from Dalric’s senses. The ability piqued his interest somewhat, but it was disappointment that took center stage. Another dead end.

More concerning than that though, another sign something was very off about the jungle he’d been reborn in. He left behind a small gift before flying away to continue his reconnaissance.

Aside from the unusual and powerful fauna, unique and extraordinary flora kept popping up one after another as well. His quiet belief that the Dance had somehow finagled with the ambient ahjer levels quickly broke apart the further he traveled. He continually spotted plants that required sustained and dense concentrations of ahjer to grow. Some were known to take years to bloom. That could only mean the current state of ambient ahjer wasn’t new or abnormal. This area had experienced it for years, possibly decades.

What does this mean?

His second theory would have been that he was simply reborn in a high-density area, maybe something about the graveyard, or those buried within, caused that area to have an explosive amount of ahjer, but he had put some distance between him and the small hill he awoke on. Not a great distance, maybe half a league, just enough to disprove the theory.

Where did that leave him, on a different world?

He laughed off the possibility. Though it wasn’t none per se, the only being capable of such a thing insisted on ‘not interfering with the natural processes of an ecology’. Which in reality just meant they were lazy and incapable of accepting responsibility.

Rude.

Dalric ignored that.

He couldn’t ignore the abnormalities he observed though. They broke his basic understanding of the world. He lowered himself to the ground, removed his gauntlet, and gently picked up a moonfire plant. If he hadn’t sensed dozens of them, he wouldn’t believe the one in his hand was real. Even as he rubbed his fingers across it, feeling the petals radiating heat, he could barely believe it. Moonfire plants sold for hundreds of great pieces precisely because they were rarer than rare. Only occasionally spotted around volcanoes, not along a warm jungle floor.

What could possibly explain thi—

His head jerked up, mostly out of habit as he still couldn’t see. Something had jogged into the range of his ahjer sense. No, somethings. There were three of them: they all walked on four legs, had tails, and sported some sort of metal attached to their ankles. They didn't seem like herbivores, but their ahjer felt far thinner and more impure than the predators he'd 'greeted'.

What are you?

Whatever they were, this was the first active group he’d come across and they headed straight for him. He grabbed his gauntlet and made himself scarce, flying up into the canopy and blending into its shadows.

Let’s see what you do.

The radius of his unfocused ahjer sense stretched to fifteen fathoms, give or take. Ninety feet wasn't an incredible length, but the sheer amount of plant life in the region meant without an equally pervasive sight or sense, the somethings wouldn’t have seen him. Dalric wagered they had neither.

He was right.

They hadn’t seen him, they passed both him and the clusters of moonfire without giving them a second look.

Dalric had hoped they'd stop for the moonfire. Enlightened or not, animals tended to know when a plant contained large amounts of ahjer they could use. Even if the somethings were carnivores, which Dalric felt was almost certain, ahjer enriched plants could still be consumed for moderate benefits.

They could have more pressing matters.

Dalric was torn on whether he should tail them. They were the only mobile creatures he'd spotted that weren't actively hunting. Each of their steps was powerful though, like they moved with purpose.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Once they crossed the area right underneath him, he had a much clearer picture of what they were. They were feline, for one. Their general body shape and movements reminded him of jaguars. Though they were quite large for jaguars. The one leading the group stood at almost five feet tall. Thinking back to everything he’d seen during his short flight, it was probably the least strange prospect. Animals grew in strange ways when exposed to high concentrations of ahjer for long durations.

Hmm. There's no blood on their paws… are they distance fighters or have they not been attacked?

Both were possible, but nothing about them spoke to them being skilled at long range combat. The metal bands around their ankles might be a tell, but those could be anything. They had only the faintest whiff of ahjer to them. Dalric leaned towards the latter explanation.

If he was correct, that was a hint. A hint that they were part of a larger group. A group the denizens of the jungle knew to avoid. The three in front of him were certainly weaker than anything that had attacked him so far. The orangutan-spider especially, but even the overgrown blazewurm he encountered could handle at least two of the three. If he was on the menu, but not them, there must be a reason. That was something worth exploring.

It could lead nowhere, but he'd accept that risk. His other option seemed to be wading through a nonstop wave of nocturnal predators hoping one ends up being Enlightened.

Stealth wasn’t on the mind when his wings were designed, so he had to cast a slight muffling spell and keep his distance. He still roused a few of the critters, the spell was simple and geared towards cost-efficiency rather than efficacy, but thankfully they never ran in the direction of the something-jaguars. The noise they made didn’t seem to reach them either. Though the jungle wasn’t exactly quiet, perceptive ears would clearly hear the small animals frantically fleeing for their lives. Whatever the something-jaguars were doing, they remained oblivious.

Or they don’t care.

Dalric followed them for a while, somewhere close to a full league, and as he suspected he remained completely untouched. Nothing even came close to their path.

That said, when he briefly spread his ahjer sense up to a hundred eighty feet, he did notice some sort of other creature stalk them for a few moments before vanishing. Unfortunately, at that range his current sense didn’t have the resolution to really make out much through the noise. What it was remained a mystery to him.

On the foliage side, the encounters continued consistently. There wasn't a stretch of land that didn't boast some form of rare plant life, and yet the something-jaguars didn't care for any of them in the slightest. They stopped for water once, but otherwise they jogged at the same pace the entire time.

