Shae started from his half-asleep state, jerking his head backward from where it had rested on the tree trunk in front of him moments before. It was still dark, save for the pale, pearly blue and pink light of the moons that cast the forest in an ephemeral twilight. And cold.

What was tha–

A loud, doglike growl sounded from the floor below, accompanied by human shouts and the noises of frantic scuffling, scraping, and struggling. The beast snarled and barked, and Shae could hear a pleading, desperate stream of words in a foreign language coming from the person below him.

Immobilized by his binding to the tree trunk, Shae was forced to rely only on his hearing and his imagination for a picture of the scene unfolding below. He scrambled at the rope tied around his waist, struggling to free himself and get a look at the commotion, fingers dumb with cold and haste and fear. His heart slammed in his chest as the noise below grew louder, and finally, he was free.

There was a thud, and Shae felt the tree vibrate with the impact. The beast howled again, the high, keening, banshee-like shriek so unlike its snarling that, at first, Shae thought it was a different creature entirely. Then the forest erupted in responding cries, filling the night air with their terrible song. Whoever was beneath him screamed, and Shae realized that the other man was climbing the tree towards where Shae sat, perched between three branches and the trunk.

Whatever that thing is, it’s going to kill this guy if I don’t do something. And it sounds like more are on their way.

As if to confirm his thought, a second round of howling emanated from the forest in a circle around them, still at a distance but getting closer.

Shae shimmied out on a branch, passed his bag, and peered down, sword clutched tightly in his trembling fist. The first thing he saw was the man’s face, a perfect portrait of terror, peering up at him. His eyes were wide and brown, and a thick brown beard covered most of his face. One arm hung limply at his side while the other was flung over a branch some five feet below Shae, holding him up. There, he clung on for dear life, curling his knees to his chest and kicking off the tree in an effort to avoid the greedy hunger of the monster below.

Their gazes locked, and for a moment, confusion swept away the fear in the man’s eyes. An almost disbelieving hope took tentative root, then a moment later, to Shae’s bewilderment, hate crept over the man’s features like an ugly mask. Shae frowned confusion; in spite of the vicious animal just a few feet below, the man contorted his face into a sneer and spat up at Shae.

The spit didn’t reach him, instead falling back down past the man, lost to the forest floor and the rabid creature beneath. Shae watched the clear globule of saliva fall, and losing it in the low light, his eyes fell on the animal. Whatever image of the beast his primal fear of night and unidentifiable noises had concocted was immediately forgotten and replaced by the nightmare that lay below him.

Animal, beast, creature: these words were insufficient. Or perhaps inaccurate. This was a monster. Or a demon. Suddenly the disparity between how alien it sounded when howling and how aggressive and doglike while pursuing the man hanging below him made a little more sense; there was no defining this monster. He had absolutely no frame of reference for the thing that stared salivating up at him, for it was unlike anything he'd ever seen, making even the umbra seem normal and familiar by comparison.

A trembling shiver began in Shae’s throat and rippled across his body, causing each of his muscles to momentarily convulse. The monster had four legs, a head, and two tails. That’s where the similarities began and ended with anything he could think of seeing on Earth. It was furless, and its skin was a sleek, oily black, like polished leather that stretched across a lithe, muscular body. In place of a head, there was an orb the size of a large basketball that opened like a portal into a maw of rings upon rings of teeth. It had no eyes, no ears, nor jaws that Shae could distinguish, only a thin line of skin encircling its mouth. It was hard to imagine where its brain might be, for the gaping void of glistening saliva and long, white, snakelike fangs seemed to occupy its whole head.

Beneath that were its shoulders and back, thin, cordlike muscles bulging under tight skin. Shae watched them bunch and stretch as it strained up at them, spitting and jumping. The monster’s spine stood out from its back, each disc bulging and rising several inches in a row under the tightly fitted skin from its neck to its pelvis. Two identical tails protruded from its body, long and thin and black like living rubber hoses. They were the same oily, sleek black as the rest of its body, and completely hairless. At the tip of each tail was a glossy, ten-inch-long blade of black bone that stretched out in the shape of an elongated diamond and reflected the moonlight. The tails whished silently behind the monster, occasionally snapping out with frightening speed seemingly at random.

Muscular thighs gave way to thin legs belted with tendons and compression wrapped in black skin, ending in pawed, clawed feet like a mountain lion without fur. It leapt what must’ve been fifteen feet high, launching off of its hindlegs, claws reaching up to swipe and miss just mere inches from the man hanging below. The size of a large dog, the monster was incredibly strong and agile, its body made entirely of skin, muscle, and bone, lacking any body fat at all.

The hideous mouth keened again, then growled, ropes of saliva flying into the air and steaming in the cool night air.

