Samuel braced himself with his leg over a gap between rocks and pulled Wilhelm across. Barely visible halfway up the steep incline of Hedda’s Woe was the old campsite, where a group of huntsmen had vanished fifty years prior, eleven hardy men, according to the villagers—which, by this point, Samuel had to admit he and Wilhelm were not. The lone peak looked like a pile of rubble from a distance, with specks of green, but up close, one couldn’t help but wonder what had made such a thing.
It wasn’t so much a dream, Samuel had confessed on the way out, but a bright feeling, like a sunbeam reflected off a patch of smooth, clear water when a breeze lifts an obscuring branch.
Up on the Woe, strong winds whipped through the rocks and made a dolorous wail.
Samuel gripped his cousin’s arm at the elbow and helped him over the next rock.
They were the last of their line. Samuel was to wed Wilhelm’s sister within a fortnight, on the equinox, which Samuel’s father, their lord, had agreed to when he took the children in. To consolidate family holdings as well as the line, the grim duke had said. Both had thinned of late.
The villagers at the fusty inn had turned their backs when they learned what the princes intended to do. Not a soul would guide them, not even for pay.
“Careful of that one, Wills.”
It had taken a great deal of convincing to persuade Wilhelm to come with him, for the festivities had already begun and Wilhelm wanted to find his own bride before the old duke forced him into the priesthood.
Most boulders were as big as peasant carts; some reached as high as a barn. It took tremendous effort to scale even one, but finally they made it to the halfway point and the campsite.
Powerful gusts swept across the small clearing, carrying a sweet perfume. As they looked around, Samuel struggled to imagine how eleven men could have found enough level earth to rest on. They must have taken turns, kept watch.
There was no sign of life, other than the most diminutive types and the occasional stunted tree.
“How do you suppose these rocks got here? There’s nothing like it for miles around,” Wilhelm said, pointing at the forest and fields down below.
“This is all supposedly a great winged beast’s doing. A nest, according to legend.”
“A proper farewell to bachelorhood, then. But what happened to the hunting party? Their equipment’s still here. Look.”
He picked up a small iron cookpot and winked at Samuel through a rusted-out hole in the bottom. Samuel kicked a tin spoon that clattered. A piece of coarse fabric flapped vigorously between two rocks at the edge.
“Their timing may have been off.” Samuel had no idea why he said this.
“And what does the legend tell of the beast’s brooding habits? No, no, hear me out. I’m serious. A hen takes weeks. If it’s a nest—”
“It’d be long.” Uneasy, Samuel stepped away. “Their years would stretch far beyond ours. Too long for us.” He mumbled, “People forget, I suspect. Get careless.”
“What’s that you say?” The wind howled violently.
“People are often careless.”
Wilhelm was leaning over the precipice at a gap between boulders, holding on with his hand. Samuel approached one of the big rocks, one of several stacked together, and bent low to peer into the darkness enfolded within.
The vision flashed, after days of nothing, and this time Samuel could hear it as well, through the wind’s incessant howls, the sound of a tremendous bulk shifting deep behind the rocks, dark leathery movement within the recess. The vision superimposed itself over his reality. They were almost the same.
That meant his mission was complete, yes? What little he’d understood of the seer’s promise. What now? Go home? Wait for the old duke to die?
There was a scrape of gravel and a dull thump.
Samuel whipped around. “Wills? Where are you?”
He rushed to where he’d last seen him, and down by his foot he found a white-knuckled hand clinging to a knob of rock.
“No!” Samuel dropped to his knees and reached over the ledge. “Grab onto me! Hurry!”
“Oh, dear God,” Wilhelm rasped from somewhere under the lip. He sucked in his breath, swung his right arm up wide, and caught hold of Samuel’s waiting hand.
Wilhelm’s legs must have been dangling freely. Soon Wilhelm’s hand slipped off the knob, and the full weight of his body yanked Samuel down; his chin rammed into the hard ledge.
“Don’t you dare leave me!” Samuel shouted, but heard nothing from Wilhelm, though their hands maintained a viselike grip.
Samuel began to slide on the scree. First his shoulder went over, then his head, and at last, half gone, he saw his cousin’s face below him. Pale wet lines ran through the dust on his cheeks. His lips parted, as if to speak.
“I was only hoping—” Wilhelm said, but those were the only words that came out, for the bright vision flashed once more; and in that moment of distraction, to Samuel’s horror, he released his grip on Wilhelm.
There was no scream.
An incomprehensible silence billowed on the wind. Samuel rolled onto his back, away from the unreality of what he had done. His dry gaze locked onto the pale sky above, unblinking. Breath would not come.
A different sound filled his ears, in spite of their ringing, a sound he struggled to understand. Like a deathless flame resurgent, as if fed, it roared—from inside the crevice!
In darkness, her massive opal eye drew open and found him. He saw and sensed her arousal, the end of centuries of expectancy bought with the timely sacrifice of his beloved Wilhelm.
A high-pitched peal emanated from the hole: muffled, small, and new.
On his back, on a tiny patch of level ground, Samuel clutched at the fine soil at his sides, senseless as it ran through his fingers. Between gasps, his mad laughter echoed across the plain, loud and long, without an ounce of comprehension to it.
