And if she keeps looking—keepsseeing—she might learn who I am.
What I’ve done.
And if that happens… I’ll have to decide if I’m the monster I keep pretending to be.
Or something worse.
I return to my main lair, for I have many, and put my hands to work. Sometimes physical labor takes the mind off things. And, sometimes not.
The blade doesn’t need sharpening. It could split bone clean from tendon just fine the way it is. But I run the whetstone along its edge anyway, slow and steady, each stroke a meditation. A ritual I don’t remember choosing. Just one I repeat, night after night, like breath.
The fire pit beside me pops softly, throwing orange shadows up against the cavern walls. The scent of seared sting tail still hangs in the air, fatty and acrid, clinging to the pelts strung above. Some still drip, the blood congealing in lazy droplets onto the already stained floor.
It’s quiet here.
The kind of quiet that makes your ears ache.
I don’t mind. Noise asks questions. Silence lets me pretend the answers don’t exist.
My hand flexes on the hilt. The blade hums faintly—Odex steel remembers its forge. I remember the war. The sound of it. The way this blade used to sing for me in battle. Now it just growls. Like it’s hungry for a purpose I won’t give it.
I set it down with a sigh and stretch, vertebrae clicking in protest. Around me, the lair breathes with the same rhythm I do. The pelts shift gently in the breeze that filters in from the high cracks. Outside, I hear the wind rise—sharp, poisonous, carryingwith it the sting of ash and minerals that would choke human lungs in under a minute.
They have no idea how close they are to death.
I step toward the entryway, ducking slightly under the jagged overhang, and let the moons bathe me in cold silver. There are two tonight, low in the sky, caught in the haze but glowing enough to give shape to the world. The air carries that electric tension again. Like the planet itself is coiling for something.
It’s too warm. Too quiet.
Sting tails are moving.
My gaze drops toward the ravine, and I trace the natural fissures that cut through Purgonis like claw marks. That camp—they don’t even realize it, but they pitched their little prefabs barely three hundred paces from a migration tunnel.
One tremor. One wrong scent. One mistake and the ground could open up and birth teeth.
They’ll die screaming. The ones who get to scream, anyway.
I should let them.
They came here. Ignored the warnings. Think their tech will save them. That their fusion weapons and smug little perimeter drones mean anything to this planet.
They chose this.
My breath curls out in a soft snarl. I can almost taste the sulfur shift beneath the rock.
And yet…
Her face rises unbidden again. That tilt of her chin. That strange calm. Not foolish—something else. Some kind of stubborn awe that cuts through the cynicism all her species seems to marinate in.
I grit my teeth. I shouldn’t be thinking about her. Not now. Not ever. The pull behind my ribs, it tightens again—like muscle memory gone haywire. Like I’ve been here before, in another life I promised I’d forget.
Before the war. Before the shame.
I take a deep breath, chest expanding against the cold. The scent of the storm coming in is familiar—metallic, charged. The kind that fries instruments and makes the sky dance. They’ll hole up in their base, safe behind their generators. Think they’re protected.
They’re not.
The sting tails don’t care about lightning. They move by vibration and heat. And humans radiate both like dying stars.