It wasn’t until a third of the way through the journey, when they met an intersection, that Dalric realized the path they walked on lacked the level vegetation the rest of the jungle maintained. He had chastised himself for the oversight, but in truth his ahjer sense just wasn’t that refined yet.

Once he noticed, he felt confident in his decision to follow them. While well-trodden paths weren’t necessarily a sign of anything other than consistent traffic, these specific paths reeked of organization. If one of their number wasn’t Enlightened then there was a powerful beast master or tamer. That would work just as well, maybe even better.

He'd find out soon. It was only a bit further before the something-jaguars finally slowed down. They reached... a checkpoint.

A checkpoint?

Two other something-jaguars stood in the middle of what he assumed was a barricade while a third one laid on an elevated stone platform. The two on the ground stood towards the edge of his senses’ range, but he could tell that beyond the checkpoint the path sloped up. As he inched closer he got a sense it wasn't just a raised path, but the makings of a hill.

Whatever...interaction occurred at the checkpoint, it was quick. The three Dalric tailed swiftly bypassed the barricade and resumed their pace up the hill. He shifted away from the path to see if he could follow, but he immediately ran into a wall. Thick tree logs, stacked horizontally, stretched higher than the canopy. Even worse, from what he could sense, the hill beyond the wall laid completely barren. Simply flying over wasn't an option. He drifted further from the path, just in case, but the only other opening in the wall had another checkpoint. His shadow ended here.

That was fine though. He'd clearly reached the destination he was looking for, he just needed to find an alternate route. And he would, later. For now, he needed to process.

So while the three jogged out of his sense's range, Dalric settled down to review what he learned.

They have checkpoints.

That piece refused to unlodge itself from the center of his mind. For good reason, beasts didn't have checkpoints. Even with a tamer or an Enlightened leading them, that level of understanding and organization would be beyond them. It was one thing to lay around in strategic positions and watch for threats, it was another to have what amounted to a border guard with watch towers. That, that was something only the Wyld would have.

Could this be?

He analyzed, re-analyzed, and overanalyzed every bit of his surroundings. The soil, the flowers, the weeds, the trees, even the rocks were scrutinized. It couldn't be. The Wyld were ancient beasts, each well over ten thousand years old, and their lands matched. This jungle on the other hand was new. The trees weren't even a thousand years old.

Hmm. I could be approaching this incorrectly. This could be a new settlement in land the Wyld want to claim.

He went back to the strange thickness of the ahjer.

That would certainly be a reason to want this land. But..

That train of thought led him back to the beginning. Where was he? Details didn't add up. There was a graveyard, a clear sign of civilization. He couldn't tell which specific race was responsible, but it didn't matter. Every kingdom, clan, tribe, city-state, band of mercenaries, or anything in-between would fight desperately to claim land like this. Yet somehow the jungle is untouched? The graveyard was left to rot and the Wyld came in uncontested? That didn’t sound believable.

He threw away his assumptions and reapproached with only pure facts.

First, he was human.

…

It would seem he was not as over that detail as he'd like to believe, but he ignored that and focused on pertinent facts.

First, the jungle is overflowing with ahjer and has been for decades, at minimum. At some point, it was visited by some form of civilization. Said civilization did not see it fit to settle. Hmmm. It could be that there is no overlap between those two points… But even if the graves were built prior, surely they'd still be aware of this area? Why would it lay forgotten? Hmm… anyway.

The jungle has been overflowing with ahjer for decades. Wild and plant life has become extremely… unique in that time. Of the wild life, there is a group of jaguar-like animals with a strong reputation, advanced organizational skills, a form of communication… and also stonecutting.

That last one just occurred to him. Not because he realized himself, but rather because a…

Rhino? That’s definitely a rhino.

Two rhinos, in fact. Their forms were so distinct he could not mistake them for anything else, but their size bordered on miniature. They were smaller than the something-jaguars, in both height and musculature.

The more I learn, the less I understand.

He turned his attention to them as they approached the third checkpoint he ran into during his scans. Both of them had a wide cart filled with large chunks of stone attached to their back.

For a moment, he wondered why this transaction would occur in the middle of the night, but then the question of 'how would they even communicate' immediately displaced it. He had to know, it may be a clue.

While the barricade and the approaching rhinos were both within his ahjer sense, they were not within earshot. If not for his blindness, he would have tried to rectify that with a spell. A part of him wanted to risk it, there was little lost in losing his hearing temporarily, but he decided against it. Lacking both sight and sound seemed like begging for disaster. So instead of gambling his senses, he cast a more powerful—and costly—concealment spell and just moved closer.

It was, in a way, a doomed effort. Carefully slaloming through trees was certainly a much slower process than a hurried straight line jog. Which meant the rhinos were always going to arrive at the barricade a bit before Dalric could get close enough. He tried to speed up, but he knew at best he'd miss the beginning of whatever their communication entailed. At worst, if they were as quick as the trio he first followed, he'd miss it entirely. He continued on either way.

In the end though, he never needed to move.

"Halt. Code?"

"169. Master says quick. Disturbance."

"Yeah, yeah. Come this way."

Dalric froze.

Hu—bu…wait. What?!