The Stalker. Missing Gadail’s words and farbark most, awhile alone with her thoughts Serib was welcome among the feet of Hadaean mountains where woodlands tall were holy-green, trees unaware of Time’s depart growing as they ever had, wind-blown leaves their song. She tried to heed as Gadail had told her - that she was there to know Earth as an element and all its ancestors; the shamans that had come even before her master-old. The ancestors they could eventually, inevitably join, should they leave existence greater than it was found.

∞

A history enriching the future. She could not imagine Gadail as an ancestor let alone herself, to whom young shamans would come in pilgrimage, for totem and boon alike.

If not Chance, she had wondered before who or what decided such worthiness, in the cycle of Time’s permanent finity.

∞

These are thought by most scholars, to be her first steps away from apprenticeship and into shamanism proper. Away from certainty and into doubts believed, doubts we all must take to their endings.

∞

Welcome as Serib was in Nature’s woodlands-Gapel’ond or was it Gapel’yhond, in no cave full of humanity’s artworks, nor meadow untouched of the mountains-Hadaeon could she find an Ancestor to greet her. She felt the presence of Earth nonetheless. Heard an older howl echoing and of that she knew not what to make, as when she followed the sound it seemed only further away.

∞

The ‘presence’ nodded sleepily and old in the bend of wind-touched trees. Moss-furred branches leaned above as to let the sunshine pave a path of light for her through the brush. Stones rich with iron cracked by giant tree roots. And though she wandered as her wonder sketched along that sun-tread way, not a soul did she meet, forgetting she was with herself.

She felt guided nonetheless, by a force that did not yet see fit to meet her.

For who can know who else might be reading?

∞

She tried to count the miles though beyond eight of them she could reckon no further before she had to start counting again, and soon - downwards led every path she found, away from the mountain’s sheer - paths tread or not by human feet and otherwise. Signs she found abundant that to us would mean little, signs that other shamans had through here as pilgrims followed a well-worn path.

∞

Grimmer signs more obvious to you and I soon disturbed her: there were tufts of thick fur matted in the sharper leaves. Indifferent Death reeked upon the winds from the valley below and if she took too deep a breath she retched and coughed.

Indifferent Death, faceless and everywhere, of great involve in the patterns of Time and Entropy’s Elope; little mentioned and easily forgotten is the dread simplicity that all things are born and will expire, the shame that with Truth awry some of us can see no further than that, unsure what worth or purpose finite things can have.

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∞

She was jaded with such thoughts, as in that valley there were huts among the trees, large as houses resting weightless as bird nests. And above those rooting-rooves - readying their nameless rituals - vultures high soared as the death she had smelt was clearer: werewolves were hung from their homes, across the sunny path ahead where flies made their discord. Some homes had come unfastened and lay strewn over the mountain-forest floor. Homes of fur, oak and leather. Pots of stew still hot, spilt steaming across the grass.

Something grabbed her.

∞

Her arm it clenched between its pincers, larger than the huts it had ruined was its size. Fat with the Werewolves it had swallowed. Insect wings buzzed wider than Serib was tall as it attacked her. Wings vibrating all that was near to take her away into a hollow it had carved in the clouds or bury her in its hovel underground she feared and fought against. Bronze lightning flashed from Serib’s eyes and would soon strike the grand insect from the skies, though she heard shout from above a known voice that ceased her retaliation. The massive beetle released her sore arm from its pinch and she was glad to find no severe wound. The creature’s master - unseen until it was his wish to be seen - was sitting among the leaves above:

“Nay, Enanti.” The Stalker had spoken, calling off his growing companion.

The grand crab or beetle scurried off through the trees shouldering them out of its way and once it was gone from her view, Serib heard a dire rumbling, fearing the thing had burrowed into the ground.

∞

The Hunter Lord Ahlzvyr tucked away a sand-dusted page he had been reading and remained there perched up high. He watched her with the indifference of eagles and other raptors. Serib could not see if he was sitting or standing, or entirely integrated into the trees. Infinity runes had long ago been scored with frustration or desperate fashion into the bark around him. Into the stones at their roots.

“Confuse not Enanti’s hunger with my hunt. They are a young grub growing always while I am pleased of your being lured here by chance. Another step and it all will change.” He warned or encouraged. “Though which way will you choose? And so mine determine.”

‘Another step?’ Serib crouched to move aside the still-warm arm of a Were recently slain and scalped by her feet, and underneath the corpse was a crude infinity rune carved through the grass into cold mud. It glowed with a soft bronze light as her eyes followed its curve. She was dizzy staring at it, though something about the ‘rune’ was incomplete or ingenuine, and so she was not transported through the odd warps of Timelessness.

“You have been leaving these runes?” she called up to The Stalker, unable to see him.

“My prey began to, and I learned then the difficulty of our chase. She navigates this Timelessness with an ease I cannot yet.”

∞

Gadail had told Serib it was his last apprentice who left these runes, and so she asked:

“You are hunting a shaman?”

“If my prey can still be numbered as one of your kin. A spirit I would closer say, having shed her corporeal flesh leaving order behind in effort to craft order anew and redefined on her path a radical. Step across my butchered rune and we shall see if you are caught by its spell, if I have learned what is known to her and at last made equal our chase. I will make clear to you what I know… and perhaps you do not need to become my prey.”

“I do not fear death by your hand or the claws of your creature.” Serib barred her tusks at the hunter’s words, at wherever she thought he was.

“I believe you. Then you are lost to all virtue as Fearlessness is a fool’s retreat far from Bravery’s famed grave.” Leaves rustled behind her.

∞

Vultures continued spanning their effortless circles through the mountain-skies waiting for rot, and Serib too young perhaps in mind or heart to decide between extremes of coming or going, felt a moment powerless against the deep mystery of forces beyond her. Or was she herself, her own barrier and momentum both? She could not with any resolve bring herself to step across the infinity rune in the mud.

∞

“Totemless illiterate.” The Stalker spat - Serib felt Ahlzvyr’s heel in her back and she tumbled over the makeshift sigil. “Let our chase convene onto another side.”