The world ended in a single, crushing point of pressure.
Not the sharp slice of a claw or tooth. This was the slow, grinding finality of stone. The gray figure's vision flickered, the ghostly glow of the fungi smearing into a nauseating swirl. The grip around his throat was absolute, a living band of iron severing him from the earth, from air, from hope.
His feet—skilled at finding silent purchase on the most treacherous of paths—pedaled uselessly in the void. His clever, five-fingered hands clawed at the arm holding him. It was like trying to scrape granite. This was his end. Not in the familiar dark of his clan's tunnels, not from a fever his poultices couldn't break, but here, under a foreign sky, snuffed out by a force of nature wearing a young face.
Then a voice cut through the roaring in his ears, sharp as a flint shard.
"Put it down!"
The pressure vanished.
He fell. The impact with the soft moss was a distant, secondary shock. His body was a constellation of pain centered on his ravaged throat. He scrambled back in a crablike, ungainly motion, pure instinct taking over. Air, ragged and burning, tore into his lungs in great, whooping gasps. He clutched his neck, already feeling the deep-throated ache that would become a spectacular bruise.
His luminous green eyes, wide with pure animal terror, were locked on the young giant.
The thing—for his reeling mind could not yet categorize it as a person—was staring at its own hand as if it had betrayed it. The terrifying, instinctual bloodlust that had erupted moments before was gone, replaced by a profound, trembling confusion. The monster had retreated, leaving a shocked creature in its wake.
The older one was at its side in an instant.
"Lad... Your eyes..." the man murmured, his voice stripped of command, layered with a shaken awe that was somehow worse than anger. "By the forgotten rivers, what was that?"
A cold, sharp understanding pierced the gray figure's panic.
The older one is afraid of the young one, too. He doesn't understand what it is.
The realization was a spark in the absolute dark. His captors were not a unified front. They were fractured by this mystery.
It was his only chance.
While their attention was shattered, while the older one was gripped by his concern and the young one by its own horrifying potential, the gray figure moved.
He uncoiled from the moss, a streak of gray, pure survival instinct. He shot for the terrace's edge, for the consuming, merciful darkness of the forest.
But the older hunter's reflexes were a honed weapon.
He didn't lunge. He pivoted, shoving the coil of rope into the young one's hands. "Stop it! Don't hurt it!"
The command was a lash, snapping the young giant from its daze.
Its head came up, the confusion in its eyes sharpening into a frightening, single-minded focus. It moved.
In three ground-eating strides, it was on him again.
This time, the hands that seized him were not a weapon of rage, but a tool of purpose. They did not strike or choke. They simply enveloped him, pinning his wiry limbs, and lifted. The strength was the same—effortless, absolute—but the intent was chillingly different. It was a cage, not an executioner's block. That controlled, dispassionate power was a colder terror. A reminder his life was a trinket they could choose to hold or discard.
He thrashed, a final, furious expenditure of desperate energy. It was hopeless. A leaf fighting a landslide.
"Hold it," the older one, Othniel, said, his voice now all grim efficiency.
He approached with the rope. His movements were methodical, precise. He bound the gray figure's hands firmly in front of him, then secured his ankles with practiced ease. The binds were tight, unyielding, but not cruel. The work of a man who understood restraint. It was a small, chilling comfort.
Defeated, the gray figure went still. His shoulders slumped. He was caught. Trussed.
Othniel crouched before him, the fungal light carving his face into a mask of wary assessment. "You. Thief. You understand my words. Speak. What are you?"
The gray figure lifted his head slowly. He let them see the fear—a cold stone in his gut—but layered it with sharp, calculating resentment. Survival now depended on the story he wove.
"I am Dazak," he hissed, letting the sibilant, sharper tones of his tongue mark him as other. "Of the Zakl clan." His gaze, burning with terror and a strange clinical curiosity, flicked to the massive youth. "What is that?"
Othniel's face remained an impassive wall. "We ask the questions. Why are you here? Why steal from us?"
Dazak's mind raced. He could not reveal the full extent of his art. His knowledge of infusions was his last, hidden chip.
"You live in a land of giants," he began, his voice deliberately softening into a storyteller's rhythm. "I come from a world of deep forests and guarded paths. The Zakl clan is all one blood. A single, tangled root. We do not take outsiders. We do not let our own leave."
He let the weight of that confinement settle in the air between them.
"I was… valued. For my knowledge of herbs. I could make a poultice to seal a wound in a day. A tea to calm a fevered mind." He spoke only of healing, of mending. The pastes that could flood limbs with fire, the infusions that could sharpen senses to a razor's edge—those secrets were his alone. "But to be valued was to be trapped. They would have had me spend my life within the same few miles of forest, perfecting my art for a people who would never let me see beyond our borders."
He spoke of his flight. The terror of slipping past the watchers. The overwhelming vastness beyond. He was a gray ghost in a land of giants.
He described seeing the Great Wall from a distance. A jagged scar of impossible stone. It wasn't a barrier of fear, but a symbol of defiant hope. A gateway.
Crossing it had stripped him to his core. The land on this side was different. Thick, wet, roaring with deafening life. And empty of Grizk trails. His rations dwindled to nothing.
"I am a Herbalist," he admitted, letting genuine shame into his tone. "Not a hunter. I know how to set a snare for small, fast things. I do not know the rhythm of this forest. I was starving. My cleverness was a useless weight in an empty belly."
He described watching them. The first sight had frozen him. They were colossal, moving with a heavy, grounded power. Their skin, a dull, sun-touched color, marked them as utterly alien.
He had watched, hidden and trembling, as they built their terrace. He saw the young one move, a density to it that seemed to bend the space around it.
When the wind carried the scent of their meat, it was a sharp, physical pain in his gut. A biological imperative. The theft was an act of a dying animal. The snares were a desperate mind trying to claim a tiny territory in a world too big and too hungry.
He fell silent.
Othniel processed this, his hunter's eyes seeing a map—a crossed Wall, a displaced creature, a risk.
The young one watched with a deep, unsettling thoughtfulness. It looked at Dazak not as a monster, but as something complex. Another set apart.
Othniel's voice was a low rumble betraying no trust. "You have given us a story. But trust is not bought with words."
Dazak raised his bound hands, sharpness returning. "Then let me earn it. My knowledge of plants is deeper than yours. I can find what you cannot see. I can tell you what will heal and what will kill." He met Othniel's gaze. "A partnership is better than a prisoner. This is foolishness. It benefits no one."
Othniel stared for a long time. The forest's night chorus swelled in the silence.
Finally, he glanced at the young one. A silent conversation passed between them—a weighing of risks, of fear against potential.
It ended with a single, almost imperceptible nod from the youth.
"Tomorrow," Othniel said, standing. "We decide your fate with the sun. For tonight, you remain as you are."
He turned away, a deliberate distance.
The young one followed, casting one last unreadable look before settling against the stone, its gaze on the dark trees.
Dazak was left alone. The sharp terror had passed, but he was still bound and vulnerable.
He looked at the two giants, silhouetted against the pulsating light. Cautious. Untrusting.
And he was cautious too.
He had shared his story, but he had kept his soul—his art, his true power—locked away.
He was a Herbalist of the Zakl.
And for a maker of potions, being alive was the first, most crucial ingredient. The rest was just a matter of finding the right recipe.