Tenebroum

Chapter 43: Bait

Tsson’vek lay there on the rocky overhang above the creature’s nest for almost two days without moving a muscle. Covered in the dried mud, he was invisible to the eyes and the nose of even a cautious hunter. However, the drake that had become his obsession for the last few months was hardly that. It was a dumb beast but an impossibly strong one. It would disappear for days at a time only to return with an entire elk or goat in one of its claws. Every attempt to hunt it until now using the tried and tested pack-hunting tactics of the tribe had ended in the deaths of several of his fellow lizardmen.

This time he would not fail, though. Even if the thing slew him, he would still win. He had already won, he thought. He had helped to bring down the wyvern, and he had survived the manticore even though he’d been poisoned by both of them in turn. Neither had forced him to linger as long at death’s door as the ogre’s blow had, of course, but they had gotten him what he truly desired: a mate. So, even if the drake slew him, his hatchlings would be raised in the shadow of a father worth remembering.

The ogre’s blow had shattered his bones, and it was only thanks to the darkness that now flowed through him that he’d survived at all. All of them hadn’t healed right, including his skull, which gave him the crooked gaze that many in his tribe found unsettling. He didn’t care, though. They had no idea how poisoned his blood had become after surviving not one but two fatal poisonings. The manticore’s stinger had made him vomit blood, and the wyvern’s acid had made his blood burn in his veins for a day and a night, but he was stronger for it.

He was stronger for all of it. The tribe had better hunters and wiser leaders, but there was no one stronger than him anymore, and that was why he alone would slay the drake where three separate hunting packs had failed. Only he had the strength to do what needed to be done.

That victory would, of course, only come with the perfect amount of surprise, so Tsson’vek lay there and waited for the thing to feed and sleep before he sprang his trap. When night fell, and the thing had been asleep for over an hour, he slowly rose to his feet. He was painfully aware of every small sound he caused, from the way the mud that coated him broke as he moved to the way the butt of his spear scraped against the rock he had waited upon for so long.

The moon was only a sliver, and his prey was asleep just beneath him. No one in his tribe would say this was an honorable hunt, but Tsson’vek did not care. He would trade the secret shame for the benefit that the kill would bring to the tribe. With this ebon drake finally dead, the whole valley would be theirs, and the tribe would grow. The glory he would get would only be a side effect to salve his wounded honor. There was simply no other way.

He examined the razor-tipped spear of obsidian in the starlight. It was a point that he’d carved just for this moment. It was too fragile to penetrate the leathery scales of his quarry, but it would be perfect for a single vicious strike through the eye and into the brain. The hunter looked down at the sleeping form of the drake and watched as its chest rose and fell while it slept secure in the idea that no threat could harm it.

Tsson’vek smiled toothily at the idea that he was about to take that comfort away from it forever as he leapt soundlessly down towards the giant lizard. The fall was less than twenty feet, but that was plenty of time to build speed as he fell silently toward the sleeping creature.

It wasn’t asleep, though. No sooner had he made the jump than it stirred. In that instant, the hunter had all the time in the world to try to puzzle out whether he had done something to wake it or if it had been the one laying a trap for him instead. He would never know because even as he fell, the head rose upward on its sinuous neck to meet him while he was helpless in midair.

Tyson’vek lashed out twice with the spear in the blink of an eye, but both of them missed the eye, and the second blow shattered the spearhead on the thick bone of the creature’s brow as it snapped at him. In a moment of heart-stopping panic, he pushed against the beast’s jaws with his feet and kicked free of the bite that would have cut him in half.

Using the momentum, he whirled around and attempted to smash the creature’s near eye with the reach of his tail. Such a blow likely wouldn’t be enough to take its eye from it, but it would give it a blindside long enough for him to use that advantage to escape.

The blow never landed, though. The drake lashed out with a second quick snap before Tsson’vek reached the ground, and its teeth firmly embedded in his tail, removing most of it in the blink of an eye. It was a painful shock, but the pain ended almost immediately and was replaced by the shame that it had happened and the thrill of battle. He was wounded, and his tail would take many months to regrow. He was not dead, though, and he would not die tonight. If he survived, the wound where his tail used to be would stop bleeding.

