“You’re prey.”
The words cut through the rhetoric. Simple. Factual. The god stops mid-sentence.
The faces cycling across its form slow, almost stop.
It understands what he is. What we are.
The god speaks again, and the voice wavers—stripped of its divine authority, edged with something older and uglier.
The singular terrified face searches him. Searching for mercy it won’t find.
“You’re a monster.” The accusation carries the weight of millennia. “Worse than anything I ever created.”
“I’m a predator.” The distinction is quiet. Final. “You made things to hunt me. Now I’m hunting you. The only difference is that I’m better at it.”
The god shatters away from him.
And runs.
The god runs,and we follow.
It flees across terrain that buckles and warps beneath its will—stone flowing like water, distances stretching and compressingas existence itself struggles to accommodate panic from an entity that has never known fear. The Veiled One bleeds power into the landscape with every desperate stride, leaving trails of iridescent ichor that hiss and smoke where they touch corrupted earth.
Kaster moves beside me, his partial shift rippling across exposed skin. Scales darken his forearms, his neck, the ridge of his spine beneath torn clothing. His focus has narrowed to a single point—the fleeing god ahead of us.
The bond hums between us. Not communication—the mating doesn’t work that way. But awareness. I know where he is without looking. Feel the direction of his attention like heat against my skin.
We don’t need to speak. The strategy has become instinctive—he drives, I wait. He wounds, I anchor. Whatever the god throws at us, we’ve learned to counter through weeks of killing its creations.
The terrain shifts again. What was flat ground becomes a ravine, then rises into jagged formations that shouldn’t exist. The Veiled One is throwing power at the landscape itself, trying to create obstacles, barriers, anything that might slow us down long enough for it to escape.
It won’t work.
Kaster adapts mid-stride, his body fluid despite the impossible geometry. He’s hunted in worse conditions. Killed in places where physics themselves were suggestions rather than laws. A god’s desperate reshaping of reality is inconvenient, not insurmountable.
I match his pace. My body responds without the familiar resistance that once accompanied exertion—no burning in my lungs, no trembling in my limbs. The mating bond didn’t make me a predator, but it gave me endurance I never possessed. I can keep up with him now. Can run as long as necessary.
The god’s form flickers ahead of us. It cycles through shapes—humanoid, monstrous, geometric patterns—as if trying to find a configuration that might offer advantage. Nothing sticks. Nothing helps. Every face it wears is the face of a creature that has run out of options.
My magic coils tighter, ready.
Soon.
The thought arrives with clinical certainty. I sense the god’s weakness—the wound Kaster inflicted still bleeds power into the corrupted air, and the Veiled One lacks the resources to heal while fleeing. Every second of this chase costs it power it can’t afford to lose.
The terrain ahead narrows into a canyon of twisted stone. A bottleneck.
Kaster sees it the same instant I do.
He accelerates.
Dragonfire erupts from his hands as he closes the distance, arcs of flame that curve toward the god with predator precision. The Veiled One screams—not with a human voice, but with a frequency that makes my skull vibrate—and tries to redirect. Too slow. Kaster’s claws find purchase in divine flesh, ripping through layers of protection that have stood since before mortal memory.
The god falls.
I’m there before it can rise. My magic unfolds without pain, without cost, reaching into the wound Kaster created. I feel divinity beneath my power—vast and ancient and terrified. The Veiled One’s essence writhes against my anchoring, struggling toward regeneration with cosmic desperation.
No.
