The eastern grasslands sparkled with a golden hue. Down in the riverbed, the Silverstream hissed quietly as it brushed against the rocks of its banks. The cool air not yet touched by the rising sun caused mists to hang low over the water like a mourning veil. On a smooth gray stone, in small pool upstream from the shattered otter home the serpent lay coiled.
On a smooth, sun-warmed stone at the river’s edge, Serathis lay coiled.
Still. Patient. Letting the heat soak deep into muscle and bone.
His scales, black marbled with sickly violet and green, caught the morning light in dull, oily flashes. Old wounds formed pale ridges along his flank, reminders of the night before. They stung, but he barely noticed. Pain was an old companion.
He tasted the air.
River silt. Late-season pollen. Mushrooms rotting under wet leaves.
And beneath it all, the ghost of something else, fear, faint but familiar. It lingered like smoke on the wind.
He let the warmth lull him, his coils loosening one ring at a time. His eyelids lowered, not fully, just enough to quiet the world.
And he drifted.
Not into sleep…
But into memory.
The comet was always the first thing that came when his mind slipped.
There had been no warning, no sound, no scent, no shifting of earth. Just a sudden tearing of the sky, a wound of black fire ripping across the firmament. The stars themselves seemed to flinch aside as the shape descended, dragging a tail of shadow that bled into night.
The river beneath it had changed.
Turned darker.
Thicker.
Wrong.
Light struck the water and became something else, something with weight and hunger. As it passed overhead, the world tilted; for a moment he could not tell sky from river, or river from void.
He remembered sliding into the water.
He remembered drinking.
He remembered the taste, metal, cold, ancient, like swallowing the breath of a dead god.
He remembered the shift.
His mind had opened like a wound. Thoughts he had never known he could have surged in, violent and bright. The world sharpened, edges too clear, sounds too loud. Understanding carved itself into him with all the grace of a blade.
He remembered the terror.
He remembered the awakening.
He remembered everything.
The memory ended as suddenly as it came, leaving only the quiet rush of the river and the warmth of the sun on his scales.
He opened his eyes.
The mist had thickened.
The forest whispered.
Something moved far upstream.
Serathis lifted his head, tongue tasting the world anew.
The day had begun, and hunger waited.
The warmth on the stone should have soothed him.
Instead, it slipped away.
Serathis lifted his head again, tasting the air as if the world might have shifted while his eyes were closed. The mist curled around his body in slow, drifting strands, and the forest beyond the river blurred at the edges, shapes bleeding into one another.
He blinked.
Once.
Twice.
The trees did not settle into place.
He tried to remember why he was here, coiled on this stone, listening to the river murmur under its thin veil of steam. The memory of dawn was there, soft light, cold air. but everything after tangled and frayed.
Had he hunted last night?
Had he slept?
Had something bitten him?
He tasted his own wounds and couldn’t recall when they happened.
A low hiss escaped him, unbidden. His mind crawled when he needed it sharp, and the dullness stirred a deep, restless fury.
This was happening more often.
Thoughts that once cut clean now snagged on one another like thorns. Sometimes he remembered a scent from a hunt a century old but forgot the place he’d just come from. Sometimes he remembered voices, shrill prey screams, the crackle of fire, the hiss of things that lived underground, but could not place them in time.
Sometimes the memories overlapped, stacked, wrong.
He tried to summon clarity.
Nothing sharpened.
Only the comet memory remained intact, unblurred, untouched.
Everything else frayed at the edges.
A pulse of anger rippled through his coils, tightening them against the stone. He flexed, testing muscle that had once obeyed him with perfect precision. It responded slowly. Stiffly. The strength was still there, but buried under a drag he despised.
Age.
Poison.
Too many summers carrying the comet’s fire inside him.
He hated it.
Serathis coiled tighter, as if squeezing might wring the fog from his thoughts. He tasted the air again, trying to anchor himself in the present.
River silt.
Rotting leaves.
A faint trace of prey from upstream.
Good.
Real.
Now.
Yet even as he focused, memory and present blurred again: a scream, a child, blood in the water. Was that last night? Or a decade past? Or imagined?
He could not hold the threads.
He hissed again, louder, and the mist recoiled from his breath.
The world steadied for a heartbeat.
One heartbeat.
The shadow slid across the stone in a long, silent sweep.
Serathis froze, coils tightening by instinct rather than thought. The forest sounds dulled. Even the river seemed to hush as the shape above the mist grew sharper.
Wings.
Broad. Powerful.
Descending.
The eagle broke through the low fog with a scream that split the morning apart. Its talons were wide as a beaver’s skull, curved like hooked knives, and they came down with the full weight of a predator certain of its victory.
The blow struck like falling timber.
Talons raked deep across Serathis’s back, tearing scales loose in a spray of dark flashes. Pain flared white-hot. The stone beneath him cracked under the force of his twisting body.
He lashed upward.
His tail whipped the air. The eagle dodged, beating its wings in a fury of feathers and wind, but not fast enough to escape his strike. Serathis coile, too slow, slower than he once was, and the eagle pressed the advantage, driving its claws deeper.
The river hissed as his blood struck the water.
He surged, jaws snapping open, fangs flashing. The eagle reared back, but he caught the edge of its wing. Venom entered the wound in an instant.
The eagle’s cry warped from triumph into agony.
It beat its wings wildly, desperate to wrench free. When its talons tore loose, Serathis felt the skin along his back rip open. Then weightlessness, an instant of drifting above the stone, before the earth rose up to meet him.
He struck the rocks with a sound like splitting branches.
The world jarred sideways. Mist blurred into sky, sky into water, water into memory. He tasted grit. Blood. The metallic tang of his own venom thrown back at him by the wind.
Above him, the eagle staggered through the air, its right wing hanging wrong. It circled once, jagged, faltering, before veering toward the treeline. It would die soon. Perhaps in minutes. Perhaps in an hour.
Serathis did not watch it go.
Pain throbbed along his ribs and spine. He breathed, shallow and ragged, each inhalation tugging at fresh tears in muscle and scale. His vision dimmed at the edges, but he forced it to narrow on a single truth:
He was still alive.
Still predator.
Still Serathis.
Slowly… Aching. Furious. He pulled himself from the broken stone. His tongue flicked weakly at first, then steadier.
New scent.
Warm.
Close.
Something small.
His coils dragged through wet leaves as he followed it into the underbrush, each movement a grind of pain. Roots scraped his wounds. Stones dug at his belly. He didn’t stop.
Hunger drove him.
Anger drove him harder.
The scent led to a narrow den beneath a tangle of roots. Earth packed tight around the tunnel mouth still held the shape of the muskrats that had passed through only moments before.
He pushed inside.
Their shrieks were small, frantic things.
Short-lived.
When silence returned, Serathis swallowed, tasted warmth, and finally allowed his battered body to sink into the cramped dark.
The mist outside drifted on, ignorant.
The river murmured.
The morning brightened.
And Serathis slept, coiled in pain and old shadows.