Nussudle ran until the camp became only a faint haunting sound behind him.
The eclipse turned the world strange. Firelight from the Ash Clan camp faded behind him, replaced by a half-darkness that made every dead tree look alive for a moment before revealing itself as only burned wood and twisted branches. The ground beneath his feet shifted between ash, cracked earth, and stone still warm from old heat. Every step hurt. Every breath scraped his throat.
He did not run straight.
The blind prisoner's warning stayed with him.
'Don't run straight.'
So Nussudle moved like prey that knew it was being watched. He cut left through broken trunks, doubled back once across a stretch of blackened roots, then climbed over a fallen branch the size of a bridge before dropping into a shallow gully. He kept low where he could. When the ground opened, he sprinted. When the dead trees thickened, he wove through them, letting their burned skeletons hide his body from distant eyes.
He did not know if the Ash Na'vi had already begun tracking him.
He did not know if they were laughing from the camp, giving him time, enjoying the thought of him exhausting himself before they came.
That thought nearly made him run faster.
He stopped himself.
Panic wasted strength.
Nussudle pressed one hand against his ribs and forced his breathing to slow as he moved. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Keep the feet light. Avoid soft ash where tracks would hold too clearly. Step on stone. Step on the root. Step where the heat had cracked the ground.
It was not enough.
He knew that too.
This was their land. Their ruin. Their hunting ground. They knew every ridge, every hollow, every false path. He was a stranger running blind through a dead forest with no weapon and no sky above clear enough to call Nova.
'Nova...'
The thought struck harder than the pain in his side.
He slowed near a cluster of burned trees, listening.
Nothing.
No cry from above. No answering pulse through the bond that he could trust. The connection was there, faint and damaged, but distance, injury, and exhaustion blurred it. He could feel life. Anger. Pain. But not direction.
"Hold on," he whispered.
He moved again after a moment to collect himself.
Time lost shape.
It could have been one hour. It could have been three. His legs burned until they felt separate from him. His shoulder throbbed with each jolt. Ash stuck to sweat and blood, turning his skin grey in streaks. Several times, he heard movement and froze, only for the sound to reveal itself as falling embers or shifting branches. Once something small and pale darted through the ash ahead of him, then vanished beneath a root.
The world remained dead, but not empty.
That made it worse.
Eventually, the ground dipped.
Nussudle caught the smell before he saw it.
Water.
Not sea. Not brine. Fresh water, faint beneath the smoke and ash, but unmistakable. His throat tightened with need so suddenly that it almost hurt. He moved toward it before caution fully caught up with him.
A small pond waited in a hollow between blackened stones.
It should not have been there.
That was his first thought.
The trees around it were dead. The ground was charred. Ash floated on the surface in thin grey patches. Yet the water remained, dark and still, reflecting the dying eclipse above.
Nussudle stopped at the edge.
His body screamed at him to drink.
His mind told him to wait.
He crouched slowly and scanned the ground around the pond. No movement. No obvious tracks, though ash had been disturbed in places by wind or old passage. A few dead branches lay half-submerged near the far bank. Stones ringed the water naturally enough, though some were too evenly spaced.
He should have left.
He knew that.
But his tongue felt swollen. His throat had gone dry enough that swallowing hurt. He had run for hours through smoke and heat with no water, and the thought of turning away from the pond felt impossible.
He reached down.
His fingers touched the surface.
The mechanism snapped.
A hidden cord pulled tight somewhere beneath the ash. Nussudle heard the sharp wooden crack a fraction before the spear launched.
He threw himself back on instinct.
Not fast enough.
The spear tore across the pond at impossible speed, cutting through the space where his head had been. Its stone tip passed close enough to split the air against his face. Pain opened immediately from his left temple down across his cheek.
Nussudle hit the ground hard.
For one stunned second, he felt nothing but heat.
Then blood ran.
It spilled down the side of his face, over his jaw, and into the corner of his mouth. He pressed a hand to the wound and pulled it away wet. The cut was long, from temple to chin, deep enough to wound but not kill, although this would indefinitely make hiding even harder.
The spear slammed into a dead tree behind him and sank halfway through the trunk.
Nussudle stared at it.
