The first thing Jack learned about dying was that it did not improve his timing.
One moment, he had been a man with a name that mattered in small, private ways. The next, he was a pressure inside stone, a heat in metal, a pulse trapped in a shell that had fallen from the sky. There was no tunnel of light. There was an impact. There was the ugly, intimate sensation of being packed into himself.
The world announced itself with pain and taste.
Stone around him rang like a struck bell. Dust poured through fractures and scraped over plates that were not skin. Something inside his chest, if it could be called that, thumped in a cadence too old to be a heart. He tried to inhale. Air rasped across inner ridges. The breath brought in grit, iron, and the faint, dry sweetness of blood that was not his.
His eyes opened.
Sight came in layers, not pictures. Heat-lines clung to shattered rock. The sky was a hard blue sheet above a wound in the mountains. Sunlight broke across splintered stone and glinted off the crater's lip. His new vision did not care about beauty. It measured distance, movement, warmth, and weakness.
He flexed. The meteor shell had been a coffin and a womb; it cracked with a sound like a breaking tooth. He pushed. Plates shifted over the muscle. Talons gouged stone. His limbs did not obey the memory of joints. They answered to leverage.
When he hauled himself free, the air hit him like a slap.
The Bone Mountains stood around him in crooked spines, pale and jagged, thrust up from the earth as if the world had tried to crawl away and failed. Beyond the broken ridges lay a smear of tan and gold: the edge of the Great Sand Sea, vast and indifferent. Wind combed the slopes and carried sand in thin sheets that hissed across rock.
Jack stared at it all and waited for panic.
Panic arrived, inspected his body, and left. Something else took its place, large and immediate.
Hunger.
It was not a metaphor. It was a directive.
His mouth, if it was a mouth, opened with a clicking spread of mandibles and inner hooks. He tasted the air again. Scents came with meaning attached, not memories. Old goat. Lizard. Bird. Dry rot. Mineral water far below. And, faint but sharp, the trace of smoke and dung that meant people.
The idea of people did not bring comfort. It brought salivation.
He tried to think like a man. He forced a list into his mind with the stubbornness of habit.
One: I am alive.
Two: I am not human.
Three: This is either proof of the afterlife or a personal joke.
The last thought should have made him laugh. The sound that came out was a low scrape, as rock dragged across rock.
He looked down at himself.
He stood lower than a horse, longer than a man, broader than a wolf. His hide was layered in dark plates that caught the light like dull metal. Between the plates, tough tissue flexed, pulsing with heat. A ridge of spines ran along his back to a tail built for balance and violence. His forelimbs ended in hooked claws meant for climbing and tearing. His head was an armored wedge with eyes set wide for hunting. There was no softness anywhere. There was no place a blade would slip in easily. That knowledge did not come from pride. It came from design.
The Tao Tei. The name surfaced from somewhere in Jack's head with the certainty of a label on a jar.
A devouring beast, a curse brought upon the world by the gods for the arrogant attitude of an emperor.
He took a step and almost fell. His center of gravity sat farther forward than he expected. He corrected, placing his claws with deliberate care. The rock underfoot vibrated with his weight.
A second step felt easier. The third felt natural.
He climbed.
The crater had gouged into a steep slope. He scrambled up using claws and brute traction, shards of his fallen shell skittering and breaking behind him. At the lip, he paused and lifted his head into the wind.
The smell of people sharpened.
Not close. Not immediate. Hours away, maybe less, carried in gusts that threaded through the mountain gaps. His instincts read it like print: a line of movement, a trail of sweat, leather, horses, and fear.
Horses.
The word brought a memory of softness and warmth, of leaning into an animal's neck. The scent in the air brought none of that. It brought meat.
He blinked his eyes and felt something like nausea. The human part of him tried to place rules between himself and what he was becoming. Rules needed leverage. Hunger had leverage.
He moved forward, placing the scale of rules and hunger further away.
Down the far side of the ridge, the mountains sloped into broken valleys littered with white stone and black shale. Sparse thorn-bushes clung to cracks. Small lizards scuttled at his approach, too quick to catch without effort. A hawk circled high above, then drifted away, wise enough to avoid anything that did not fit its world.
Jack found water in a narrow cut where water had once flowed, now reduced to a cold trickle seeping between stones. He lowered his head and drank.
The act told him more than it should have. His tongue, rough and ridged, filtered grit. His throat tightened in a way that pushed water fast into him. His body hoarded it. In this land, water mattered more than gold.
He kept moving.
