The blood drained from my body as the fetid odor changed from repulsive to terrifying. Kro’daka. Monster. Unlike the skogg menace, the Six Tribes had never rid the island of their threat. Even the greatest heroes had failed. For every monster slain, the blight just spawned another.

“Should we run?” I breathed.

“I don’t know.”

“How —” I started, the words sticking in my throat, “how big is it?”

“I don’t think it will matter. We don’t have spears, or bows.”

“Maybe it mutated from something slow,” I offered.

“Maybe.”

I looked to Elani in terror as she backed toward our camp, eyes darting from tree to tree.

She was capable, clever, cunning. She knew more about the island and its magic than I ever would. I could run faster than anyone in Eiden, and fire my slingshot with unmatched accuracy, but the blight had robbed me of one and my kavi took the other and so I had put complete faith in Elani.

And now she was out of answers.

Something shattered a nearby sapling. The crack of the tree’s breaking trunk made me jump and Elani yelp. The bamboo was too dense to discern where the sound came from, and anything beyond a few dozen strides was like peering through tall grass.

“Okay,” Elani said, “I think maybe we do run.”

Adrenaline flooded into me and filled my stomach with acid. The approaching kro’daka smelled like a festering wound, like wet animal pens left unclean for too long. I couldn’t move, lest I fall to my knees and empty my stomach.

Run, I told myself. Run. Over and over I ordered my legs to take me away. Yet my feet were planted, my legs locked, disobedient. Time moved as slow as a stream choked with bracken. Even my kavi knew to disappear.

I saw a copse of bamboo shiver off to my right, and a moment later the creature burst through in a shower of shattered plants.

Its head was swollen, misshapen, like a child had shaped wet clay into something porcine. Its coat had fallen out but for patches of red fur clinging like sores to its sickly white hide.

The tusked head swiveled toward me, not just hungry but hateful, angry. Ropes of saliva swung like pendulums from its twisted mouth. It had been a peka’ri, once.

I had only that moment to identify some of the features of the tiny animals I knew from Eiden before the kro’daka screamed and threw itself toward us. I thought of a boulder’s unstoppable momentum, smashing through the fences outside Eiden, as it trampled straight through the scattered bamboo in its path.

Elani was shouting. “Ren, I said RUN!”

I snapped out of my daze and bolted after her. She had already made it a dozen strides away from where I had stood transfixed.

I caught up with her easily; The blight could take away my endurance, but not my speed. The creature pounded after us. Peka’ri rodent-pigs were usually the size of melons, yet this one had grown nearly as tall as I was, and fattened to many times my size.

The monster cried out again. The hairs on my arms stood up as I heard something of the peka’ri it had once been. The animals only sounded like that when they were in great pain.

Elani tossed me my sword as soon as I caught up to her at the travelers’ refuge and then we were running again. I didn’t bother strapping the sword to my waist.

Dry wood exploded behind us as the monster charged straight through it. Each huff of its powerful breath seemed to carry the force of a threat. Each blast of air hammered me with hate. I will eat you. I will eat your kin. I will eat your pack-mate. The imagined threats carved themselves into my skull as though it had spoken with words edged in obsidian.

“It’s too fast,” I cried. “We can’t outrun it!”

“Right,” Elani hissed. She slowed to an abrupt stop and faced the oncoming monster.

“What are you doing?” I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep running, not looking back, until I reached Udoro. We needed spears, bows, fire. Yet I couldn’t abandon Elani.

“How well can you use that sword of yours?” she shouted over her shoulder.

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I didn’t remember pulling it from its scabbard, but it didn’t matter. “Elani, move!”

Elani bounced on the balls of her feet, knees bent and ready to run. “What’s the point of giving Enling kids swords if they’re not going to use them?”

“I fought with wooden sticks against a friend, not real swords against a monster!” I put my sword in front of me anyway, ready to swipe at the kro’daka as it passed Elani. If it passed Elani.

The kro’daka seemed to grin at the easy target. The expression was demonic; The blight had warped the peka’ri it had once been beyond recognition. Impossibly strong ropes of muscles moved just beneath the skin of its stout limbs, but the rest of its bulk was cripplingly obese.

In seconds it would trample Elani like a landslide.

