The sand tasted of old bones and desperation.
Meera's lungs burned with each ragged breath, her feet bleeding through the torn leather wrappings that had once been boots. Behind her, the hunters' howls split the pre-dawn darkness—not the hunting cries of predators seeking food, but something far worse. The sound of men who had stopped seeing her as human.
*Don't think. Just run.*
But thought came anyway, fragmenting like glass under hammer blows. Kiran's face. His smile when he'd kissed her three nights ago—soft, promising forever. His voice when he'd whispered her location to Varak's men—cold, negotiating his passage out of Red Hollow like she was cattle to trade.
A stone caught her ankle. She stumbled, caught herself on a thorn bush. The spines drove into her palm, but she didn't pull away. The pain was clean. Simple. Not like the jagged hole where her heart used to be.
*Father died protecting me. I won't waste that.*
She forced her legs to move.
The Scorched Marches spread before her like a corpse—endless, sun-bleached, indifferent. Dawn bled red across the horizon, turning the dust storms on the distant plains into walls of amber fury. Beautiful and lethal. Like Kiran's eyes when he'd looked at her for the last time, love and betrayal occupying the same expression.
Her mother's bone-bead necklace bounced against her collarbone with each step. Eighteen beads. Eighteen years her mother had lived before the fever took her. Meera was twenty-four now. Six years past her mother's expiration. She wondered, with the peculiar clarity of exhaustion, if she'd make it to twenty-five.
"There! By the thornwood!"
The voice was close. Too close.
Meera's body reacted before her mind could catch up—diving left, rolling through scrub that tore at her arms, coming up running. Some animal part of her brain had taken over, the part that didn't care about heartbreak or betrayal or the future. The part that only knew: *survive this breath, then the next, then the next*.
She'd been running for two days.
Or was it three?
Time had become elastic, stretching and compressing. She remembered the coup—Varak's men flooding into her father's tent, the wet sound of blades finding flesh. She remembered Kiran pulling her aside, his hand gentle on her wrist even as he pushed her toward the killers. "I'm sorry," he'd whispered. "But I can't die for your father's war."
*It wasn't a war. It was survival.*
But Kiran had never understood that. He'd thought the Red Hollow Collective was politics, territory, power. He'd never grasped that for Meera's father, it had been about something far simpler: building a place where humans and beastmen didn't kill each other on sight.
Varak understood power, though. And Varak's hunters understood what happened to the daughters of dead leaders.
Meera's foot hit something soft. She glanced down—a dead sun-basilisk, half-buried in sand, its scales already bleaching white. Three days dead, maybe four. The scavengers hadn't touched it. That meant predator territory. Something big enough that even the jackals stayed away.
*Good. Let them follow me there.*
She ran toward the basilisk.
The land changed as the sun crested the horizon—scrubland giving way to broken stone, then the foothills of what the old maps called the Stone Fangs. Mountains sharp as broken teeth, perpetually crowned with snow that should be impossible in this heat. The wind shifted, bringing the smell of ice and ancient rock.
And something else.
Musk. Fur. The particular scent of bodies that weren't quite human or quite beast.
Beastmen.
Meera's first instinct was to veer away. Every human child was taught: *beastmen are dangerous, unpredictable, other*. Her father had taught her differently, but old fears ran deeper than new lessons.
Then she heard the hunters behind her, closer now. Laughing.
One of them—Dren, who used to trade jokes with her at the communal fires—called out, "Come on, Meera! We'll make it quick if you stop!"
They wouldn't. She knew what happened to women who fell into the hands of men with nothing left to lose. She'd seen it during the clan raids her father tried to prevent.
The beastman scent grew stronger.
Meera made a choice.
She ran toward it.
---
The cave mouth appeared suddenly—a slash of shadow against gray stone, half-hidden by thornbush and rockfall. Meera didn't slow down. She plunged into darkness, her sun-blind eyes seeing nothing, hands outstretched, feet trusting to instinct.
She hit something warm. Solid. Alive.
A growl rumbled through the darkness, so deep she felt it in her bones.
Her eyes adjusted. Slowly, shapes resolved out of shadow.
Eight beastmen. No—nine. Huddled around the burnt-out remains of a fire pit, their faces turning toward her with expressions ranging from shock to hostility to something that might have been recognition. Not of her personally, but of what she represented: trouble.
