Chapter 45: The Mirebeast Awakens
"Well, that is just... too much," Danny thought, stupefied.
It was the only thought his brain could form. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even panic. It was that stupid, blank feeling you get when something is so big, so wrong, so completely beyond what should exist, that your mind just gives up trying to understand it and sits down, refusing to work.
In front of him, snow was falling sideways from the force of its breathing. Each exhale moved air like a bellows, like a forge breathing, hot and stinking of wet earth despite the cold.
The creature moved.
It didn’t move like an animal. Animals have rhythm. They shift weight, they breathe, they prepare, you can read them, you can guess where they’ll go. This thing didn’t. All six of its limbs — limbs that looked like they had been carved from the mountain itself, covered in cracked stone and matted black fur that was frozen solid, bark plates grinding against each other like millstones — shifted at once. No warning. No tension. One second it was a statue of impossible size, a hill that shouldn’t be there, the next its massive body lunged forward with a speed that made no sense for something that large, that heavy, that should be slow.
The ground beneath Danny’s feet didn’t just shake. It bucked, like the road tried to throw them off, like the mountain was shrugging.
Danny’s eyes widened until they stung from cold air and blood mist and snow.
The Mirebeast raised one of its claws and swung.
It wasn’t a precise attack. It wasn’t aiming for Danny specifically. That was the most terrifying part. It was just clearing the road. Like a man swatting at flies on a table without looking, without caring which fly was which. The claw, each talon as thick as Danny’s entire arm and as long as a short sword, whistled through falling snow, carving the air, and it was aimed in his general direction, in everyone’s direction.
That was enough to kill him ten times over. You don’t need to aim a boulder if the boulder is the size of a house.
Danny didn’t think.
He moved.
There was no heroic calculation, no Echo flaring to save him like in the stories the caravan told, like when the hero shouts and light comes. His body just reacted with the raw, pathetic instinct of a rat that had survived this long by running, by being small, by not being noticed. Without wasting a single moment, without even breathing, he jumped sideways as far as his frozen legs could push him, throwing himself, not a roll, a desperate flop.
He felt the wind of it pass his cheek, so close it cut skin like a knife, like cold glass, opening a thin line that bled instantly warm in the cold.
The claw passed through the space where he had been standing a second ago. Where his head had been. Where his heart had been. Where his whole future had been standing.
BOOM!
The impact shook the ground like a cannon had been fired directly into the stone road, like the mountain itself had been struck with a hammer. The claw struck the old imperial stone road, each sharp edge tearing through surface that had survived a hundred winters, a hundred armies, a hundred years of carts. Rock exploded. Ancient stone cracked like cheap pottery, sending streams of snow and sharp stone shrapnel flying into the air in a white, deadly cloud that stung his face and arms, that peppered his clothes.
The shockwave alone was a weapon, a wall of air and dust.
Danny was thrown off balance by the force. It picked him up off his feet even though he was three meters away, even though it didn’t touch him, even though it missed. He landed hard on his shoulder and rolled across snow, his mouth filling with ice and dirt and old blood from earlier, from the fight before the monster. His ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear wind anymore, only a high whine, only his own blood thudding.
Then—
Something heavy crashed onto him with a pained grunt, not the claw, something smaller, human.
"Ugh!"
Danny’s face was pushed straight into snow, hard, face-first. Fresh, powdery snow packed into his nose and mouth, choking, cold burning his sinuses. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. All he could feel was sudden, crushing weight on his back and sour smell of unwashed clothes and sweat and fear, human fear different from beast fear.
He struggled beneath weight pressing down on him, kicking and clawing at snow, panic finally catching up to his brain, legs flailing, hands slipping.
"What the— Get off! Get off!"
He recognized clothes when he managed to twist his head, cheek scraping ice, snow in his eyelashes. Same patched, filthy prisoner garb he himself was wearing, same thin grey that marked them as cargo, as property of the caravan.
It was the thin prisoner.
The bastard had somehow, in his own blind panic to escape, tripped and fallen directly onto Danny. Of all places on this entire cursed mountain road, this wide, empty road that went on for miles with nothing, he landed on him. Like fate was a joke writer who only knew one joke, like the world was laughing at both of them.
"Damn! Why are you so heavy! You look like a stick!"
Danny screamed, voice muffled by snow, by cloth, by cold. He kicked him with all strength he could muster, boot connecting with something soft, ribs, a weak grunt. The thin prisoner rolled off and landed several feet away with a soft thump, not fighting back, not even cursing.
He didn’t even react to kick. He was completely stunned, lying on his back in snow, eyes wide and staring at nothing, mouth trembling open and closed like fish thrown onto ice, breathing in quick white puffs. Tears freezing on his cheeks before they could fall, turning to tiny ice beads. He wasn’t here anymore. His mind had left before his body could die, fled somewhere warmer.
Danny pushed himself up on shaking arms, elbows screaming. Snow covered his hair and clothes, caking his eyebrows white, making him look old. His hands bleeding again where stone cut them, old cuts opening. He wiped his face violently with sleeve, trying to clear vision, smearing mud and snow and wolf blood across cheek, making war paint.
But before he could fully recover, before he could even get knees under him, before he could stand—