Stagnation is something to avoid. It is the one thing that destroys most.

-From Canticles: 23:53-54

The next day she traveled farther south past Axmaker’s territory. The neonate took care, not rushing, searching for potential resources to take from the others. The food delivery from Tok wasn’t for a few hours yet, so she had time.

Her patterns rippled with the background easily, her steps meticulous.

I learned so much. Fighting Design and Slash really had helped her better understand her own abilities. The Greenscale found a berry bush, plucking it clean and devouring the little fruits hungrily before cutting it off at the base.

She returned to scanning, then paused.

What is that?

A large flat stone sat at an angle, one end in the air. It was big enough that it would be difficult to pick it up. Smaller stones were piled on top of the lifted side, and they were all held up by three flimsy looking pieces of wood. It looked like it could fall at any moment.

Unnatural. Investigate. Her Instinct decreed from her eyes.

Checking one last time for any of the others she moved in closer.

Each of the three sticks were shaped, notched so that they fit together. They formed a triangle, the bottom point facing out away from the hinging point of the rock while the top point supported the rock off of the ground. She looked at the big stone placed on top, weighed down with more.

A trap?

It only took a moment to understand. The thin piece of wood was the trigger, and would cause the other two to collapse, and the far end was under the stone.

Should be bait on the tip, make the prey touch it.

The little hunter bent down lower to inspect. Something was really mashed into the fibers of the wood on the end of that stick. Making sure she wouldn’t accidentally spring the trap, she let her tongue slide out, the forks not spreading too much. The smell tasted fragrant, sweet. Berries. She glanced at the bush she just cut down, feeling smug.

True. Baited. Her Instinct confirmed, also signaling orange.

Cutting a fern with her knife, she used the stem to brush the bottom stick. With a blunt thump the pile of stones hit the ground as the supporting wood all fell away.

Not a bad design.

Easily stolen. Easily spotted. Take the pieces. Her Instinct disagreed.

True. With some effort she lifted the stone and grabbed the pieces, looking at them. Notched to fit together, but clearly it had taken a few attempts to get it to work correctly.

Are they unique to each stone? That is far too much effort if you don’t have an earthbone blade. Clearly it could be done, but to the neonate it felt like a sounder plan to use snares. They were harder to spot, quicker to place, and far easier to make.

Now that she knew to look for such things, it was very easy to spot others, and she found quite a few. She triggered each, then collected all of the parts, which she would study, if only to better understand them.

The little predator even found a rat, crushed by one of the traps, and she tore into it hungrily, lazily tearing out the guts with her claw, spitting out the fur as she went.

She crunched down on the skull, savoring it.

A good snack…

A snack… She began to ponder. The stones seemed to be good at getting smaller game.

Maybe set them up within the wall of thorns? She was sure that small creatures came through there, and with the bait under the stones, it would be protected from the rain. And there weren’t many good places to set up snares within her territory.

If someone is able to take the parts if they are there, I’ll have bigger issues anyway.

Her Instinct grunted as she licked her claws clean. Snares.

I should check for those too.

Sure enough, the neonate found some, and she made quick work of collecting them and putting them into her bag. One even had a young rous in it, easily distinguishable from a rat by how wide its jaw was, with pointed teeth.

She ate that too, tearing out the guts and leaving them to make the spot stink like death.

Scare away the prey and attract the predators.

Her Instinct grumbled, unsatisfied with the lackluster sabotage.

Fine, but I need to hurry.

The day was getting on, she wanted to be there to steal some of the provided food from Tok. The Greenscale made a point to scrub herself thoroughly with the moss after eating before continuing deeper into the territory, hide the scent of blood.

It was a good thing that she was moving as slowly as she was.

Crack!

Her foot fell through the ground as it gave way under her step!

Hissing in fearful frustration she had her black knife in her hand. Something, anything! She couldn’t see the bottom.

Root!

She rammed it down!

Ka-thunk!

Jerking to a halt as it sunk into the wood, she glanced down into the pit, reaching up with her other hand and digging in her claws. The hidden pit was almost fifteen feet deep, sharpened stakes at the bottom of it. Fire hardened points only visible when a lance of lightning split the sky above.

Trapmaker. Her Instinct named the hatchling, thunder rumbling.

It was the first time that had happened without even yet seeing the individual.

The neonate used the knife as a lever to pull herself back out of the hole. Once she was out she pulled the thin covering of leaves and sticks aside.

Could catch rous and maybe even some crocodilians.

And idiot hatchlings. Her Instinct hissed.

From that point on she took a lot more care, a process she already did well shifting in her mind. She was so used to spotting creatures against the background, but now the background had to match as well.

She started to learn the signs, an odd change in the leaf type here, an overly flat piece of ground there. Hues and patterns, her specialty. Still, the level of detail that this Trapmaker could manage, making it so close to perfect, impressed the little predator.

Inefficient. Her Instinct growled, snapping its jaws.

It was a lot of resources. It did seem like a good way to protect your nest though.

Cowardly.

How did they feed themselves with all this work? Her Instinct didn’t reply, just as unsure in her hindbrain as she was in the fore.

Her tongue flickered out.

