Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
The last time we bedded down, Bear started barking halfway through. She’d bark, I’d wake up, we’d both peer into the darkness, and then she would settle down and we would go back to sleep. I thought it was some monster making circles around us, but it didn’t feel like that anymore. It felt like something was deliberately hunting us, something smart and patient. Our hunter stayed just out of range. Sometimes I would feel a flicker of a presence, and then it would be gone.
I pushed hard after resting, going through the tunnels and caverns at top speed. I thought we’d lost them. Apparently not.
Bear went back to munching on lake dragon steak. The wasp queen was a watershed moment for me. Until that point, I viewed myself as prey. I tried to avoid fights, and I assumed that everything we met was stronger than me.
I was still cautious, but reality had finally set in. I was faster and stronger than a lot of things in this breach, and my injuries healed within hours. I no longer went around. I cut through. And when something managed to get too close, my monster dog tore it to pieces. Bear grew another two inches and reached ninety-nine pounds. The scaredy-cat shepherd who hid behind me when we started was long gone. Now when Bear sighted an enemy, she held herself like an apex predator. When she sensed a fight coming, her tail wagged and her bright eyes seemed to say, “Oh boy, I wonder if this one is yummy.”
Perhaps sensing a change, the stalkers gave us a wide berth. We killed an oversized serpent the size of a power pole, a handful of the silverfish bugs, some tentacled thing which I couldn’t identify, and now a lake dragon who tried to ambush us on the shore of a deep pond. This one was smaller than the first, but it still made us work for the win. We paused to rest, heal, and eat, and now our unseen tracker caught up.
I shifted the bag on my back. The spider herders didn’t just let me pass. Their leader and two of his guard spiders walked us about half a mile through the tunnels. We didn’t speak, but he treated me with deference. At the end, one of the other herders caught up with us and brought me a backpack made of spider silk with a length of one of my ropes inside it.
The backpack was weightless and damn near indestructible. Right now, it contained that rope, my helmet and Bear’s leash and harness. I had no idea why I kept that stuff around. The rope could prove useful, but the harness didn’t fit Bear anymore and the helmet mostly got in the way now. I saw better without its light. My eyes had completely adjusted to the darkness. I was pretty sure I’d passed the human threshold of night vision days ago.
I cut a paper-thin slice from the lake dragon’s flank and chewed it.
“Bear, either this dragon tastes like chicken or I’m losing my mind.”
Bear ripped into her slab of meat.
“Compared to the stalkers, it’s downright delicious.”
The more casually we acted, the closer the hunter would get. I took another bite. Come on over, it’s just me and my puppy having a picnic. Join us, won’t you? We are harmless, I swear.
I chewed and waited.
Nothing.
Hard to look harmless when you are snacking on a monster the size of a moving truck and leaving a trail of bodies in your wake.
I leaned back against the rock. “I’m happy, Bear. My stomach is full, I drank some water, I rested, and neither one of us is hurt.”
The shepherd glanced at me.
“When you are young, you think that happiness is made of big triumphant moments. Getting your driver’s license. Graduating. Getting accepted into a college of your choice. Your wedding day – that’s a big one. But when you get older, you realize that those are the moments you remember, but they are so rare. If you want to be happy, you look for joy in small things. A cup of your favorite coffee. A good book. Vegging out on the couch after a long, hard day at work. Some people might say those are moments when you are content, not happy. But I will take what I can get, and right now this is a moment.”
Bear grinned at me.
“When we get out and I get back to my kids, now that will be a huge moment. You will like them, Bear. They will like you, too, because you are the best girl ever.”
I would walk out of this gate no matter what it cost me. Even if I was no longer the same Ada who had entered. And when we did exit, Bear would be coming home with me. I would pry her away from the guild no matter what it took. After all, I was sadrin now. I would think of something.