A pack of these things is coming, and now it knows I’m here too, if it didn’t already. Why the fuck did this guy have to be here?

Looking down, Shae noticed a bow slung across the man’s back and an empty quiver dangling from his shoulder.

The archer!

Anger flared, and Shae’s face twisted, but at this moment, this precipice between life and death, he couldn’t bring himself to feel hatred or spite for the man. He still had no idea why the archer had shot at him, but they didn’t speak the same language, and if they both died in the next few moments, he’d never find out.

I have to get back home.

Clenching his teeth to stop their chattering, Shae gripped hard on the hilt of his sword and drew it from its sheath. Between where he lay draped over the branch and the ground was no less than a twenty-foot drop, and he was suddenly thankful for his stupid antics of backflipping off of his training tree after each of his hanging sit-up sessions.

Breathing deeply, Shae closed his eyes and forced out the noise, the fear, the man, the monster, the moment. Excluding everything else but his body and mind, Shae sunk into his core: into himself. Like water from a wellspring, calmness filled him, and a quiet stillness overcame him.

Shae opened his eyes and dropped from the branch. In his flight, he passed the disbelieving man still watching him and twisted in the air until he was falling face first, sword angled at the monster below. Timing his dive with the creature’s jump, there was no way for it to maneuver away from his falling blade.

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Shae plunged his sword into the monster’s bulbous head, sinking it to the hilt in the pit of gaping teeth. Their momentum clashed, and for a moment they were suspended in limbo in the air, connected by steel, blood, and the inevitability of death.

They fell together, Shae refusing to let go of his sword even as the monster closed its head around his outstretched arms, engulfing them up to the elbow in a sea of gnashing teeth and a parade of blood and pain, the monster's barbed tails whipping about them as they plummeted. Shae screamed as hot pain seared his forearms, kicked at the monster with his booted feet. It choked a guttural sound, throat constricting around the steel, blood streaming down its black skin in slow, thick rivers.

The monster hit the ground first, the impact jarring Shae but cushioning his fall. The abruptness and violence of the collision forced the monster’s mouth open, releasing Shae’s arms and causing him to cry out in pain. With the weight of gravity behind him, Shae pinned the monster between himself and the ground, skewering it with his sword. It pierced through its body with a loud crunching as bone shattered under metal, then exited through its back with a tearing of skin that sounded like ripping fabric.

Shae lost hold of the sword and rolled away, his arms numb with pain and his face burning with a laceration from the monster’s tail. When he came to a stop, he lay face up on his back, panting heavily into the night. Remembering the monster, he rose, stumbling, to his feet. It lay unmoving a yard away, limbs and tails splayed, his sword sticking out at a ghoulish angle from above its shoulder. The blade had torn through its mouth, head, and neck when it’d landed, and now protruded from the monster like a gruesome sword in the stone.

Shae limped to its corpse. It was a stupid, last-ditch plan, but it’d worked. Somewhere in the fall, his leg had been cut too, and his knee felt as if an icepick had been embedded inside the joint and was being jostled with every step.

Shae had exited Ren nearly as quickly as he’d entered it when the monster’s teeth had pierced his flesh, and now, making his dubious way over to the beast’s corpse, he teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. Great, throbbing waves washed through his arms in a way that the cuts on his face and leg couldn’t even begin to match, and as he knelt over the monster and examined its cornucopia of teeth, he discovered what must be the source of his agony. A grey film coated the spindly fangs that he hadn’t before noticed, milky and somehow sinister, dripping from the creature’s teeth like drops from a needle and falling into the cold dirt under its opened mouth.

Poison. It poisoned me, fucking damn it, it poisoned me. Fuck, fuck— fuck! This was bad. It was uncharacteristic of him to act this way, and he knew it.

Struggling to regain control of his mind, Shae tried grabbing the hilt of his sword, the cord binding of its grip coated in slick maroon blood, but his fingers disobeyed him. His fingers felt cold, heavy, and numb. Horrified, he noticed that the feeling, or loss of feeling, was spreading up his biceps, triceps, and into his shoulders, slowly wresting away control, inevitable as a creeping shadow.

There was a thud behind him, and Shae turned his head in time to see the archer scream, reaching with his one good arm towards his leg. It had snapped on impact, the shin and foot of his left leg twisted behind him. The archer dissolved into whimpering sobs, groping at his ruined appendage. His pant leg had torn above the knee, and a bloody white bone poked through the hole, jagged and quivering.

Tears streaked down the man’s face, salty water carving tracks through the layers of filth and grime that had accumulated on his skin. His bow had caught on a branch as he’d fallen, and now it and the quiver lay about him in a mess on the dirt, broken, helpless, and empty as their owner. The man’s pain-clouded eyes shifted slowly from his mangled leg to Shae, and in them, Shae watched as anger turned to confusion, then faded to resignation as he accepted his own death.