Campfire. More to the left.

The neonate shifted direction and kept moving, and it wasn’t long before she spotted him, spying out from behind a boulder. She poked her head around the side near the bottom, making it look like a smaller stone with her color and pattern. Spotting the male, but then taking in the surrounding area.

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She almost let her eyes go wide as the shock washed over her.

That’s how he fed himself…

Bones of some sort of huge beast had cascaded across the ground. Several broken open. Others being drilled into by strange worms. The massive skull, large enough to swallow both her and Trapmaker whole, rested at an angle, slightly sunk into the mud.

A nightmare of fangs and huge staring sockets in a long triangular head, almost like a crocodile’s, but much larger and flatter. And the teeth intermeshed and stuck outward from the mouth.

There was also a huge hole on top of the head that didn’t look like damage, it was the size of her head at least, but she didn’t dare get closer to get a more accurate guess. Not yet.

For breathing? Her Instinct hissed, knowing creatures had that sort of bodyplan, but all were aquatic.

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Look Kiddo, just hope you never run into one of those. Okay? Ever!

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She glanced at the male, who had picked up a stick, one of the pale worms speared and wrapped up on it steaming. He stripped the worm from the skewer languidly before tossing the stick into his fire and picking up something else he was eating. It was a wasteful fire to, out in the elements, forcing it to be large enough to fight off the rain.

She looked back at the skeleton. Found the carcass. Ate the scavengers and the bones. That’s how he lived while digging those pits and making those traps.

But now he clearly had better vittles.

Trapmaker was large. More than twice as big as Axmaker, and at least a foot taller. And not just large. Fat. Not obese, but unlike the others, the Trapmaker didn’t have well defined muscles. They were all padded with fat stores, and his tail was thick with it. And it was no wonder why.

Trapmaker lounged on his back, his head moving in the characteristic pull-jerk of tearing a piece of tough meat. He chewed loudly. Occasionally, his other hand dipped into the cooked center of a whiptail bulb, scooping out still steaming flesh and licking it off his claws.

She felt her jaw tighten. He was relaxed? Black-and-red engulfed her thoughts.

Prey. Cull!

I should! Just to shatter that confidence!

Bad dreams, deep scars, broken and dislocated bones. She had seen it all. But his method clearly was a good one. Could she fault him for figuring out the best strategy? For being born bigger?

No, but I still hate him! It wasn’t fair!

Fight! Attack! Kill!

If she did this place could be hers.

Mine. Greed rose again inside.

She drew the matte black blade.

No. Wait.

He shifted position, and she was reminded of his size. He wasn’t tired. He wasn’t hurt.

And I can’t kill him. Any of them, directly. Tok had made that clear.

Endless traps to provide passive meat. Whiptails clearly nearby.

He could outlast all the others. He was probably the most well-fed of all of them outside the Provider.

Then the neonate noticed his shelter.

Her eyes widened as she looked closer.

A ruin! He lives inside a ruin? Her Instinct hissed from her suddenly clenched fists. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, but he was treating the house of the pantheon as his camp!

She watched him eat, gluttonous, leaning back and opening his mouth to gulp down water from a trickling rivulet next to him, picking up another worm-skewer.

This is the one… Her Instinct sent, full of callus rage, filling her belly with acid and her brain with fire, this is the one we tempt with the herb.

She checked from behind her boulder. There were no signs of him using it. No wounds on his body, no scent of the poultice. Not even denuded branches from the bushes themselves.

She shifted from her hiding place, sliding behind the boulder before trekking carefully around the immediate area. Just to make sure.

She found several of the bushes behind his ruin, and they were untouched. What was more, there was another pit trap that she saw, and some of the cover concealing it was leaves of the herb.

She ached to take some. Of all the others, Trapmaker surely didn’t need her full attention. She licked her muzzle with a suddenly dry tongue.

Absolutely not!

Her Instinct snarled.

That’s when she figured it out.

He was the perfect target.

It was because Trapmaker was just spending a lot of time waiting.

Waiting for prey.

Waiting for the trial to end.

While he ate, walked the same paths to check the traps, dug massive holes with meticulous care.

All in the hopes that something or someone would come along and fall in. Not very active in his survival at all.

Her Instinct growled, but she ignored it. She took it as a good sign that her plan might work.

He has to be bored. Boredom hadn’t been the cause of her addiction, but it had exacerbated it while she recovered.

Her Instinct grunted, though she could feel that it still wanted to strike now.

How do I get him to try it.

She wasn’t exactly sure at first, but she knew she didn’t have to be physically present when she planted the seed of an addiction in him. Moving back around to the opposite side, holding her camouflage, she paused at the archway that led in. It looked regular enough.

No. Trapped for certain. Her Instinct hissed as it narrowed her eyes.

She couldn’t shake that feeling, and the longer it didn’t go away, the more suspicious she became.

If I was him, I would be sure to put traps all around my nest as well. She thought of the dropping stone traps.

I know that someone sneaky would think that the most resources were in the shelter. The tools, the stores of food, maybe even a backup fire. She would prepare for this exact scenario, a hostile combatant entering her base.

Lightning flashed, and she saw it. Or she thought she did.

