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My breath rasped loudly in my ears.
I peered around it, at the campsite beyond.
The fire was still lit but it’d been disturbed, knocked aside, forming a speckled line of flickering flames that dwindled as they reached for the darkness.
Another scream.
Lumbering armored prison guards bolted to their feet and peered at their surroundings, shock rifles raised and aimed.
Something seized one of the guards.
He fell, sprawling to the sand.
He spun around and clawed at the ground as the thing pulled him into the black.
Another guard chased after his comrade, peering into the shadows, but unable to make anything out.
He fired a single shot, not for the damage it might do, but for the light it shed on the surrounding area.
And that’s when I saw it.
The monster.
Thick tendrils writhed in the orb of light cast by his rifle, there one moment, gone the next.
I blinked, disbelieving what I’d just seen.
It looked much like the Desert Flower vines I had the misfortune of running into before.
Only on a much larger scale.
Its tendrils were as thick as my arms, whereas the ones from earlier had been little thicker than my thumb.
The prison guards unloaded, firing at the flailing arms of the invisible beast.
The guards weren’t used to being outside for extended periods.
If they were, they would have known not to place their camp so close to the sand dune mountains.
That was where the beasts lived.
And this monster was the king of monsters.
I ducked my head as streams of yellow-blue lightning zipped overhead, crackling and making my hair stand on end.
I stood, shocked, surprised the prison guards were so ineffective at protecting themselves from the creature.
Only Egara could protect me.
But he was light-years from here.
One of the thick tendrils slithered across the sand in my direction.
It couldn’t be aware of me as I hadn’t moved an inch.
It slid inside an upturned regulation issue boot before pulling back and knocking the boot aside.
I was frozen, unable to move a muscle.
