The vigil was a new kind of hell. The wind in the high pass was a living thing, a predator in its own right, slicing through our wool cloaks with icy, invisible claws. It sang a low, mournful song as it swept over the barren rocks, a constant, maddening whisper in the dark.
We lay in the brush-filled gully, five hundred yards from the ruined watchtower, and waited.
Garrick was a mountain of stillness to my right, his breathing so slow and deep he might have been carved from the same cold stone we hid behind. His patience was absolute, the discipline of a Master.
Leo, a few feet to my left, was equally still, but his stillness was different. It was the coiled, waiting patience of a spider, every sense extended, his spyglass rising in slow, economical movements every fifteen minutes to scan the ruin.
I was the one struggling. My muscles, bunched and cold, ached with the suppressed need for motion. The dragon's blood humming in my veins hated this. It was an energy of action, of dominance, of sudden, explosive force. This passive, shivering silence was an insult to its nature.
'Prey hides,' the familiar, arrogant whisper echoed in my mind. 'Prey waits. We are the predator. We strike. We end this.'
'We are hunters,' I countered silently, my jaw clenched, forcing the Two-Heart Cadence to remain steady, a human rhythm against the dragon's impatient thrum. 'And hunters do not blunder into traps for the sake of pride.'
The hours crawled. The moon, a useless sliver, vanished behind the peaks, plunging the world into an even deeper blackness. Dawn was still a distant promise, an abstract concept.
Leo shifted, a movement so slight it was more a rumor than an action. "They're changing watch," he breathed, his voice barely audible over the wind, spyglass pressed to his eye. "Same two sentries. North and South. They just swapped positions. Forty minutes on, ten-minute break inside, then swap." He grunted. "Sloppy. Or... arrogant. They're not expecting company."
"Or they are," I murmured, my own Rhythmic Sense probing the darkness. The three cold, sharp signatures in the tower remained constant, their discipline unwavering. They felt like perfect soldiers, automaton-like in their calm. It was this, more than anything, that felt wrong. There was no fear, no boredom, no restless spike of Aether. Just a flat, cold readiness.
"Let's assume sloppy," Garrick rumbled, his voice a low vibration in the dark. "What's the plan?"
Leo collapsed his spyglass, the sound a soft, oiled snick. He began scratching a crude map in the dirt, using a shard of rock. "The tower is a simple square. Two floors, crumbling walls. North sentry, south sentry. One man resting inside, ground floor, likely by a fire. They're using the wind to cover their noise, but it covers ours too."
He looked at Garrick. "You are the hammer. As we discussed. Approach from the south, from that gully below the main ridge. It's their biggest blind spot. When we're in position, you create a diversion. A loud one. A rockslide, a sudden Aetheric flare. Something to draw their full attention south."
Garrick nodded once, a curt, solid motion. "A hammer," he confirmed.
Leo's gaze shifted to me. "The diversion pulls the south sentry's focus. He'll turn his back to the tower to look. That's your moment, Lancelot. You'll be positioned behind that cluster of boulders," he tapped the dirt, "thirty yards from his post. You have... three seconds. Get up the wall, silence him. He cannot make a sound. Use your dagger. No scales, no magic. Be a ghost."
My heart hammered, but I nodded. A clean, silent kill. "Understood."
"While you take the south, I take the north," Leo continued, his voice utterly flat. "His back will be turned to me as he moves to support his partner. Two sentries down, silent. We converge on the ground-floor entrance, meet Garrick, and take the last man inside. Three-on-one. Clean, fast, lethal. No survivors, no alarms. These men carry poison. We don't let them use it."
It was a solid plan. A classic ambush, exploiting distraction and superior numbers. It relied on speed, silence, and the perfect execution of three distinct roles.
"We move at first light," Leo concluded. "The grey half-light just before dawn. It plays hell with the eyes. Best cover we'll get."
We settled back into our cold, miserable vigil, the plan a cold comfort against the biting wind. The dragon's will quieted slightly, mollified by the promise of imminent, decisive action.
The sky began to pale, shifting from inky black to a deep, bruised purple. The first, faint hint of grey light touched the highest, most distant peaks, outlining the world in sharp, cold relief.
"Time," Leo breathed. "Move."
Garrick was gone, a mountain disappearing into the shadows, circling south. Leo and I began our own slow, agonizing crawl, moving from boulder to gully, our bellies scraping against the cold, rocky ground. It took us twenty minutes to cover the three hundred yards to our strike positions, my body screaming in protest, my senses on fire.
I settled behind my designated cluster of rocks, my heart a pounding drum. I could see the south sentry, a dark silhouette against the lightening sky, pacing his small section of the crumbling wall. I could feel his cold, calm signature. I drew my dagger, its steel a cold promise in my hand.
I looked north, trying to find Leo in the gloom. He was gone. Vanished. I had no doubt he was in position.
I waited. For Garrick's signal. For the rockslide.
I scanned the tower again, my senses sharp. And I saw something.
It was faint, almost invisible. A thin, dark line, barely thicker than a spider's silk, running from the base of the tower wall out into the scree-field, not twenty yards from my position. A wire. A tripwire.
My blood turned to ice. It wasn't a defensive trap for the tower. It was an offensive trap, facing outward, designed to catch anyone approaching.
"Leo," I whispered, my voice tight, knowing he couldn't hear me. My eyes frantically scanned the ground around me. And I saw another. And another. The entire approach to the tower was a web of them.
'It's a trap,' my mind screamed. 'The tower is a honeypot. They wanted us to see them.'
Leo's voice came, sharp and sudden, from a cluster of rocks I hadn't even known he was near. "Hold! Lancelot, don't move. Abort."
He must have seen them too.
He raised his spyglass, his movements frantic now, desperate. He wasn't scanning the tower anymore. He was scanning the surrounding ridges, the high ground, the places a hunter would wait.
He froze, his spyglass fixed on a rocky outcrop a thousand yards to our east, a position that gave a perfect, commanding view of our gully, our approach path, and the tower itself.
"Gods," Leo breathed, his voice cracking, the cynicism shattered by pure, cold dread. He collapsed the spyglass. "A spotter. I missed him. Sloppy. Gods, I've gotten so sloppy."
"What?" I hissed, not daring to move.
"The apothecary clue... it was too easy," he rasped, his mind connecting the dots with terrifying speed. "The 'surveyor' story... too clean. The sentry routine... too predictable, too perfect. It was a performance. It was bait. The three men in that tower are bait."
He pointed with a trembling finger towards the eastern ridge. "The real team is up there. The leader. They've been watching us. Watching us plan, watching us move, watching us crawl right into the center of their pre-sighted kill box."
A new, cold dread washed over me, far colder than the wind. I pushed my Rhythmic Sense out, not at the tower, but past it, straining, pushing it towards the high ground Leo had indicated.
It was difficult, the distance at the very edge of my perception. But I felt it. A fourth signature. And a fifth. Colder, sharper, and far more powerful than the three in the tower, their Auras suppressed to an almost impossible degree, masked by the terrain. One of them… one of them felt immense. A deep, still, bottomless well of controlled, lethal power. A High Expert, maybe... maybe even a Low Master. The Huntsman.
The hunters had become the hunted. We weren't a scalpel preparing to strike. We were three mice in a barren field, frozen in the shadow of a hawk we had only just now seen circling high above.
And as I felt my Sense touch that cold, powerful signature, I felt it react. I felt it turn, a sudden, sharp spike of awareness, like a physical lance, aimed directly back at me.
He knew we were here. Now, he knew we knew.
The trap, I realized, hadn't just been sprung. It was about to close.