Ingenious!

There were tiny puddles on the ground, and they formed little runnels that ran along the curve of the ground, little tributaries. She waited for another bolt to be sure, impatiently listening to the thunder.

He made the ones away from his base bad on purpose!

It had almost worked on her too. He had done what she had with her scales, hide his full potential. Luring the invader into a false sense of expertise to snare them yet again.

Does he want to lure others in?

Lightning shattered the sky and she confirmed her initial suspicion. There were places where those runnels just simply vanished. Water didn’t just disappear, and it always flowed to the lowest point. She could connect the dots of vanishing water to estimate the rough outline of the pits below.

Her Instinct grunted smugly from her eyes, shifting back into the dark spaces of her mind.

She looked at the archway, shifting back into some bushes as she kept watching. The wind was blowing from Trapmaker to her, so she pulled some moss out of her bag and reapplied it to herself in the cover of the underbrush. Just a tiny amount. To make sure her scent was masked.

There has to be one in that entryway. She couldn’t see it though.

It would be a bad trap otherwise.

Such a helpful Instinct. Then it offered a different plan. She didn’t like it. But she couldn’t think of anything else.

Frustrated with herself, the neonate avoided the entrance all together. She slunk around to the side of the building, cutting some branches of the herb bushes free with her knife.

Her hands trembled. She didn’t want to, and yet…

With less hesitation than she would have liked, with an eager desperation almost, she put some of the leaves into her mouth.

She chewed.

Yes… Her Instinct purred.

The warmth flowed back into her, and she quivered in ecstasy with her Instinct. It stroked her neck to make her swallow before she could stop it, spit the wad onto the ground.

Glorious dizziness filled her. Bliss. A quiet mind at last.

The neonate had forgotten how much she needed this. She just focused on the gentle fall of the rain for a moment, the chill it brought becoming something to observe.

No! Focus! I have to finish this before it gets worse.

She shook her shoulders and spat the wad onto the ground, picking up a small stone to replace it. She looked at the pile, dissatisfied, struggling to think of why.

Place whole ones. Her Instinct suggested languorously.

She struggled to do that, but once she did it looked better.

Her own little ploy done, she purposely made a noisy exit.

Each snapped twig, each deliberately shaken bush, each purposely deep footprint pained her. She was exposing herself in a moment of weakness. She had given in to her cravings, only now realizing she could have ground up the leaves with two stones if she was quiet enough. But worst of all, she had given the secret of medicine away.

To trap him in addiction!

It still felt wrong though. As she ran, she dropped a leaf here and there, adding to the multitude of paths she was leaving for the male to find. She maintained her camouflage though. She would be heard, not seen. Not yet.

After she felt she had gone far enough she stopped being deliberately easy to track. She hopped from a rock to a log, wobbling, and finally leaped onto the trunk of a tree and scrambled up. She laid along a bough and became a bumpy patch of bark. Her eyes open for now so she could watch.

She needed the Trapmaker to be paranoid, but not so much so that he didn’t try the leaves.

Let him suspect the runt, hunting for some release from her worries.

That rankled her Instinct, but it kept itself in check for now.

She expected him to be cautious, to wait and take it slow. She had no doubts that if it were Biter or Slash, either one would have mangled his flabby form with ease in spite of his larger size. He didn’t fight. He avoided it, after all.

He burst out around the corner like he was one of the brutes. He moved oddly, zigzagging his way along, his plump tail dragging behind, obscuring his footprints as he went. She memorized the pattern.

Left side, cross the middle, enter the ruin from the right. Speaking of patterns… gods that is horrible. She couldn’t help but be amused.

Trapmaker’s black and red was comically simplistic. Big blocky shapes. No intricate patterns anywhere. And the red was closer to orange than it should have been.

He found her trail easily enough and tore after it.

She closed her eyes, laying flat along a branch big enough to hide her whole body. She spat the stone into her hand.

Just like Tok.

If it worked on the Provider, it had to work on this fool. The neonate threw the stone as hard as she could down the trail. It rustled and clattered splendidly. She cracked one yellow eye open. Partly to check her work, but also to stop feeling ill. The herb was starting to really set in.

As she looked around the side of the branch, she could see he had stopped just a few feet from her tree. So close she could see his expression in the coloration of his facial scales. She knew the instant that the male decided to not continue the chase.

He turned, heading back, when he paused, looking down. He crouched. She held her breath.

Come on.

He reached down, and plucked a variegated leaf out of the mud, looking at either side of it. Satisfaction washed through her, which built as he followed the trail to the back of his shelter, spotting the wad of leaves. His tongue flickering near it.

Smells the saliva. Knows it was another Greenscale. One that got right up behind him.

Come on!

He looked at the leaf, tracing the variegation with a claw.

‘Maybe this will make me stealthy too?’ He’ll think.

Do it!

Then placed it in his mouth, his expression becoming distant as he chewed.

‘Oh this feels good, I should get more of this!’

He turned and started tearing up whole bushes of the herb, stuffing more into his jaw and chewing eagerly.

Got him.

Her Instinct purred inside her.

She slunk away through the trees, wobbling slightly herself.