The victory at Serpent's Gulch was absolute, but the mood in the temporary holding cells—formerly known as "that damp cave behind the waterfall"—was anything but celebratory.
They had captured five Feral beasts alive. Well, "alive" was a generous term. They were foaming at the mouth, thrashing against their bonds, and smelling like a locker room that hadn't been cleaned since the Stone Age.
Elara stood outside the cave entrance, arms crossed, staring at her three "Lieutenants."
"Okay," Elara began, looking at the Alphas. "We need information. Specifically: Who organized them? Where did they get the armor? And why are they suddenly fighting like soldiers instead of rabid animals?"
"I have a method," Kaelen volunteered immediately, cracking his knuckles. The sound was like gunshots. "I go in. I roar. I bite one of them in half. The others speak from fear. It is the Lion's way."
"Denied," Elara said flatly. "Rule #10: You cannot interrogate a witness if the witness is bisected. Next."
"I could take one into the sky," Zev suggested, preening a blood-flecked feather. "I drop him. I catch him. I drop him again. Eventually, he screams the truth."
"Also denied," Elara sighed. "High-altitude torture is messy, and I don't want to clean up the splash zone. Roric?"
The Shadow Wolf was leaning against the rock wall, whittling a stick with a terrifyingly calm expression. He looked up, his silver eyes cold. "I will separate them. I will place them in absolute darkness. I will whisper their greatest fears to them for three hours. Their minds will break."
Elara shuddered. "Okay, that's effective, but we don't have three hours. We need answers now. So, we are going to try a human technique."
The three Alphas looked at her, intrigued.
"It is called Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Confusing Cop," Elara explained. "Kaelen, you are Bad Cop. You loom, you growl, you look like you want to eat them. But you do not touch them."
Kaelen grunted, looking pleased to be assigned the role of "Professional Loomer."
"Roric, you are Silent Cop. You stand in the corner and stare. Just stare. Don't blink. It freaks people out."
Roric nodded. "I excel at the unnerving stare."
"And Zev... you wait outside," Elara finished.
"Why?!" Zev squawked indignantly.
"Because you fidget," Elara said. "And you'll try to preen the prisoners. Now, bring out the leader's second-in-command."
The Armor Anomaly
They dragged the Feral Lieutenant onto a flat rock in the center of the cave. He was a hyena-type beastman, muzzled and bound with Roric's strongest vines. He was snarling, his eyes rolling wildly.
But Elara wasn't looking at the beast. She was looking at his armor.
Now that she was up close, she could see it wasn't just lizard scale. The chest piece was a composite material—scales fused together not with leather or vine, but with a strange, translucent grey polymer. It looked... manufactured.
"Hold him still," Elara ordered.
Kaelen stepped forward and placed one massive hand on the Feral's shoulder. The Feral instantly froze, terrified by the proximity of the Lion Alpha.
Elara pulled out her small knife and scraped the "polymer" binding the scales. It didn't scratch. It sparked.
Sparks. In a Stone Age beastworld.
"This isn't natural," Elara whispered, a chill running down her spine that had nothing to do with the damp cave. "This is tech. Old tech, or... something else."
She looked at the Feral. "Unmuzzle him. Kaelen, be ready."
Kaelen ripped the muzzle off. The Feral immediately spat at Elara.
"Weak!" the Feral rasped, his voice sounding like grinding gravel. "Soft meat! The Master will peel you!"
"Bad Cop, you're up," Elara said casually, stepping back.
Kaelen leaned in. He didn't roar. He simply opened his mouth slightly, revealing fangs the size of steak knives, and emitted a sound that was less a growl and more a sub-sonic vibration that rattled the Feral's ribcage.
"The meat asks a question," Kaelen rumbled, his golden eyes burning with predatory promise. "Answer, or I will start my meal with your feet."
The Feral whimpered, shrinking back. "The Master... the Master gave us the skins! He promised the Blood Moon! He promised the end of the Fur!"
"Who is the Master?" Roric asked from the corner. He hadn't moved a muscle. His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The Feral's eyes darted to the shadowy corner, terrified by the invisible Wolf. "The Cold One! He Who Coils! He lives in the Lost City! He woke up!"
Elara's heart skipped a beat. Lost City. Coils.
"Is he a Beastman?" Elara pressed. "Or is he... like me?"
The Feral looked at Elara, confused. "No. You are soft. He is... hard. Shiny. Like the skins. He speaks the language of the ticks-and-clicks."
Ticks-and-clicks. Morse code? Or... computer processing?
"The scales," Elara pointed to the armor. "Where did you get them?"
"The Pit!" the Feral screamed, his sanity fraying under Kaelen's looming pressure. "The Green Pit in the Dead Lands! We dig! We find the shiny skins! He melts them! He makes us strong!"
Suddenly, the Feral started to convulse. Foam, tinged with purple, began to bubble from his lips.
"He is breaking!" Kaelen growled, stepping back in disgust.