A trap.
'Of course, it was a trap.'
His own thirst had almost killed him.
Somewhere in the distance, a horn sounded.
Low.
Long.
Powerful enough to roll through the burned forest and vibrate in the hollow of his chest.
Nussudle went cold.
The hunt had begun.
He got up and ran.
Behind him, the pond sat still and dark, waiting for whatever prey came next.
The eclipse was ending.
Light began to return in thin lines along the edge of the sky. It did not bring comfort. It revealed too much. The dead forest emerged around him in clearer detail, stripped black and grey, every open space now visible, every ash field dangerous. Shadows shortened. Hiding would become harder with every passing moment.
Nussudle kept moving, blood running down his neck.
He did not look back.
At the Ash Clan camp, silence ruled before the horn.
Hundreds stood at the village entrance.
They gathered beneath the bone poles and hanging skulls, arranged in loose ranks that did not need order to feel organised. Ikrans crouched on scorched perches and broken stone ridges, wings twitching, eyes bright in the fading eclipse. Direhorses stamped the ash, their bodies painted with black and red handmarks. Others stood on foot, carrying spears, clubs, knives, hooks, nets, torches, and bundles of sharpened bone.
No one spoke.
Even the children were quiet.
The central fires burned behind them, low and hungry, painting every face with shifting orange. Some warriors had marked their mouths with ash. Others had drawn lines down their throats and across their chests. A few wore fresh bones at their belts, carved and polished, clicking together when they breathed.
This was not disorder.
This was a ritual.
The hunt was not simply a pursuit. It was a ceremony. It was a judgment. It was the appetite of those who are godless.
At the front stood the chief.
The severed queues still hung from his neck, and the fresh one taken the night before now rested among them. In one hand, he held the skull cup. It had been refilled. He watched the light returning to the sky with calm pleasure.
Beside him, the tattooed young woman stood with her arms folded, eyes fixed on the dead forest ahead. Her earlier laughter had faded into something sharper. Anticipation. Hunger without food. Violence waiting for permission.
The horn bearer stepped forward.
He was massive, his chest painted in concentric rings of ash and red clay. The horn in his hands had been made from some great dead creature, its surface carved with figures of hunters, flames, and bodies bent beneath them.
The chief raised two fingers.
The horn bearer inhaled.
Then he blew.
The sound tore through the camp and rolled into the wasteland.
For half a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the Ash Na'vi erupted.
Ikrans launched first, wings beating ash from the perches in great grey clouds. Riders leaned low, torches strapped to their saddles, flame trailing behind them as they climbed into the brightening sky. Direhorses surged forward next, hooves striking hard enough to throw sparks from black stone. Hunters on foot followed, fast and wild, vanishing between bone poles and dead trees with the ease of creatures born to ruin.
The sky began to burn.
As the sun returned, torches were lit one after another. Fire spread from hand to hand, from spear to club, from sling to wrapped bundles of resin-soaked fibre. The growing daylight did not weaken the flames. It made them worse, turning the horizon into a moving wall of orange points.
The hunt poured out of the village.
Hundreds of voices rose together.
Not a cheer.
A howl.
The chief remained at the entrance, watching them go.
A smile curved his mouth.
Behind him, something shuffled through the ash.
The blind prisoner came slowly, thin body bent but moving with strange certainty. No guard stopped him. Perhaps no one cared. Perhaps the chief had allowed it. His empty eye sockets faced the direction of the departing hunters, and his ruined mouth stretched into a devilish smirk.
"So," the blind man rasped. "Can I have his queue when you are done with his body?"
The chief did not turn at once.
For several seconds, he watched the last of the riders disappear into the blackened trees.
Then he looked sideways at the decrepit prisoner.
His smile deepened.
He nodded.
The blind man's mouth opened.
A howl escaped him, raw and delighted, rising thinly into the smoke.
The tattooed young woman laughed at the sound.
The chief finally lifted the skull cup and drank.
Far ahead, Nussudle heard the howls multiply behind him.
He pushed harder through the dead forest, one hand pressed to the bleeding cut across his face, feet striking ash and stone as the first shadows of riders passed across the ground.
The sun was rising.
And they were coming...