As the sun climbed, the wind rose. Sand from the Great Sand Sea began to intrude, thin at first, then constant, a fine abrasion that would have stripped skin raw. His plates did not care. Sand pattered over him like weak rain.
He began to understand his range. He could climb slopes that would have broken a man's ankles. He could leap from rock to rock with a spring that felt obscene. When he dug claws into stone, he left marks that would not fade quickly.
He also began to understand what his instincts wanted from this place.
It did not want shelter. It wanted territory.
It did not want food as much as it wanted dominance.
A shadow moved near a boulder ahead, and his body tensed before his mind finished seeing it. A mountain goat had been picking at a patch of scrub. It froze, legs locked, eyes wide.
Jack stared back.
He told himself to let it go. He told himself there was no need to kill on the first day, in the first hour of freedom, in a world where every story about monsters ended the same way.
His body did not ask his permission.
He lunged.
The distance vanished. His claws hit the goat's shoulder and pinned it against the stone. Bone cracked. The goat bleated once, high and thin, then the sound ended. His jaws closed, and his teeth met flesh with a wet certainty.
Taste flooded him, warm and shocking.
Meat, iron, fat. Life turning into fuel.
He ate too fast. He could not stop. He tore and swallowed, legs, bones, even the brain, which tasted like an ice cream to his new tongue, and the hunger did not ease so much as change shape. It became a steady pressure instead of a screaming void. His breathing slowed. His muscles loosened. Heat spread through him like a fire banked under ash.
When he finished, there was little of the goat left.
Jack lifted his head and looked at the mess against the rock. The human part of him recoiled. The Tao Tei part of him evaluated the remains as a good start.
He cleaned his jaws by scraping them along stone, leaving dark smears.
Then he listened.
Far away, a faint rhythm carried through the gaps in the mountains. Hooves. Many hooves. And voices, thin with distance. Not the lilting cadence he remembered from television accents, but something harsher.
He climbed again, faster this time, driven by the promise of more.
At the top of a ridge, he found a view that made the world feel too large.
To the south and east, the Great Sand Sea rolled out in pale dunes and heat shimmer. To the north, the Bone Mountains stretched like the ribs of a dead god. Westward, beyond broken hills and red rock, the land opened into desolation that could only be the Red Waste. Somewhere beyond that lay Qarth, if the maps in his head were not lying. Somewhere farther still lay seas and cities and Westeros with its petty wars and grand betrayals.
Jack did not belong anywhere in that chain of places.
Below him, in a winding valley, a small caravan picked its way through a pass.
Three wagons. Two dozen riders. Horses with their heads wrapped in cloth against the sand. The men wore loose layers and headscarves, their skin darkened by the sun. Spears and curved blades caught the light. A banner hung limp in the dry air, cloth dyed deep purple with gold thread.
Qartheen, then, or traders close enough to Qarth to steal its colors.
Jack watched them and felt his mouth fill again.
He also felt something else, a thin coil of fear, not from them but from himself.
If he went down there, they would see him. They would scream. They would run. They would try to kill him. Their fear would make them sloppy. His hunger would make him fast.
He could slaughter them. He knew it with the calm certainty of geometry.
He could also do something harder.
He could learn.
Jack crouched low behind the ridge's broken spine and forced himself to breathe slowly. He fixed his gaze on the caravan and tracked their spacing, their guards, their pace. He listened for words, hoping for something familiar. The wind stole most of it. What remained sounded like a language that did not care whether he understood it.
He stayed still as the caravan passed near him.
One of the rear riders looked sideways, eyes narrowing under a wrapped scarf, as if he had felt the weight of being watched. The rider's hand tightened on his spear. He scanned the rocks, then spat and urged his horse forward.
Jack did not move until they had gone.
Only when the last wagon disappeared into the next cut in the mountains did he allow his claws to relax.
He had food. He had water. He had a direction. He had a shape that would make every human in this world reach for a weapon or a prayer, sometimes both.
He looked down toward the pass where the caravan had gone and made a decision that felt like dragging a blade across his own instincts.
He would follow.
Not to help them. Not to befriend them. He did not have the patience for fantasies.
He would follow because people meant information, and information meant survival. Hunger could wait. Hunger always waited. It just complained the whole time.
Jack turned from the ridge and began to run along the high ground, keeping the caravan's path in sight. Stone flew under his claws. Wind hammered his plates. The Bone Mountains watched, ancient and deadly.
In the valley below, the purple and gold banner bobbed onward, unaware that something from the sky had started hunting it, and had decided, for the moment, not to eat.