An odd movement in the water caught his eye, and he banished his worries for another time. Movements in the water were common, but not in the middle of the day, for the greater a thing of the Wild was, the less it liked the glare of the suns. He circled slowly, always coming back over the Godroad to regain height for the next pass. The swamp water was too cloudy to see shadows in, but whatever it was swam close to the surface, its ridged spine making a mountain range of ripples.

Vasin wore his sapphire armour, his second skin of living crystal, and he had his spear, but that was all. He was alone in the sky, without his hunters in a land he did not know.

Though he loved to fly alone, Vasin hated to hunt that way. Without spear sisters and spear brothers, a hunter soon becomes the prey. A memory surfaced of his encounter with the Scuttling Corpseman, of his flight through the trees, and how close it had come to destroying him.

Mindful of past mistakes, Vasin continued to circle, gliding lower but keeping a healthy amount of air between himself and the water. There was definitely something there. It too was being cautious, roving up and down alongside a short stretch of Godroad. This gets stranger and stranger. It comes in the day, it comes close to the Godroad, and it comes to a place where there are no people.

It briefly occurred to Vasin that perhaps that last fact was not true. After all, he was there. Perhaps it was looking for a chance to snare a Deathless. He dismissed the idea as nonsense, but levelled off just the same and adjusted his grip on his spear, sliding a thumb over the trigger in readiness.

As he watched, more details of the thing were revealed. It was long, a kind of Lizardkin, with pronounced ridges running from nose to tail. At first he thought it had branching limbs, like a living, writhing tree, but he soon realized it was carrying other creatures that bucked and kicked in its grasp.

The Lizardkin lifted its body from the water, revealing a wide snout, circular, covered in scales that glittered. Vasin could not help but drop a little closer, and realized that each scale was an eyelid, and that the glittering was actually the thing blinking, blinking, blinking, hundreds of times with its whole body. He knew that beneath the surface its body went on, the great belly brushing the silt at the very bottom of the swamp. For he’d recognized it now, the Story-singers had told him of this creature and it was dangerous, a true power of the deep Wild: Quiverhive. But what is it doing here?

Quiverhive stuffed the squirming thing it was carrying into its mouth, but instead of feeding, it tilted its head backwards, and spat.