“We should run,” said Barclay frantically. Running had always been his best and only strategy.

“It’s a Styerwurm, a Prime class. That means it’s—”

The snake stretched open its mouth, so wide that it actually turned its jaw inside out. Barclay stared in fright at its endless expanse of stomach—dark and pink.

“Yep, yep,” Viola squeaked. “We run.”

They took off. The Styerwurm slithered after them, tearing through the trees. Barclay, being smaller and faster, quickly outpaced Viola, and he was far too terrified to turn around to see if she was still behind him. The Beast was every bit as ferocious as the sort in stories he’d heard, and now they were about to be eaten.

Viola screamed, and Barclay finally looked over his shoulder to see her on the ground. She’d tripped and fallen, and the snake was catching up at an alarming speed. Its rootlike tongue stretched through the leaves and snow toward her.

“Help me!” she called.

Barclay, who was a pitiful, cowardly excuse for a hero, who didn’t particularly even like Viola, ran back to help her. He grabbed her arm and hoisted her up. A long cut stretched down her shin where she’d scraped it, and she hobbled a bit when she put weight on that leg.

“Thanks,” she breathed.

“Never mind that, let’s just go—”

Barclay’s words quickly turned to shrieks when the tongue wrapped around his ankle and yanked him back. He flew through the air, hanging upside down. Belongings from his bag toppled out onto the forest floor, and the world spun around him as the tongue whipped him this way and that.

“Viola!” he screamed.

“Just be calm!” she called. “The Styerwurm has a very weak stomach, so it shakes its victims to death before it eats them.”

“How can I be calm when you tell me that?!”

Indeed, the tongue switched from swinging Barclay around to shaking him like a piggy bank. Barclay attempted to kick and pull at it, but its grip would not budge. Spots of black bloomed in his vision.

“Just… just hold on! Mitzi, help!” Mitzi emerged from her Mark and appeared on Viola’s shoulder with a determined squawk.

A blinding light burst from Mitzi’s mouth, the same attack that she had used the day before to ward off the Lufthund. Barclay switched from prying at the tongue to covering his eyes, but the snake, if affected, didn’t stop thrashing him. Barclay’s breakfast from this morning threatened to return for an explosive encore.

“Is it working?” he shouted. “Because it doesn’t feel like it is!”

“I’ll try something else!”

The light faded, and Barclay opened his eyes in time to see Viola raise her hands, palms out. A faint beam of red light shot out of them directly at the Styerwurm’s forehead, and there was the sound of something sizzling. The snake wrenched back, dropping Barclay into a heap on the snow.

Barclay jumped to his feet and staggered, dizzy, to Viola’s side. He pulled his charm out of his pocket and waved it around, making the air reek of skunks.