The one she'd stumbled into stood slowly. Tall—taller than any human, corded with lean muscle, dark gray fur rippling across forearms and spine. Amber eyes that caught the dim light like a cat's. When he spoke, his voice was rough with disuse.
"You brought hunters to our den, human."
Not a question. An accusation.
Outside, the sound of boots on stone. Dren's voice, breathless: "She went in there! Filthy beast-fuckers are hiding her!"
Meera opened her mouth. Closed it. What could she possibly say? *Please help me*? Why would they? She was nothing to them. Less than nothing—a problem wrapped in bleeding feet and desperate eyes.
But then she noticed something.
These weren't proud beastmen from established clans. Their clothes were mismatched, scavenged. Their bodies bore scars not just from hunts, but from fights—the kind that came from being cast out, unwanted. One had a shattered horn. Another, a missing eye. A third sat apart from the group, serpentine scales catching the light, completely alone even in company.
Outcasts. All of them.
Just like her.
Something shifted in Meera's chest. Not hope—she'd forgotten what that felt like. But recognition.
She met the amber-eyed male's gaze and spoke, her voice hoarse from screaming and sand and two days without water.
"I didn't bring them here for you. I brought them here for *me*. Because I'd rather die by your teeth than let them have what they want."
Silence.
The male tilted his head, studying her. Behind him, the others shifted—some leaning forward, others back. A stocky figure with stone-gray skin began to rise, then stopped, waiting.
Outside, Dren called out again. "Last chance, beast-filth! Give us the human bitch and we'll leave you alone!"
The amber-eyed male's lips pulled back from pronounced canines. Not quite a smile. Not quite a snarl.
"They're lying," he said. "The moment we give you up, they'll come in anyway. Humans always do." His eyes narrowed. "What makes you different?"
Meera thought about her father. About the Red Hollow Collective—the fragile peace he'd built between species, the council fires where both human and beastman voices held weight. About Kiran's betrayal proving what everyone had always whispered: *You can't trust the other. Not really.*
She thought about the last thing her father said to her, breath wet with blood: *"Find the ones the world threw away. They'll understand."*
"I'm not different," Meera said. "I'm just as broken as you. And that means I have nothing left to lose by telling you the truth: if you help me, I'll owe you. If you don't, you'll have human hunters in your cave either way. At least if I'm alive, I can fight."
The male studied her for a long moment. Then, impossibly, he laughed—a short, bitter sound.
"You have stones," he said. "Human bones, maybe. But stones." He turned to the others. "What say you? Do we throw her out and hope they leave? Or do we add to our collection of broken things?"
A female with feathers woven into her hair spoke from the shadows. "The hunters will come in regardless. At least she's honest about being trouble."
The stone-skinned one rumbled, "I didn't flee my hold to hide from human scavengers."
The serpentine figure said nothing, but their vertical-slit pupils fixed on Meera with unsettling intensity, as though tasting something in the air.
The amber-eyed male nodded slowly. Then he looked back at Meera, and something in his expression shifted. Not kindness—nothing so simple. But a kind of grim solidarity.
"You stay behind us," he said. "You don't fight unless they break through. And if we survive this—" He bared his teeth fully now. "—you'll owe more than you can pay."
"I know," Meera said.
He turned away, addressing the cave. "Positions. These humans want blood. Let's see whose spills first."
As the beastmen moved with surprising coordination—some grabbing crude weapons, others taking defensive stances near the cave mouth—Meera sank down against the cold stone wall, her legs finally giving out.
Her hands were shaking. She couldn't stop them.
She'd run for three days. She'd watched her father die. She'd felt Kiran's love curdle into transaction. She'd stumbled into a cave of outcasts who had every reason to feed her to the hunters.
And now they were about to fight for her.
*Why?*
The amber-eyed male caught her looking. For a heartbeat, their eyes met across the dim cave. His scent hit her then—something she'd been too panicked to notice before. Smoke. Wild earth. Something that made her hindbrain whisper: *safe*.
Which was absurd. He was a beastman. A stranger. A predator.
But as Dren's voice echoed into the cave, promising violence and worse, Meera found herself breathing in that scent like salvation.
She didn't understand it.
She didn't have time to.
Outside, the hunters charged.
---
**To be continued...**