I woke up in sweat, I could feel the eyes burning with malice, even after the nightmare was fading from my memory. My bedroll was soggy with my perspiration, and my heart was still galloping as fast as Nimbus’ gait. It was still dark and the fire I’d banked a few hours ago had burned down to the smallest smoldering embers. To calm my racing heart I breathed and listened to the forest creatures, and the snuffling snort of Nimbus grazing. I’d been so caught up in my newfound freedom that I’d forgotten The Center had eyes, everywhere. I’d forgotten that I needed to be careful, that I needed to worry. I knew I had to move soon but I didn’t want to. The first pale morning light was starting to tentatively creep over the horizon filtering through the tent I’d pitched the night before. I sighed and started getting up, knowing I couldn’t go back to sleep even if I wanted to after that nightmare.

Something broke the quiet and in a split second several realizations flew through my head. I hadn’t heard Nimbus’ noises in the normal intervals that had quickly become natural. I could also hear a strange metallic intake of breath, so out of the ordinary of the background noise that it was noticeable. The noise cut through the birds singing an early morning refrain. Silence dominated the landscape. In that split second, these thoughts flashed through my head and I threw myself to the side as a massive shape tore through my tent utterly demolishing it, missing me by inches. A weird rattling snarl clanged in my ears as the creature completed its leap, skidding in the dusty prairie scrub. I knew what kind of creature it was even before it landed. The pale morning light gleamed off of the metal embedded in it’s skin. It might’ve been a mountain lion once, in its past life, but now it was a horror of scarred flesh, and sharp edged metal plating. I’d thought I’d kept my magic bottled up, that I had pushed it so deep that no one could sense it anymore, but I was wrong.

It was a part of The Center’s early experiments that had gone wrong, mechanically enhanced creatures. They were created to be a strong, obedient army, obeying every command given to them. Earlier iterations were wrong, and twisted, and eventually The Center got the obedient killers that they wanted but they had a lot of failed versions leftover and it was getting hard to feed and house them all, not to mention the difficulty to keep them contained. The Center dumped them outside their gates, and with their thick walls protecting them they no longer needed to worry about the monsters they made. Every new type of enhanced beast they developed, the earlier and failed versions would get dumped into the world, free to cause panic and destruction. The more clever of the bunch found ways to reproduce with the discarded junk from The Center, making the monstrosities a permanent facet of the dangers in the open landscape.

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The one thing that The Twisted needed to keep their engines running was fuel. Some consumed creatures for fuel, some attacked settlements, but the most sought after meal was magic. The more wiley ones would wiggle their way into the center and feed on the Outer Rim residents. But for those outside, anyone who smelt of magic, was a tasty treat for the twisted ones. I thought that I’d be able to hide my magic to disguise my tracks from The Center as well as the twisted ones, but I wasn’t able to hide myself as well as I thought.

The beast turned back towards me, long blades unsheathing from it’s mangled paws, it’s one unbroken eye was lit with red, the crimson light washing over the grass making it look bloodstained. I scrabbled in the wreckage of my tent trying to find my knife knowing it wouldn’t be of much use anyway. My hand closed around a jagged shard of metal, just as the creature leapt towards me with serrated claws outstretched. At the last second I managed to dodge to the side and stabbed the beast with the shard as it barreled past me. The wound wasn’t life threatening but the shock of pain from its prey threw the hunter off its pattern enough for me to make a break for it. Nimbus came out of nowhere barreling furiously towards the creature ready to defend me, seeing me relatively unharmed, she quickly stopped short, skidding to a halt in front of me. I grabbed the few bags at my feet and swung myself up onto her back. My feet weren’t even in the stirrups before she sped off, I could feel her muscles moving and the breath pounding in her lungs as she stretched her neck forward. Giving all of her energy to escape the broken light of the twisted mountain lion. The creature screeched in a painfully sharp register, as it pursued Nimbus’ dust trail. My wild girl was much better suited to long distance running than the creature was, though. Soon it’s haunting screams faded behind us in the dust. Leaving the nightmarish creature stuck in my head, sure to stalk my dreams for many more nights to come.