There were perhaps twenty of them visible from this angle, and the count grew as he moved and the angle changed. Abomination corpses, drained and desiccated, their hides sunken over their frames like old leather over collapsed frames. Each one had been opened — not torn, not savaged, but opened with precision, the ribcages pried back in matching patterns, the internal cavities swept clean of anything that had been inside them. It was systematic in a way that exceeded the behavior of any Abomination he knew of, and it had clearly not been recent; the corpses had been here long enough to have dried to the texture of old wood, their colors leached to uniform grey-brown.

"Church’s work?" Jacob asked, looking at Arthur.

"No," Arthur said, and there was something careful in the word, something that was not quite reluctance but was adjacent to it.

"You sound certain."

"I am." Arthur studied the far wall a moment longer, then turned his gaze to the trees at the far edge of the riverbed, where runic markings had been carved into the bark of three separate trees at uniform height — each one catching the pale filtered light with the faint luminescence of residual Ein Sof, still active despite however long they had been sitting there. They were not any runic family Nero recognized, and the arrangement between them did not follow the symmetrical patterns of standard inscription work. They made something that was closer to a sentence than a formula, oriented inward toward the riverbed rather than outward toward the forest. "This is older than the Church’s project. And more purposeful."

Jacob said nothing to that. The silence among the three of them had a different quality from the easy quiet of moving through familiar territory, and Sergeant Aldric, stationed a short distance up the bank, had gone very still in a way that was nothing like his usual watchful distance.

Whatever had made those markings was not here now. Nero held that knowledge carefully, because the other half of it — that whatever had made them was simply not here *now* — was not particularly comforting.

They moved on before anyone suggested that lingering was a good idea.

The ground rose again on the far side of the channel, and the forest closed back overhead, and another ten minutes passed without incident before the Maw Tyrant appeared.

It came out of the tree line to the right without any of the preliminary sounds that most large creatures produced — no breaking undergrowth, no heavy tread carrying through the soil — and it was large in the way that created a problem with spatial judgment, because the mind wanted to place it at a different distance than it actually occupied. It stood close to twelve feet at the shoulder, built low to the ground with the massive forward-weighted frame of something that had evolved exclusively for breaking through things, its hide a mottled dark green-grey, warped and thickened by corruption into something closer to plating than skin in the areas over its vitals. Its face was a maw — the name was literal — a cavity surrounded by teeth that had grown outward from the jaw rather than inward, creating a fringe of overlapping bone around an opening that seemed to take up most of what a face should have been. No visible eyes. Olfactory pits along the flanks of its skull, wide and pulsing.

The three Maw Spawn trailing behind it were built to the same template and scaled down to roughly the size of large horses, which still meant they were considerably larger than anything Nero had encountered in the Thornwood up until this point.

Arthur had his sword drawn before the Maw Tyrant took its second step out of the treeline, and Jacob had already cleared the waraxe from his shoulder with the particular swiftness of a man who had been thinking about what he would do when this moment arrived since before the moment was anywhere near arriving.

Nero leveled his spear and moved to the right — not hesitating, placing himself where he was most useful, drawing the attention of one of the Maw Spawn by the simple expedient of putting himself in its path and making noise — and then things moved very quickly.

Arthur went for the Tyrant directly, which was not a strategy Nero would have conceived of and was apparently the correct one; the sword’s pale blue runes ignited along the fuller as it came out, and the crescent of concentrated force that left the blade on the second swing opened the Tyrant’s side at a depth that exposed the internal architecture of the thing, and from that moment the fight’s outcome was a matter of time rather than question. Jacob took two of the Spawn in a sequence of movements that spent about as much time on each as most people spent deciding whether to take a second helping at dinner — the waraxe moving in short, efficient arcs that used the weapon’s weight rather than fought it — and Nero took the third across the snout with the butt of his spear, driving its head into the ground with the newly-concentrated force that the Potion of Change had been accumulating over two weeks of conditioning, following it down with the point before it could regain its feet.

It lasted perhaps forty seconds.

The forest did not go quiet after, because it had already been quiet, and it simply remained that way with a completeness that sat differently now than it had before.

Jacob crouched beside the fallen Tyrant and worked at its ruined chest cavity with practiced efficiency, gloved fingers seeking and finding the dense, dark mass nestled behind what remained of the creature’s sternum — no larger than a clenched fist, irregular in shape, pulsing once with a faint interior light as he pulled it free before going still.

"Budding Essence Core," he said, holding it up briefly before pocketing it. His tone was the tone of a man noting the weather.

"Serviceable extraction," Arthur observed, and it sounded like a compliment, which from Arthur it probably was.