"No, he's reacting!" Elara shouted, lunging forward. She grabbed the Feral's jaw. "Seizure! Roric, hold his head!"
But it was too late. The Feral stiffened, his eyes rolled back, and with one final, gurgling gasp, he went limp.
Elara checked the pulse. Nothing.
"Poison," she diagnosed grimly, prying open the beast's mouth. There was a tiny, ruptured sac under his tongue. "A suicide capsule. But biological. It smells like... sulfur and venom."
The Council of the Dead
Elara walked out of the cave, wiping her hands on her trousers. The three Alphas followed, the air heavy with the revelation.
"He spoke of 'He Who Coils'," Roric said quietly, his face paler than usual. "And the Lost City."
"Fairy tales," Kaelen scoffed, though he looked uneasy. "Nursery rhymes for cubs. The Lost City of the Ancients is a myth."
"The poison wasn't a myth," Elara countered. "And neither is that armor. It's synthetic fusion, gentlemen. It's advanced technology. Someone is digging up ancient tech in the Dead Lands and strapping it onto feral beasts to build an army."
Zev, who had been listening from a perch, flew down. "The Dead Lands... that is beyond the Salt Flats. It is the territory of the Scaled Ones. But they died out cycles ago. The dry heat took them."
"Apparently not all of them," Roric murmured. "Or something else has moved in."
Elara paced the small clearing. Her mind was racing. The crash, the temporal field, the Feral Tide, the "ticks-and-clicks."
"This 'Master'," Elara said. "If he's using old tech, he might be trying to do what I did—mess with time, or power. And he's using the Feral Tide as a distraction to keep you three busy while he digs up his weapon."
She turned to the Alphas.
"We aren't fighting a turf war anymore. We are fighting an arms race. And we are losing."
Kaelen bristled. "The Lion does not lose! We will march to the Dead Lands! We will crush this 'Coiled One'!"
"You can't march into the Dead Lands, Kaelen," Roric said sharply. "It is a sulfur wasteland. Your Lions will suffocate in a day. My Wolves will burn their paws. Only the Ferals—and the Scaled Ones—can survive there."
"And the Sky-Riders?" Zev asked, looking hopeful.
"The air is poison," Roric said. "You would fall from the sky like stones."
Silence descended. An unbeatable enemy in an unreachable land.
Elara looked at the armor piece she had confiscated. She turned it over in her hands. There was a symbol etched into the synthetic material. It wasn't a beast clan mark. It was a geometric shape. A double helix, intertwined with a snake.
"I know this symbol," Elara whispered. "It's not just a snake. It's... DNA. It's genetics."
She looked up at her three monsters.
"I can survive there," she said.
"NO!"
The word was shouted simultaneously by all three Alphas. It was a wall of sound—Lion roar, Wolf bark, Griffin screech.
"You are soft meat!" Kaelen yelled, grabbing her arm. "You die if the wind blows too hard! You are not going to the poison land!"
"I am the only one who has a respirator," Elara shouted back, referring to the N95 mask she still had in her pocket from her original scrubs (miraculously preserved), though she knew it wouldn't be enough for long. "And I understand the tech! If I can get close, I might be able to shut it down."
"It is suicide," Roric stated, stepping in front of her. "We will find another way. We will lure them out."
"We don't have time to lure!" Elara argued. "He's building an army now!"
The Unlikely Solution
"There is... another way," Zev said, his voice unusually hesitant.
Everyone looked at the Griffin.
"The Dead Lands are surrounded by the Acid mists," Zev explained. "But there is a current. A high-altitude wind stream called the Serpent's Breath. It flows over the mist. If a Sky-Rider could fly high enough, fast enough, he could drop a passenger directly into the center of the City, bypassing the poison border."
"You just said the air is poison," Kaelen growled.
"The lower air is poison," Zev corrected. "The upper stream is thin, cold, and dangerous. But pure."
He looked at Elara, his blue eyes filled with a terrifying mixture of fear and determination.
"I can carry you. But it will test us both. If I falter, we fall into the acid. If you faint from the cold, you die. But it is the only way in."
Kaelen looked ready to punch Zev. "You will drop her!"
"I will never drop her!" Zev screamed back. "I am the Storm!"
"Stop!" Elara held up her hands. "Zev has a plan. It's insane, dangerous, and stupid. Which means it's our best shot."
She looked at Kaelen and Roric.
"I need you two to create a distraction. A massive one. Draw the Feral army to the border of the Dead Lands. Make so much noise that this 'Master' looks at you, not at the sky. While he's watching you, Zev and I drop in through the roof."
Roric looked at her with deep, terrifying respect. "You are small, Elara Vance. But you have the heart of a Behemoth."
Kaelen stepped close, his hand cupping her cheek, his thumb brushing her lip. The jealousy was gone, replaced by a pure, agonizing fear of loss.
"If you do not return," the Lion Alpha whispered, "I will burn this world to ash until I find you."
"Good incentive," Elara said, her voice shaking slightly. "Now, let's go start a war to end a war."