Words were few on the march to the remains of Teb’s farm. Teb’s daughter, Lalimen, clenched her teeth and fought back tears at the sight of her devastated home, but it only made her more determined.

  Kule’s eyes lingered on the burnt-out husk of the house.

  “She’s joined her Ancestors,” Dena told him quietly, and glanced up. “She’ll keep watching out for us.”

  “Then she’ll watch me kill that thing,” he said through gritted teeth.

  They managed to find a wagon untouched by the claws of the Anihazi, and loaded it up with the arrows and spears they’d brought from the cave. Four of the burly farmhands took up positions at the front without question and began pulling it on the long journey back to the village.

  Firon took the time to speak to each of them, offering words of support, and checking on existing injuries. He reminded Syl that being a doctor was about more than just treating the body; the spirit was also important.

  Syl let him take the lead, and the attention of the farm hands, and fell back to the rear of the procession. Rogar and Dena instinctively lagged back with her and surveyed the treeline while Syl’s senses reached out further.

  A sudden pressure in her head made her stumble and she would’ve fallen if not for her friend’s quick support.

  “Are you okay?” Dena asked quietly while Rogar kept an eye on the people ahead.

  “Fine,” Syl said, finding her feet. “I just wasn’t expecting… that…”

  “Expecting what?” Rogar asked. He didn’t let go of her arm until he was sure she wouldn’t stumble again.

  Syl’s neck craned back to look at the mountain peaks behind her. “I can feel the storm building on the other side of the mountains. It’s so big…”

  “You can feel the storm?” Dena asked, eyes wide.

  Syl’s eyes went back to the Cloud Stone. “Well, the clouds at least. Bloated and heavy with water, pushed up against the stone by the swirling winds. Just waiting for that one gust that will push them up and over, and…”

  “And then we get wet. Really wet,” Rogar sighed. “Can you tell how long we have?”

  “Let me see,” she said to nobody in particular, and let her senses mingle with the clouds. “Tomorrow at the latest,” she said, trying to predict how the clouds would move with the Stone’s guidance. Her eyes narrowed when she felt something else, something sinister, beyond the storm clouds. “The rain might be the least of our worries,” she said in understanding.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Anihazi. Dozens of them,” Syl said. They were so far away she could barely even touch them with her senses. The malice was unmistakable though.

  “Dozens?” Rogar asked, his head shaking. “How can we fight that many? Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. No,” Syl answered the questions in order.

  “Huh?” Dena asked.

  “Yes, dozens of Anihazi,” Syl clarified. “I don’t know how we can fight them. And, probably not tomorrow. I don’t think it’s that easy for them to get over the mountains. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we see them all the time? No, there has to be… oh… yes that makes sense,” Syl’s sentence broke as she received information from the Cloud Stone.

  “What makes sense?” Rogar prompted.

  “What?” Syl asked, distracted as she processed the information. “Oh, something about air currents. Clouds normally can’t cross the peaks, that’s why our ancestors came to this valley. It was the one place the Anihazi couldn’t easily follow.

  “Even during the rainy season, only a few clouds actually make it over. A few compared to how many circle the valley,” she elaborated. She knew what the other two were thinking. ‘A few?’ They got non-stop rain for a month! “The Anihazi don’t have it any easier. It takes the perfect alignment of conditions for one of them to be able to make it over.”

  “So we might not have to fight them?” Dena asked, a flicker of hope in her voice.

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  “I hope not,” Syl agreed with a small smile. “And even if they do make it over, we can hide instead of fight.”

  “Hide?” Rogar asked, then understanding hit him like a punch to the nose. “The covered paths. The villages built under the trees.”

  “We’ve been hiding from them our entire lives,” Syl confirmed. “We just didn’t know why we were doing it. It was all buried in tradition.”

  “So even if one did make it over, it couldn’t find us?” Dena asked. “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. The one… that killed Leeze,” she said quietly. “It found us. And it came over the mountains before the rainy season. How’d it do that?”

  Syl didn’t answer immediately, instead turning her attention to the Cloud Stone.

  “Is it talking to you?” Rogar asked quietly, his eyes on the blue in the palm of Syl’s hand.

  “Not exactly,” Syl said distractedly as she ‘listened.’ “When I think something, or when you ask a question, it’s like the answer pops into my head. At first, the Stone just dumped all the information it had into my brain, but I couldn’t sift through it fast enough. Now it’s giving me the information a bit at a time.”

  “It’s learning? It’s alive?”