All he had to do was escape.

The hunter ran for his life, though not as fast as he would have if he’d still been able to use his tail for balance, but even so, the danger didn’t come now. The danger would arrive in perhaps half a minute. Right now, the drake was taking to the sky because it was as slow as it was powerful on land, but in the air, it was a graceful predator, and as soon as it had some speed, he was done for.

Tsson’vek looked longingly to the surface of the lake. That would be the perfect place to hide and wait out the ebon drake’s wrath, but the ground between here and there was entirely open, and it was much too far away. That might be where the predator was expecting him to go. As he scrambled down the slope, he veered towards a little crag between boulders he’d scouted while the giant lizard was off hunting. He hadn’t planned for his hunt to go quite so poorly, but he’d been on more than enough failed hunts and knew well enough to plan for every situation.

The gap was just large enough for him to squeeze into, and the level of claustrophobia was terrifying, but figuring out how to get back out was a problem for later. The only problem he had right now was staying alive until then.

Seconds after he had finished burying himself alive in the narrow crawlspace, the drake landed, shrieking in rage as it found its prey out of reach beneath the stone. Its claws struck the stone as it attempted to get to him, but as strong as it was, its teeth were no match for the granite surrounding him. The thing raged at him for almost half an hour before it stopped. Tsson’vek spent every minute of that time worried that while it might not reach him, it might succeed in shifting the stone enough to crush him or, worse, bury him alive.

The hunt ended as it started, only this time, the drake waited outside the den of the creature that defied it rather than the hunter waiting above the nest of the drake. For a day and a night, they stayed like that, and finally, when Tsson’vek could take it no more, he slithered out, half expecting to be eaten. That wasn’t what happened at all, though.

Instead, he found the cooling corpse of the drake coiled just outside the crevice. The creature was stone dead, and though he didn’t quite understand how only one possibility came to mind.

It didn’t bother the Lich that it would have to wait until the following sunset to dispatch its ferryman along with the juggernaut to drag the corpse of the drake to the water’s edge and load. It had waited long enough for someone to finally end this creature. That it had been done so cleanly and with so little damage by the poison in the lizard man’s tail was cause for celebration. Without physical damage, its flesh crafters could do whatever they pleased to the beast.

That was the whole reason that it had saved that hunter’s life over and over again: to let the poison in his system build up to a genuinely toxic level that even a dragon might not be able to tolerate. Not that there were any dragons in the Wodenspine Mountains, sadly. He would be the perfect bait for the drake or even a giant if one of them ever came down from the peaks.

The Lich would have been more than happy for the creature to devour his hunter whole. It had wanted it to ensure that the drake received a high enough dose of poisoned meat, and it still puzzled the Lich that the hunter managed to survive. It was no matter, though. The tribe had another animal for their totem, and it had another corpse to fabricate a new nightmare from.

The real shame was that it hadn’t managed to capture or locate an air spirit to power such an abomination. They were even more elusive than river spirits because their domain spanned the whole sky. It would have to find a way to bait them in time, but it still wasn’t exactly sure what would attract them. The Lich made a mental note to locate and kill mages that might better understand the nature of the storm and the wind. Once, long ago, Albrecht had been a master of such things, but those parts of his mind had long since rotted away as the Lich focused on other, more important things like necromancy.

For now, it didn’t matter because once it added the wings of the wyvern and choice bits of the manticore to the drake, it would create a hunter of its own and then send it out in search of prey of its own. The whole world still belonged to the Lich; it was just nibbling at it slowly, devouring the choicest bits instead of trying to gorge itself on things that didn’t matter.

It was still annoyed that it had to show off its Leviathan so publicly just to get rid of the nuisance trying to infiltrate the cult of the drowned woman. In the short term, it was just an exercise in understanding how easy it was to taint the human spirit. Still, on a longer time horizon, the cult was a valuable form of camouflage and control.

It had succeeded in taking over a minor religion and subverting it to its own ends. It thought that boded well for the future as it sat there dreaming of its inevitable ascent to godhood. There were few enough forces in the region that could stop it, and none of them even suspected that it continued to exist.