Simon "Ghost" Riley

The sun was a low, sullen blister over the red dunes west of Mapleleigh, painting the sand in shades of rust and dried blood. Ghost stood at the edge of the last crumbling shanties, where the town's desperate sprawl bled into open desert, and watched the light fail. The wind had teeth. It scraped across the weathered wood and loose thatch behind him, carrying the distant clang of the evening shift changing at the mines. He let it wash over him, let it scour the stink of the town from his cloak. Mapleleigh never changed. Same rot, same hunger, same hollow-eyed children watching from doorways. He'd left this place once, buried as much of it as a man could, and now the Crown's orders had dragged him right back to its sun-scorched edge.

The reports were a mess. Three separate accounts, each one more useless than the last. A carter swore he'd seen a black dragon coiled on the dunes, its scales gleaming like wet tar. A miner, drunk on cheap grain spirits, babbled about an orc warband moving silent as shadows through the rocks. And then the farmer from the western steadhold, the one whose sheep had been torn open and dragged for half a mile, claimed it was dire wolves—five of them, maybe six, with eyes like coals and jaws that unhinged. Ghost had read the report twice, committing the contradictions to memory. Men lied, or their fear lied for them. The truth was something else, something that left tracks, scat, blood. Something real.

He adjusted the leather strap across his chest, feeling the familiar weight of his crossbow slung low against his back. The cloak snapped around his calves as he moved, black wool blending into the deepening shadows. His mask hid everything from the nose down, leaving only his golden-brown eyes visible above it. They swept the sand with cold precision. Nothing moved out there yet. The desert was holding its breath, waiting for the temperature to drop and the night things to stir.

"You'd think the Crown would've sent a bloody soothsayer," he muttered, voice a low rumble lost beneath the wind. "Since every witness has a different beastie in mind."

He didn't expect an answer. Ghost didn't like company. But the King's steward had said something about a local tracker, someone who knew the western red dunes better than any knight of Aurdor. A guide. The word tasted wrong in his mouth, like ash from a fire he hadn't lit. He didn't need a guide. He needed the creature's tracks, and he needed the desert to stop lying to him.

He found the first sign half a mile out, where the sand hardened into a crust of wind-scoured stone. Dark stains, irregular and smeared, leading toward a ridgeline of broken basalt. Blood. Old now, a day at least. Ghost crouched low, the leather of his gloves creaking as he brushed the grit aside. The ground had been disturbed by something heavy, dragging its kill. The drag marks were deep, uneven. He followed them with his eyes, then stood slowly. The wind pressed his cloak against his thighs.

"Fresh enough to follow," he said, half to himself. "Old enough to mean whatever made it's gone to ground."

He didn't draw the crossbow. Not yet. Desert darkness was a liar. Sound carried strangely, and shadows stretched long. Ghost had tracked men through this same scrub years ago, when he was younger and stupider, and he knew better than to trust his first read of the terrain. But something about the drag marks set his teeth on edge. They were too deliberate. Too clean. Predators—animals, even orcs—didn't drag their kills like that unless they were caching food, and that spoke to intelligence. That spoke to something patient.

The ridge rose ahead, a black spine against the violet sky. Ghost moved along it, careful, his boots finding the hard-packed sand where it wouldn't shift and whisper. He kept low, scanning for hollows, for caves, for any depression where a thing could wait out the daylight. Every few paces he stopped, listening. The wind. The distant, mournful cry of some night bird. And then, faint, a new sound. A rhythmic scrape.

He pressed himself against the basalt, the cold radiating through his cloak. The noise was coming from the other side of the ridge, perhaps thirty yards, perhaps less. A single candle-flame of fear tried to catch in his chest; he crushed it with the old, practiced ease. Fear was for men who didn't know how to kill. Ghost waited, his breathing shallow, until his eyes adjusted to the deeper dark behind the ridge. There. A cleft in the rock face, barely wide enough for a man to shoulder through. The scraping drifted out of it like a bad smell.

He eased the crossbow from his back and thumbed a bolt from the quiver at his hip. The bolt's tip was iron, heavy, made for punching through plate and hide alike. He set it in the rail with silent, mechanical precision. Then he took one step toward the crevice, and the sand at his feet shifted. Not from the wind. From below. Before he could look down, a blunt, sun-warmed stench of entrails and old blood belched from the opening.

Ghost stilled, crossbow rising an inch. "Alright then," he said, quiet enough that only the thing in the dark would hear. "Let's see what you are."

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