  Syl put her hand to her forehead, then shook her head to stop the stream of information. “That’s… too complicated a question to answer right now.

  “No, not right now,” she said more forcefully to the Stone in her hand. The history of its creation was like a massive wave threatening to overwhelm her. “Focus on the Anihazi,” she commanded it. The deluge finally stopped and Syl turned her attention back to the worried looks of her two friends.

  “I’m fine,” she told them. “Really. Where was I? Right… this Anihazi.”

  Syl looked at the group walking ahead of her and considered whether or not she should share the information with everybody. No, it’ll just slow us down now. Later.

  “I said before that it takes a perfect set of conditions for one to be able to make it over the mountains,” she quietly told the two closest to her. Somebody else needed to know in case something happened to her and telling them wouldn’t slow the procession. “Those conditions can happen any time of year, but the clouds outside the valley aren’t normally high enough in the sky for it to matter.

  “The Anihazi, however, they can get high enough at any time during the year. They just don’t usually try unless it’s our rainy season.”

  “Why not?”

  “They feed off the clouds,” Syl said, learning as she spoke, the Stone filling in the pieces. “It’s even more difficult to get out of the valley than it is to get in. Without the clouds, the Anihazi starve and die. Oh, that’s why this panther looked smaller.

  “The power it used to breathe lightning, or the energy discharged when we hit it with the arrows, that would usually be replenished by feeding off the clouds. Without the clouds, the Anihazi is actually eating itself to stay alive.”

  “So even if we don’t track it down, it’ll die on its own?” Dena asked.

  Syl looked back at the mountains and the building pressure. “No,” she shook her head. “The storm will make it over before it dies. It’ll back up to full strength in no time. And now that it knows where the village is…” she didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “So what? We just have to kill it before it starts to rain,” Kule said, his pace slowed so the others caught up to him. “Works for me.”

  “Can you track it Syl? Can we hunt it down in time?” Rogar asked.

  Syl reached out with her senses, but the pressure of the clouds beyond the mountains had her pulling back in. “No,” she said. “It’s too much. All I can feel is the building storm.”

  “Find a way,” Kule said simply, his head tilting until their eyes met. “You owe it to Leeze. Find a way.” He held her eyes for a long second, then broke contact and picked up his pace again.

  Rogar watched Kule rejoin the larger group ahead, then turned his attention to Syl. “Can you? Can you find a way to track it down? Not for Leeze, and not because you ‘owe her,’” he elaborated. “But because we can’t afford for this thing to be hunting us at full strength again. We need to press our advantage.”

  Syl looked at Kule’s bandaged hand wrapped around the shaft of the Sho-Val. At the crimson where the cracked skin bled through, and she wasn’t sure which friend she missed more; Leeze or the ever-more-distant Kule.

  That’s not fair, she shook her head. Kule will be fine. We all will.

  “I’ll find a way,” she said, determined to get at least one of her friends back. “Just catch me if I stumble.”

  “As many times as I need to,” Rogar said without hesitation.

  “So, why does it hate us so much?” Dena asked after giving Syl a conspiratorial wink and silently nodding at Rogar.

  Syl’s mind flashed to the wedding proposal she’d overheard between their two fathers—the proposal that didn’t seem quite so repulsive at the moment—before dismissing it and focusing on the question. The answer she got wasn’t as simple as she might have hoped.

  “Something about a war,” she said, sifting through the images and information filling her mind. “And… they were our… slaves,” she whispered in horror.

  “Slaves? What?” Rogar and Dena both asked, just as surprised as Syl was.

  “Yes, I…” she couldn’t finish as she felt her consciousness fading under the unfiltered barrage of data.

  “Got you,” Rogar said, and caught Syl before she fell.

  “You okay?” Dena asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. Thanks, again, Rogar. I’m good now,” she told him. “The Stone gave me too much all at once again.”

  “Maybe you should wait until after we’ve dealt with all this,” Rogar suggested. “Whatever happened before our ancestors came to the valley isn’t going to change what we have to do to protect ourselves now.”

  “Probably,” Syl admitted. “I’ll think about it again after everybody is safe.”

  That’s what she told her friends, but she couldn’t help but wonder about the shared past between the Anihazi and her people. How had they enslaved them? More importantly, why? And how did they end up hiding in the valley?

  She knew the answers were literally in the palm of her hand, but she kept the mental barrier up between herself and the Stone. Those answers would have to wait until the Anihazi was dead. No matter what her people had done to the Anihazi in the past, that didn’t mean she was going to let it go around killing her friends.

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