The first dead sheep told Kael nothing. The second one told him everything, and he wished, almost immediately, that it hadn't.
"Same as the others," said Corren, one of Fen's four registered hunters, a broad quiet man who'd volunteered to walk the east fields with them once word got around that the waystation keeper had put her faith in the strange boy from Ashvale. He crouched by the carcass, careful not to touch it. "Throat opened clean, nothing eaten. Whatever's doing this isn't hungry. It's practicing."
He's more right than he knows, Starlight murmured, and something in its tone made Kael's stomach go tight. Reach out. Carefully. Tell me what you feel.
Kael closed his eyes the way he'd learned to, letting the hedgerow's ordinary noise — birds, wind, the distant lowing of cattle still alive in the next field over — fall away until only the deeper current beneath it remained. And there, faint but unmistakable, threaded through the brush not fifty yards off, was a presence that made every instinct he'd built over the last month scream a warning he didn't fully understand.
It was small. Smaller than the Ridgeback by half. And it was watching — not moving, not hunting, simply holding still and observing the three of them the way a hunter might study prey it hadn't decided yet whether to bother killing.
"It's here," Kael breathed. "Close. In the hedge line, maybe forty yards, due east. And it knows we're looking for it."
Bren's hand went to his sword hilt without seeming to think about it. Corren went very still. "How do you know it knows?"
"Because it hasn't moved since I started sensing it," Kael said, "and everything else out here that isn't dead has run from us on instinct. This isn't running." He opened his eyes, and found he couldn't quite keep his voice steady. "It's curious."
Curious is the wrong word, and also, unfortunately, exactly the right one, Starlight said, grim now in a way it rarely allowed itself to be. This is not a rogue predator, Pathfinder. Feel the shape of its Spark signature again, more closely this time. Tell me what tier it registers as, by the old reckoning.
Kael reached again, careful, and felt his blood go cold.
"First tier," he said. "Barely first tier. It's weak."
And yet it has killed nine head of livestock over three weeks without a single hunter laying eyes on it, and it is sitting forty yards from three armed adults right now without any apparent fear at all. Starlight let that sit for a moment before continuing, quieter. A first-tier beast should not be capable of that kind of patience, that kind of restraint, that kind of deliberate practice. Something is wrong with this creature's behavior in a way its raw strength does not explain. I want you to look at it. Not sense it — see it, with your own eyes, before it decides the game is finished.
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Kael's heart was pounding by the time he crept forward through the hedge, Bren a silent shadow at his shoulder, Corren fanning wide to cut off any retreat. What he found, crouched low in a bramble hollow with nine dead sheep's worth of practiced patience behind its flat black eyes, was smaller and stranger than anything he'd imagined — a creature the size of a large hound, hairless, grey-skinned, with too many joints in its narrow legs and a face that was unsettlingly, deliberately close to human in its proportions without ever quite arriving there.
It looked at Kael. And it did not flee.
"That's not a beast," Bren said, very quietly, the old-hunter calm in his voice fraying at the edges. "I've killed beasts my whole life, Kael. Wolves, boar-things, things with no names at all. I've never seen anything that looked back at me and thought about it first."
Because it is not, entirely, a natural creature, Starlight said, and for the first time since the altar, Kael heard something in its voice that might have been fear. Do you remember what I showed you in the dream — the pods, buried and waiting, seeds of something with intent? This creature's Spark signature carries a thread I recognize from that vision. Faint. Diluted. But present. I believe you are looking at something that has been touched, however slightly, by the same influence sleeping beneath this world's ruins. A scout. A very small, very early scout, sent to learn how humans respond to threat before something larger follows its example.
The creature tilted its too-human head, and made a sound that was not quite a growl and not quite anything Kael had words for — and then, unhurried, exactly the way the tree-line thing outside Ashvale had withdrawn once it learned what it needed to know, it turned and slipped back into the deeper hedge and was gone before Corren could even raise his spear.
They did not catch it. They would not, Kael understood with sick certainty, catch it at all — because it had never been hunting sheep for food. It had been hunting information, patiently, methodically, the way a scout gathers intelligence before a war it already knows is coming.
Fen Marrow's face, when Kael reported what they'd found, went through disbelief, then grim understanding, then something that looked uncomfortably close to fear on a woman who had, by her own account, buried that particular reaction decades ago.
"You're telling me," she said slowly, "that something out past my east fields is smart enough to test how fast a town notices it's being watched."
"I think so," Kael said. "I don't think it's dangerous yet. Not the way a Ridgeback's dangerous. But—"
"But it's the kind of dangerous that gets worse the longer it goes unanswered," Fen finished, and rubbed a hand over her tired face. "Bones. I've spent thirty years learning what beasts do and don't do, boy, and you've just told me the rules I built my whole career on don't hold anymore." She looked at him for a long moment, then reached for a fresh sheet of paper and began writing, fast, without further comment. "I'm sending word to Thornwick tonight. Not about you — about this. If whatever's out there is scouting Rushford, it may be scouting every settlement between here and the city, and the Guild needs to know before it stops practicing and starts acting on whatever it's learned."
This is bigger than one town's hedgerows, Starlight said quietly, as Fen's letter took shape under her quick hand. I did not expect to see this pattern so soon, or so close to your own doorstep. If the Beast King's influence is already sending scouts this far south of the deep wilderness, the timeline I feared is shorter than I hoped. We do not have the luxury of years to prepare you, Pathfinder. I think, perhaps, we never did.
Kael stood in the waystation's lamplight, watching a stranger's steady hand write a warning that would ride toward a city he hadn't even seen yet, and felt, for the first time since the altar, the true and enormous weight of what he'd agreed to become press down on him all at once — not an abstract prophecy anymore, not a dream shown to him in the dark, but a small grey creature with too-human eyes, watching him back from a bramble hollow, already reporting home.