Page 1 of Unleashed

Prologue

5 Years After the Crash

Orishok walkedthrough the undergrowth toward the wall of thorns ahead. He’d known as soon as he spotted it that the wall was humanmade; its thorny branches were too tightly bunched, its positioning too regular. Sections of it had been smashed through, leaving gaps and dangling, broken branches.

Grass brushed against his leg, and he paused momentarily to glance down with wonder at the living, green plants around him. For so long, his touch had meant death to anything he came in contact with. Even years after Quinn had afforded him control over the deadly power within, part of his mind still expected to see decaying vegetation in his wake.

He moved around the circular wall until he found a gap wide enough to walk through, using his spear to push aside some of the twisted branches. The bare patches of dirt inside the small clearing were deeply worn, suggesting a group of humans had camped here for several weeks, at least. The distinctive prints of their odd foot coverings were evident in several places, and the stone-ringed pit in the center of the camp was full of ash and charred wood.

He searched the clearing quickly but thoroughly. There were other tracks that paired with the breaches in the wall to tell a chilling but all too common story — the long-toed, talon-tipped footprints of shriekers.

He tilted his head and stared down at a set of gouge marks in the dirt, noting something buried beneath. Using the tip of his spear, he dug the object out and bent to pick it up. It was a scrap of fabric. Despite its years of wear, soil, and sun bleaching, he recognized it as the same orange material Quinn had worn when she first came to Bahmet five years before.

This wasn’t the first abandoned human encampment Orishok had discovered in this forest, and it wasn’t likely to be the last.

Shriekers had attacked the people who’d dwelled here. Fire and thorns would not deter those beasts when they were hungry.

Apart from a few more bits of bloody cloth and some grayed bits of rope, the camp had been cleared out; whether by the survivors or scavengers made little difference. The attack had occurred sometime in the ten days since the last rain, which would’ve washed away most of the tracks otherwise.

Why hadn’t these humans gone to Utopia for shelter? The thriving human settlement was only days away from this forest and was secure enough to protect its occupants from such attacks.

Orishok exited the camp and walked around the rest of the perimeter, stopping only when he discovered three mounds of dirt in the woods nearby, each marked with a thick, upright branch jabbed into the ground.

The human tradition of burying their dead had confused Orishok at first. It was in some ways a more direct means of returning the fallen to Sonhadra, but humans put their dead in the ground and moved on, leaving no one to hold vigil. Who would guard the departed from the prying claws of hungry beasts? Who would implore Sonhadra to accept the dead until they were finally welcomed into the world’s embrace?

He’d ventured from Bahmet that morning to hunt, but he could not ignore this. He could not hold vigil for these humans, but he could offer them some protection.

Orishok planted his spear in the dirt and followed the well-worn path leading from the camp to the nearby stream where he gathered an armful of large stones. He brought them back to the graves and arranged them carefully atop the mounds, returning to the stream for another load, and another, feeling the weariness of his work only in his heartstone.

Death was natural, but in this instance, it seemed needless. Why had the humans come here? Why did their kind insist on braving the forests that lay in the shadow of Bahmet, the City of Death?

As he placed the final stone, the vegetation behind him rustled. He spun, his body instinctively changing to the spiked, armored form he’d worn for so long, and tugged his spear out of the ground.

He froze when his gaze met the wide, blue eyes of a tiny female human. She peered up at him from within the thick brush, through which only her face was visible. Her round, blue eyes were filled with terror, and her mouth hung open with soft, panting breaths. Her skin paled. She was looking at him, but he sensed that she didn’tseehim.

Suddenly, her eyes cleared. She tilted her head, lifting her eyebrows as though intrigued.

The change was so quick, so fluid, that Orishok could only stare in silence. Though he couldn’t be certain, he had the sense that she’d been watching him for some time.

He forced his body to its old, natural form — free of the spikes and armor, free of Kelsharn’s influence if only on the surface — and slowly sank into a crouch to put himself closer to the girl’s eye level. He lay his spear on the ground beside him, angling the head away from her.

“Who are you?” he asked in Quinn’s human tongue.

The human emerged from the brush and approached him without fear. She was thin and dirty, and her brown hair hung in tangles around her face. She stopped immediately before him and smiled, raising her hand and reaching for his face.

Orishok’s eyes flared; his instinct, even after five years, was to leap away before she touched him. Before Quinn had blooded his heartstone, the slightest contact with him would’ve meant death for this girl, foranyliving thing. Hundreds of years of habit had proven difficult to break.

He felt out that power within him, wrapped his will around it, and actively suppressed it just to be safe.

“You won’t hurt me,” the girl said in a soft voice. She brushed her fingers over the bone ridges along his cheekbone beneath his eye. “You’re not like him. You’re good.”

Orishok furrowed his brow. Though he’d encountered human children, he still had too little experience by which to guess her age. He suspected she was quite young, but the certainty with which she’d spoken seemed well beyond her years. “I am not like who, little one?”

“Kelsharn.”

Everything within Orishok stilled. More than a thousand years before, Kelsharn had taken Orishok’s people and made them into constructs neither living nor dead, beings meant only to fulfill his whims and destroy all those he deemed his enemy. But Kelsharn was gone; he’d vanished centuries ago. Long before the humans had crashed on Sonhadra.

“How do you know that name?” he asked.

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