Chapter 1

River 

The Emerald Mist Mountains live up to their name—green, thick with moss and fog so dense it clings to your skin like spider silk. My boots sink half an inch into wet loam with every step, and every breath tastes like mildew and rot and distant lightning. The mountains don’t want us here. I can feel it in my teeth.

We’re ten strong, a lean line of Rangers fanned out along the deer trail, though only five of us are really worth a damn. The others are green—new meat, twitchy fingers, wide eyes that flash too often to the trees. Me? I watch the ground. Watch the sky. Count the seconds between the snap of twigs. I don’t need to look for danger. I can feel it.

“Bet it’s just an old goat,” someone ahead says. Garth, I think. Too loud. Too loose. His voice bounces off wet rock. “This monster people keep yappin’ about? Probably a moss-covered donkey with a limp.”

“Or your mom,” Bex mutters, and someone snorts. Even I crack a smile, just a twitch.

“They say it eats people whole,” Lenny adds, lagging behind me with his rifle slung lazy over one shoulder. “Leaves just the boots. And if the boots’re nice, it keeps those too.”

“Try me,” I snap, not looking back. “See how well your balls bounce off the side of this mountain.”

Silence. Then more laughter. Nervous this time.

I keep walking.

We’re heading north of Kyrdonis, through this cursed ridge, scouting a supply path that won’t get blown to hell or blocked by elf patrols. The Emerald Mist eats armies. The terrain shifts. Maps lie. I’ve heard stories of whole platoons swallowed by landslides, or by something worse—things that move beneath the earth.

I don’t deal in stories. I deal in dirt, in angles, in shadows that move wrong. My name’s River Majors, and I don’t believe in monsters.

But I do believe in the way this place watches me.

A branch snaps underfoot. The fog rolls a little thinner, and I catch a glimpse of something massive—just an impression in the muck. A footprint, maybe. Bigger than a cartwheel. Three toes, clawed. Sunk deep.

I crouch, brush it with my glove. Still fresh. Still damp.

“Hold,” I whisper. My voice doesn’t carry far in the fog, but it doesn’t need to. Bex hears. She repeats the command. The line freezes. Weapons raise. The fog curls tighter.

Someone breathes too loud. Lenny again.

“River?” Bex steps up beside me. She’s lean, sharp-eyed, always ready. The only one here besides me who’s seen what happens when things go wrong. “That what I think it is?”

“Too big for a bear. Too clean for an ogre.” I run my fingers along the edge of the print. “Whatever it is, it passed through here within the hour.”

“Shit.”

“No talking,” I hiss. We move on, slower now, tighter. No more jokes.

The forest presses in, all dripping ferns and bent pines, branches clawing at our clothes like fingers. Every sound feels too close. Every shadow twitches.

It takes me back. Not the good kind of back.

I was fifteen when Rizzo found me. Auction block. Chained. My wrists still ache in the cold. He shot the bastard who bought me through the chest, gave me a gun, and said, “Shoot or die, kid.” I shot. I didn’t stop shooting for six hours. When it was over, I was covered in blood that wasn’t mine, and Rizzo said, “You’re one of us now.”

I wasn’t. Not really. But I stuck around. Learned to disappear, to shoot straight, to make bullets sing. I learned to be useful. No one wants to fuck what they’re afraid of.

Still, some of them try.

“Hey, River,” Lenny mutters, sidling up close. “Once we make camp, maybe you and me—”

I stop. Turn. He nearly trips over his own feet.

“If you ever finish that sentence,” I say, voice flat, “I’ll make sure your next words come out the back of your skull.”

He goes pale. Bex doesn’t bother to hide her grin.

We keep walking.

The trail narrows, winding along the edge of a cliff. One slip, and it’s a long, wet fall to the river below. I keep low, every muscle coiled. The fog here is almost solid, a wall of green and gray, swallowing sound. I reach out with one hand, touch the slick bark of a pine to guide myself.

Suddenly, a faint, distant—something growls.

Not a wolf. Not an ogre. Something lower. Throatier. Like stone grinding over stone.

The team hears it too. I feel them tense behind me. Safety clicks. Boots shuffle.

I raise a hand.

Stillness.

Something’s ahead. I don’t know what yet—but we’re not alone in these mountains.

And whatever it is, it’s watching us.

I look down.

Another footprint. Bigger this time.

The path ends here.

Something’s wrong.

I don’t mean the usual wrong—this whole mission’s been a dance with death—but now it’s gone quiet. Too quiet. Even the birds have stopped bitching in the trees. That silence? That silence is a noose around my throat.

“Hold,” I whisper.

Nobody listens.

“River, it’s probably just a—” Garth begins.

That’s when the first boulder hits.

It doesn’t roll or tumble—it falls, slams straight down into the line ahead with a sick, bone-wet crunch that silences everything. The fog erupts with screaming. I see blood. Limbs. Bex spinning sideways through the air like a rag doll caught in a gale.