A deep, red light appeared in Elani’s palm before shifting into a cloud of cherry-red fire as her kavi readied its magic. She cocked her arm back, then threw the spirit. It hurtled through the air with a deep whoosh as it coalesced into a ball of searing fire the size of my head.

The conjured flame exploded against the monster’s deformed head with a boom, ruining the air with the scent of singed fur and burned flesh. The kro’daka’s momentum carried it forward even as its legs buckled under its bulk.

Elani dove out of the way of the toppled monster, but I had gone dumb with panic. I stumbled backward, hands flailing as I fell onto my backside.

The monster crunched to a stop a mere two strides from where I fell. My gorge rose smell as its breath washed over me. It leered at me with baseless rage from tiny, grime-encrusted eyes. Those rheumy, black pools reflected a soft purple light; My spirit had returned, as useless as ever.

I will kill you, the glare threatened.

“Kill it before it gets up!” Elani shrieked at the same time.

I tore my gaze from the twisting monster as it thrashed its head, its legs trapped. My sword was no longer in my hand. A moment later I found the weapon laying in the dirt, covered in dust. I couldn’t reach it.

One of the beast’s hooves slammed into the dirt mere inches from the blade’s fragile bronze edge.

I had nothing but the spirit floating beside me. Yet if I used its magic – whatever that ended up being – the spirit would vanish forever. Whether it saved our lives or did nothing at all, the island may never see a purple kavi again.

But if we died, it would disappear anyway. “Elani, I’m sorry!” I called.

Her eyes went wide. “No!”

She spotted the sword laying inches from the struggling kro’daka’s quivering hide. She moved to grab it. A bloated, rodent-like foot lashed out at her, forcing her away. The kro’daka twisted around to snap at her with its broken teeth, yet it could not reach her.

“We can’t run,” I said. I felt for the tether.

“Don’t!” she cried, diving in vain for the sword once more.

The kavi would perform violet magic – something to do with the night, or luck, I guessed – as befitting Tesamet, the goddess of spirits and magic itself. I could not conjure fire like Elani’s red spirit, nor wind like a golden spirit or vitality like a green one.

Yet as I threw my will at the kavi, demanding it finally fulfill our contract with a display of its power, nothing happened.

Weak, the monster seemed to jeer, and it was right.

It grunted, extricating another of its legs from beneath its fat. Despite its labored breathing, it took no time to rest. It planted the foot, then another. It propped itself up, three legs straining with effort while the fourth remained pinned.

Elani had stopped trying to dive for the sword and reached into her pack instead. She retrieved a bottle filled with a soft yellow streamer of golden light. I could sense its magic in my mind like wind, like weightlessness, as she pulled it out. Buoyed by the sensation, I rose to my own feet at last.

Elani rushed toward the monster as her second kavi snaked out from the bottle.

The kro’daka’s hindquarters quaked under the monster’s unnatural weight, unable to lift itself fully upright. I watched, useless, as the beast’s massive head turned to her, its demented maw splitting in a wicked grin.

Come die.

Elani’s kavi rushed from her like wind from a bellows. The gale slammed into the monster’s flank and threw it from its feet. Again the monster crashed to the ground, screaming in frustration as spittle flew from its rotten tusks. Its underbelly was exposed, and this time Elani was ready.

She scooped my sword from where it lay in the dirt and aimed it at the kro’daka’s bulging neck with both hands. A second later, she buried my sword to its hilt.

The monster twisted, yanking the sword from her hand and tearing the wound open further. Elani responded by whipping two stone knives from her shoes and plunging them in as well. The kro’daka twitched, trying to kick her, until its wheezing breath stopped.

Elani pulled the weapons out and wiped the filth onto the kro’daka’s hide, one-by-one, then strode to where I watched.

“You… killed it,” I said. “Elani, I wasn’t even sure kro’daka still existed anywhere but the fringes of the island, and you just killed one in minutes. A small one, sure, but I –”

She dropped my sword at my feet and left to gather the discarded spirit bottles from where she’d dropped them.

“For someone who admires the old heroes so much,” she said as she returned, “I had expected a little more of you in a fight.” She brushed past me and continued toward the road.

My admiration turned to shame. I took one last look at the fallen kro’daka before I trudged after her.

In a single evening, Elani had destroyed both a monster and my pride.