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My hands slip on the hilt of my weapon, sweat and blood making it slick. My forearm burns where the claws opened it, and still I force my grip tighter.

I don’t know if we’re about to turn this, but whatever happens next will determine whether we walk off this road at all.

Then it comes for me.

Alex takes the opening.

He drives in low and hard, blade angling up beneath the creature’s jaw where the dark fur thins and the muscle flexes differently, and this time the steel bites deep. The sound is still wrong, still duller than it should be, but there’s resistance now, real resistance, and the beast recoils with a harsh, tearing hiss.

Its head jerks high. I lunge in while it’s off balance, forcing my weapon toward the softer join beneath the jaw. The impact jars my arms to the shoulder, and the world narrows to the weight of it, the shock, the knowledge that if my footing slips now, I will be dead before I can even regret it.

James hits it a breath later, shoulder and blade together, all of his weight committed, all of his doubt burned away in the act of it.

We all wrench our weapons free almost simultaneously and leap back before the creature can retaliate, boots skidding through the wet earth as we put precious distance between ourselves and its claws.

It stumbles back a single step, then another.

Blood pours dark and thick along its jaw, steaming faintly as it splashes onto the wet ground. Its eyes never leave us, bright and intent even as it withdraws. There is no fear in that stare. No pain. Only the cold patience of a predator deciding what to do next.

It begins to back away slowly, each step measured and controlled, as though retreat is merely another part of the hunt. At the edge of the mist, it pauses, its head tilting slightly, as if taking one final measure of us.

Then it turns, and I catch a clear glimpse of the length of its tail—thick, corded, and strangely twisted, as though someone has braided muscle instead of hair. A chill ripples through me as the sight of it tugs at something old and half-buried in my mind.

A story meant to keep children close to the fire and out of the trees after dark. A great green hound, big as a bear, hunting without a sound. One of the hill-folk’s beasts, they said, known by the coil of its tail and the three barks that meant death if you heard them too near.

I remember laughing then, but now I can’t remember why I ever found it funny.

The mist closes around it as though it has been waiting all along, and within moments there’s nothing there but torn earth, and the thin, trembling return of noise to the world.

Sound returns so seamlessly it’s as if the creature was never here. Water laps again at the bog’s edge. Something winged calls once in the dark and falls quiet. My own breathing crashes into my ears, loud and uncontrolled, as if I’ve been underwater far too long.

None of us move.

None of us speak.

Because standing there, blades shaking in our hands, it’s painfully clear that we didn’t drive it away.

It simply elected to leave.

I have the sick sense that if it had taken us, we would have gone out of the world there, leaving nothing behind for anyone to find.

I’m clutching my weapon hard enough that my fingers ache, but I can’t convince myself to relax yet.

James breaks first.

A shaky laugh scrapes out of him as he drags a hand down his face. “No one’s gonna believe this,” he says. “Not a single bloody soul.”

Alex huffs, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, chest rising and falling too fast. “I don’t believe it,” he pants. “And I was there.”

I swallow and finally lower my blade, my arm trembling now that the worst has passed. “You went awful quiet for a moment when it first hit you,” I tell him. “Thought you’d gone off to Tech Duinn to have a word with Donn himself. Bloody selfish of you, you bastard.”

He snorts, straightening with a grimace. “I was a heartbeat away from pissing my trousers, actually. Didn’t strike me as the proper moment to announce my almost departure.”

James barks a laugh, sharp and disbelieving. “Gods,” he says. “Imagine that bein’ how we end. Torn apart by a creature no one believes in, and Alex dead in piss-soaked trousers without a scrap o’ dignity.”

Alex shoots me a look. “I heard you yelp at one point.”

I shrug. “Shock does strange things to a man.” My sleeve is damp with my own blood at the cuff now, and I ignore it with the same stubbornness I apply to most things that hurt.