“Ogres!” I shout, diving behind a knotted stump as another boulder whips past, close enough to shear hair off my temple.

They come roaring from the trees like they were born in the bark—hulking slabs of gray flesh and muscle, their tusks stained red, their eyes glowing yellow through the mist. Each one’s the size of a siege engine, skin bristling with embedded nails and armor made from dead things. One of them swings a club that used to be a whole damn tree, roots and all.

I aim.

Breathe.

Squeeze.

The bullet whines through the air—curves left, right, then strikes one dead in the eye. He jerks backward with a wet pop. Brain matter sprays the fern behind him. One down.

“Cold iron!” I yell. “Only the eyes or neck!”

But it’s already too late.

Bex gets caught mid-sprint. A tree-trunk club slams into her side with a sound like an axe splitting wet wood. Her spine folds. She flies. Lands twenty feet off the path in a twisted arc. Doesn’t move again.

“Fuck!”

Lenny screams next. Tries to run. One ogre snatches him by the waist, grinning. Not angry—almost pleased. Like a man about to bite into a hot pie. Lenny thrashes. The ogre lifts him, gazes into his face…then bites his head clean off. Spits the skull into the fog like an olive pit.

Garth doesn’t even get a scream. Just a boulder that turns him into paste.

Gunfire erupts around me, but it’s panic, not precision. Shots go wild. The air reeks of sulfur, piss, and blood. I drop two more mags, focus, breathe. Another shot hits an ogre in the throat. He stumbles, gurgles, but doesn’t fall.

“Fall back!” I bark. “Fall the fuck back!”

Nobody’s left to obey.

The last man, Tod, swings his rifle like a club. He lands a hit. Then an ogre kicks him so hard his torso splits from his hips. His legs stay standing for a second—then collapse.

I’m alone.

I bolt through the trees, lungs burning, legs screaming. My boots skid across wet leaves as I crash out onto open rock—and freeze.

The cliff.

I stagger to the edge and gape down. It’s a gods-damned ravine—wide as a canyon, with a river boiling at the bottom like it wants to tear me limb from limb. I kick a loose rock off the edge. It spins downward forever. No splash. Just the howling wind between.

Then a sound—shrill, shrieking.

A boulder whistles past my ear, so close I feel the heat of its wake. It slams into the cliff beside me and explodes, spraying stone shards.

No choice.

I scream something—I don’t even know what—and hurl myself into the air.

For one heartbeat, everything slows.

The roar of the ogres fades.

The world turns quiet and syrup-thick. My body hangs in the fog, arms flailing, eyes wide. I feel the weightlessness—feel my guts trying to climb into my throat.

Then gravity finds me.

The air screams past. I twist, tumble, crash through mist and shadow.

The river punches the breath from my lungs. It’s not a splash. It’s a body-slam from the gods. The cold is so violent it stops my heart for a second. Then I’m tumbling through black water, spinning, choking, clawing for light. The current grabs me and drags me under.

The river is a bastard.

It slams into me, tosses me like a toy, then shoves me under so long I forget what air feels like. I kick, claw, gasp—none of it matters. The current’s a thousand cold hands dragging me by the ribs, turning me end over end, squeezing the breath out of my lungs until I see stars bursting behind my eyelids.

I break the surface just long enough to puke up river water and scream.

Then it yanks me under again.

I don’t know how long it goes on. Minutes? Hours? It could be years for all I know. I’m battered, bruised, drowning over and over again in a freezing hell with no top or bottom.

Then my hand hits something.

I don’t think—just grab.

A log. Slick with moss, half-rotten and stinking like death. But it floats. Gods, it floats. I hook an arm over it, wheezing, bleeding from somewhere—I can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel my legs, but the bark’s real beneath my nails.

“Hold,” I mutter. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s cracked and broken, like dry parchment rubbing glass.

I clamp down like it’s my lifeline, because it is.

The trees blur past on either side, gray-green streaks through the fog, and the sky’s a smear of ash above. Every second feels like a decade. The current keeps pulling, but slower now. I drift. I float. I bleed.

There’s blood in the water. Mine. Maybe someone else’s. I can taste it—metal and salt and mud.

My eyes sting. My throat’s raw. My chest burns.

My ears ring with the river’s roar, and underneath it, I hear something.

Laughter.

Not the kind from the ogres. That was guttural, violent, full of bloodlust.

This?

This is different.

It’s deep. Bone-deep. A low rumble that vibrates through the water, through the log, through my skull. Like mountains laughing. Like the forest itself found something funny.

It’s not cruel, but it ain’t kind either.

It’s old.

Ancient.

And it’s amused.

Like whatever’s out there saw what happened to me, to my squad, and chuckled at the absurdity of it all.

I try to lift my head, to look, to see—but my vision’s smeared, my body’s done. My grip slips. I barely keep my arm wrapped around the log.

That laughter echoes in my ears, chasing me into the dark.

It’s the last thing I remember.

Then the river swallows me again—and the world goes black.