The sound of the creature dragging its broken body into the woods faded, replaced by a silence that offered no peace. The night was no longer filled with threat of immediate, violent attack, but with the suffocating certainty of a future one. Alex laid on the smoke-stained floor of his cabin, every muscle aching, his mind a hollowed-out cavern of shock and disbelief.
He had thrown fire at the monster. He had watched it burn and fall hundred feet. And it was still alive.
"Alex," Elara's voice was soft, fragile thing, a ghost in the static of his radio. "Are you still there?"
"I'm here," he rasped, the words scratching at his raw throat. "It's gone. For now."
Then rest of the night was the longest of Alex's life. He didn't sleep. He didn't move from the floor. He and Elara just kept the channel open, their shared silence as a testament to their shared terror. Every gust of wind sounded like a guttural groan. Every shadow seemed to coalesce into a tall spindly shape. The monster was gone, but it was also everywhere.
When dawn finally arrived, its gentle gray light merciless. It revealed the true extent of the damage. The floor of the cabin was blackened, water-logged ruin. The air was thick with the stench of kerosene and burnt hair. He cautiously peered out the trapdoor opening. The steel staircase was twisted, melted wreck, a blackened skeleton of what it once was. It was completely unusable. He was trapped.
He took stock of his supplies. His water was gone, used to douse the flames. He had one flare left. His lantern oil was empty. His only weapon was a small firewood axe. His fortress was a ruin, and he was disarmed. A profound, crushing wave of hopelessness washed over him.
"I can't beat it, Elara," he said into the radio, his voice flat and empty. "I threw everything I had at it. It just got back up. There's nothing else I can do."
"Don't say that," she replied, her voice sharp, cutting through his despair. "Don't you dare say that. You survived the night. That's a win Alex. You're alive."
"For how long?" he shot back, the anger just a thin shell over his fear. "It's going to come back. It's hurt, but it's healing. And next time, I have nothing left to throw at it."
"Then we stop trying to throw things at it," she said, her voice filled with a sudden, fierce intensity. "You were right before. We're not dealing with an animal. It's intelligent. And brute force isn't going to work against it. We have to be smarter."
"Smarter how? With what?"
"With knowledge, Alex," she insisted. "This thing has been here before. I can feel it. Those symbols weren't new. The clicking sounds. It has patterns. There has to be a record, a history. In the tower archives. The old logs."
He looked over at the heavy footlocker he had dragged across the room just hours before. It was filled with old, dusty logbooks from the decades of watchers who had sat in this very room before him. He had thought of it only as a heavy object, a barricade.
"The old logs?" he asked, a flicker of something—not quite hope, but curiosity—igniting in his chest. "You think some other poor guy saw this thing and wrote about it?"
"I think it's possible," she said. "Maybe they didn't know what they were seeing. Maybe they passed it off as a bear, or a prank, or maybe they thought they were going crazy. But there might be a clue. A description, a mention of the symbols, a time of year when it's most active. Anything. It's a better plan than waiting here to die."
She was right. It was a long shot, a desperate search for a needle in a haystack, but it was better than the crushing weight of doing nothing.
Slowly, painfully, Alex pushed himself to his feet. He limped over to the footlocker and knelt before it. The metal was cool to the touch. He undid the latches, the metallic click loud in the quiet room.
He lifted the heavy lid. Inside, nestled among old maps and repair manuals, were dozen leather-bound and spiral-bound logbooks. They smelled of dust, mildew, and time. He reached in and pulled out the oldest one, its cover faded and worn.
"Okay," he said into the radio, his voice no longer empty, but filled with new, fragile sense of purpose. "Okay, Elara. Let's go hunting."