4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
The Breach
One of the hunters followed prey through the light. What waited on the other side was wrong in every way that mattered. But the hunter was still a hunter. And the prey was bleeding.
The prey fled toward the light.
The hunter had cornered her near the edge of the settlement—a female, smaller than the others, her fear-scent sharp in the darkness. The pack's formation had broken when the Chewbathian's arrows found their marks, but this one had separated from the group. Isolated prey. The simplest kind.
She ran for the light that opened in the air. The hunter had seen these lights before, had watched prey emerge from them, had learned that they meant nothing—surfaces that shimmered and then were gone. But this one held. The female passed through it and vanished.
The hunter followed.
The crossing was instantaneous and absolute. One stride in darkness, the next in somewhere else entirely. The hunter's paws struck ground that felt wrong—harder, colder, carrying vibrations that spoke of vast structures nearby. The air tasted wrong. Too many scents layered over each other, chemical and animal and something burning in the distance. The darkness itself was wrong. Not the pure black of a Clivilius night but a grey half-light that pressed against the hunter's eyes like dull pain.
The prey was there. Scrambling backward across the strange ground, blood already running from where the hunter's claws had found her arm. The fear-scent was overwhelming now, mixed with the copper-smell of the wound. The hunter's muscles gathered for the killing strike.
Then the light closed.
The hunter felt it more than saw it—the absence of the opening that had been there a moment before. The way back was gone. The wrongness of this place pressed in from every direction. The grey light was brightening. Soon it would be unbearable.
The prey was still bleeding. Still afraid. But she had found something—a stance, a weapon, a readiness that hadn't been there moments before. And the light was growing stronger. The hunter's eyes burned. Tears streamed down its muzzle, blurring the prey into a shape that was harder and harder to track.
The hunter retreated.
Not fled. Hunters did not flee. But the light was agony now, and the prey had stopped running, and somewhere in this wrong-smelling world there would be darkness. There would be shelter. There would be other prey—slower, softer, with no Chewbathian to protect them.
The hunter found shadow beneath a structure and waited for the burning to stop.
The prey would keep. They always did.
