The bone pile had been in this place for so long that no one alive remembered what kind of creatures these were. Local wisdom claimed two sarpa had fought each other to death, but she’d seen the bones of sarpa and these lacked the skeletal remains of wings. It was more likely the host bodies had been warped and wildly transfigured by the baneful vapors of the Pall. The now-monstrous dead might once have been as human as she was. If she still was human, she thought, rubbing the scar on her forearm. Recalling what the haunt had said.

Kem’s lively shout of delight carried across the distance as he reached the lookout. How she loved him, the way he was exuberant about things and so eager to learn, when he wasn’t being cranky. She ignored his voice. He knew better than to follow her close to where Spore might lie hidden. He’d wait up there, enjoying the view, until she joined him.

She circled the bone pile the regulation three times, twice sun-wise and the third time counter-sun to make sure she’d not missed any glistening wisp or pale root or glassy mushroom germinating outward from the bones. From the outside it looked exactly as it had last month. But looks could be deceiving, as she well knew.

Her predecessors had cleared a track through the bones. This trail ran beneath the arches of the larger rib cage and took two separate, elongated loops out and back through the crosswise rib cage, keeping boots clear of stray bones. The ribs were of a vast circumference. She and five friends, side by side, could stand up beneath them, not that they’d tried. Griffins weren’t this large, and anyway griffins had the semi-hollow bones of flying creatures. In the old tales told by traveling peddlers and itinerant scribes, the sorcerer-kings had conquered the world on the backs of gigantic monsters. Or they themselves had been the giant monsters. The way the fragmentary scraps of old poems were phrased left it a bit unclear.

If not sarpa, then perhaps these two leviathans had begun their lives as common serpents, twisting along the earth. Or perhaps they had been gracefully slender dragons, with legs and wings and breath of fire. Breath of fire would come in handy when Spore germinated from quiet bones or forgotten tombs. Maybe that’s how the ancient people had kept the Pall at bay, or maybe the Pall hadn’t existed in those days lost to time and memory. Maybe magic could spoil and become rotten, but if the historians were anything to go by, only theurgy was safe, while sorcery had always been poisonous.

Had the haunt once ridden to war on the back of a dragon amid a host of warriors who were all as beautiful as he was?