Shae’s chest seized, his throat constricting with emotion. This man had tried to kill him, but looking at him now, all alone, bleeding out and dying on the ground, he knew this man was no killer. He was emaciated, his ripped shirt revealing bulging ribs, and his clothes more the roughshod canvas garb of a farmer than the iron and leathers of a soldier or mercenary.

Eager, hungry howling shot lightning through his moment of revery. They were no longer alone.

Fear flashed through the fog in the archer’s vision, and his gaze slid past Shae and onto the dead monster behind him, then darted frantically around them. Shapes emerged from the shadows, whishing tails waving cruelly behind gaping mouths and darting, tasting tongues.

For a moment, there was silence. Shae held his breath, backing slowly towards the monster he’d slain, towards his sword. His arms had no feeling in them whatsoever, and his traps and neck were starting to stiffen. The air above the corpse was hot, and steam rose from the dead monster in visible sheets. Shae turned and plunged his face down, scrunching his nose at the stench, until his teeth were clamped around the grip of his sword.

Acrid blood smeared from the grip onto his tongue, and the taste made him gag; despite this, he bit down as hard as he could, placed a foot on the monster’s stomach, limp arms hanging by his sides, and pulled. The sword stuck, then came free with a wet squelching, sending him reeling backward. Behind him, the archer began to scream.

Shae stumbled and fell onto his ass. Unable to catch himself, he landed hard, twisting awkwardly to avoid stabbing himself with the sword. He didn’t let go of it, and his jaws ached from the effort. A chorus of snarling barks and excited howls filled the air, giving an awful counterpoint to the archer’s heartrending screams.

The weight of the sword kept him from raising his head, but through the hooded top of his vision, Shae watched as the monsters leapt onto the archer’s squirming form. Shae kicked at the ground, wriggling backwards in the dirt, hardly feeling the stones and roots as they dug into his neck, back, and legs.

Nothing would haunt him like the sound of it. Low, rumbling growls punctuated by snapping barks, yelps as the monsters bit at each other in competition, cracking as bones split, gurgling as he choked on his own blood, the sucking of his drowning, dying breathing, and the wet tearing, slurping chewing as they devoured his living flesh. Most of the sight was covered by the writhing black bodies of the countless creatures, but not all.

The archer lay on his back, his body below the head torn open like a frog on a dissection table, his limbs torn off and turned into chew toys, the ground around him awash in a bath of his blood. There was more blood than Shae had ever imagined a single human body could hold, and it poured out of him, coating everything. His intestines spewed from him, strewn about and scattered, stretching as hungry mouths pulled them out, unfurling him to the world. Shae watched as he scrambled on his back, sword in his mouth, fighting the burning, screaming agony of his legs as his body slowly grew numb.

Shae screamed through his barred teeth, not at the monsters, not in pain, and not loud enough to attract any more attention than he already was. He screamed in defiance, as a statement of resilience, and as a fuck you to this world. When he ran out of breath, Shae sucked air through his nose and mouth and screamed again, drool and spittle running down his chin and neck as he continued to scramble backwards. He’d done this before; he’d crawled on his back without using his arms while holding a rifle and moving under barbed wire at OCS, and he could do it again now. This, after all, is when it mattered. He screamed through his teeth at the circumstances that drew him to raise his sisters by himself, at his father for beating them, for torturing their mother, for leaving.

Strength rose unbidden from nowhere as his vision reddened to a senseless blur, and he continued to crawl, numb to pain, numb to everything. Eventually he backed into a tree and used it to push himself upright. Shae turned opposite the direction of the archer, opposite the fiendish, feasting monsters, and ran, his mind engulfed in a different form of Ren than what he’d ever experienced or trained for.

Time was a blur. Shae’s thoughts were consumed by one thing: survival; all else was pushed to the fringes of his awareness, shoved forcefully away by the singular focus of his will. The poison’s progression across his body was inexplicably paused, and he retained just enough control over his core musculature and legs to manage a stumbling, halting run.

Continuing uphill, Shae soon left the cacophony of horrors behind him. Night passed, and the pinkish luminescence of night gave way to the dawn’s early light. With it came a faint tint of yellow white from the triplicate suns, ushering in a new day.

Deep in delirium, Shae barely noticed the change. Some small part of his mind realized that it was dawn, and to him, that meant he had survived. The defiant will that’d animated him for the past several hours leaked away, and he was left weary, physically and emotionally exhausted, and aching. Collapsing into the cranny of a nearby tree and the rise of a throw of rocks and savoring the dark dampness of shade, Shae curled into a ball and slept.