Tsorn ran for the clearing ahead, holding his torn, bloody arm to keep it from swinging lifelessly. Leon's screech told him the beast was right behind him. He didn't dare look. Looking could slow him down. Slowing down would get him killed. He spotted the red cord he'd tied around an upcoming limb and turned sharply. A bluff was just ahead, its sudden edge hidden by the thick foliage. To the Right, the hill rose sharply, creating a wall on one side, which lead right up to the edge of the drop. But between the rise and the valley, there was a small lip. Large enough to run on, but narrow enough that you had to be very careful where you stepped or else you'd be rolling down a hill too steep to stop yourself until the bottom, some fifty paces below. And the embankment was so steep down there, not even a drake could climb back up. Further up the valley, the embankment got steeper, turning it into a full cliff. All of this was necessary to his plan. And why he chose it over the other thousand valleys in the territory. If only he stayed ahead of the wild hunger chasing behind him.
A low growl warned him, teeth and claws were on their way, just as he reached the embankment, he dove for the lip.
In the sudden turn, he almost lost his footing, but desperation and years of training helped him fight the impulse to tuck and roll; instead grabbing a tree branch he swung himself back on to the game trail along the lip. The sound of tearing earth and clawed wood told him the Greck hadn't expected the maneuver and was wrestling gravity as it found itself tumbling down the slope of the hill that he'd just avoided. He was hoping the Greck would have fallen right in, but from what he'd seen, she was more agile than that, so he moved for plan B. The maneuver did give him a few extra seconds. Each one counted now. A pain in his ankle told him he'd taken the turn too sharply, but there was no time to worry about that. He shot down a vial of Tiem, a powerful painkiller, his face souring at the bitterness. It would make thinking harder, but if he was busy fighting down the pain in his own body, the Greck would tear him to pieces before he had a chance to think. The adrenaline would have to help him fight to think for the moment. As the waves of lightness hit his head, the pain in his ankle lessened and he quickened his pace.
A scream of desperation sounded from behind him, telling the Greck was already back on his path, though struggling with the narrowness of the trail. And none too soon either. If he got too far ahead, the whole plan would have been shot. It was less than a dozen feet to the objective. The Greck was smart; if it suspected he was leading it into a trap, it might cut the chase off and retreat back to it den.
That would mean days of misspent planning and labor. He started to hobble again on his bad foot, giving the Greck time to catch up. The little theater lulling the Greck in. He could hear it behind him. Hundred paces. Fifty. Twenty. Ten. The beast roared victoriously.
Tsorn jumped the last ten feet, the Tiem giving him supernatural strength. The snarl from the Greck, was full of resentment and surprise. It knew it had been tricked. But it was too late. The lip the Greck had landed on was already sliding away under the force of its landing. The Greck tried to backtrack but every step sent buckets of earth raining into the valley, further enmiring its legs in the thick, heavy clay of the hillside. On the reinforced pathway that he'd jumped to, Tsorn grabbed the vine-rope, leading to the framework of branches he'd hammered into the trailside. Pulling it out, it displaced the delicate support of the earth, stealing the last bit of support for where the Greck was standing. In a slow, almost comical slide of earth and scales and claws, the Greck slid away from the face of the cliff down into the valley.
The Greck crooned as its last footholds crumbled away, tearing clawfuls of earth down with it as it tried desperately to climb to the reinforced lip where Tsorn stood. But even as it gained ground, Tsorn condemned it, picking up the pole he'd left there and pushing the Greck down into his trap. He felt grim satisfaction after the weeks of being hunted, watch the Greck balefully side into the valley.
The valley wasn't deep enough to kill the drake, but it was deep enough to injure it. Not to mention all the earth that would subsequently bury it, even momentarily. From where he stood, Tsorn could see the Greck, land, heavily, splashing into the shallow creek flowing through it. Soil and clay still tumbling down on top of it, though the majority of the landslide was finished. The Greck was stuck, muddy and partially buried, but alive. It would dig itself out in a matter of minutes, aided by the flow of water. An hour at the latest. But it would be tired, and hungry and wounded. In strange territory and routed into a narrow valley with only one exit. If he was lucky, the Greck would start up the the wrong way and find the cliff face at one end of the valley before needing to back track to the entrance where Tsorn would be waiting. If not, it just meant he had that less time to waste. Everything else was ready for the final part of the plan. He just needed to get into place.
A month's worth of planning, and it would be over in a few hours. The first week, Tsorn had barely slept more than a few hours a night. He spent the daytime exploring his quarry's territory; game trails, watering holes, nesting pads, valleys and ravines, the lay of the land. Once he had a pretty good grasp of the area, he soured the water sources. Nothing lastingly harmful; a Tart pill dissolved slowly at the head of the streams and creeks, making the water bitter to drink and prompting mild nausea. It would drive the normal game out of the valley, depriving the Greck of a food source. Then he started leaving bait out in the open, lulling the Greck out. He banked on the Greck taking obvious bait rather than trekking miles to find fresh herds.
As the Greck got more and more accustomed to eating his snacks, Tsorn got the opportunity to study his prey. To his surprise, the Greck was female. Generally smaller than males, females were also usually less aggressive. Though the rabid territorial-ism made more sense, since nesting females were more protective of the nests. But by the size of her crown and the strips on her back, she was well past egg-bearing age. There must have been an exceptional event to drive her to expand her territory so aggressively, when she had no nest. It was indescribably deviant from the norm. But then again, Emperor Drakes were always exceptions.
For a female she was exceptionally large, but compared to even average adult Grecks she was still small. Drakes often began growing again once their crowns reached a certain maturity, but The Empress, as Tsorn began to think of her, was still quite small despite her advanced age. After a few days, he realized why. While most drakes got larger and stronger, they used their spitting abilities to compensate for their lack of mobility. They could shoot farther and faster, with greater accuracy, so they used it to hunt rather than chasing and wrestling their prey to the ground. Because of the lack of exercise, most ancient drakes were slow and lazy as lizards. But the Empress was anything but slow. If anything, she was faster than even adolescent Grecks. Faster than any drake he'd ever seen.
Female drakes occasionally mutated without the ability to spit. Their ferocity was often a defensive posture more than anything else. They were excellent hunters, but the lack of the offensive maneuver. It was one reason many hunters believed females never reached Emperor status. Certainly this was the first time Tsorn had ever heard of one. But now it made sense why she was so cautious. And why she so aggressively marked her territory. It was to avoid a showdown between full grown Grecks with the spitting ability. But if her speed was any indication, she'd still have the upper hand in a showdown. After that, Tsorn had to adjust his plan. He had thought he was facing a near century old male Emperor Greck. Something slow but enormously strong. But so poorly disappointed, he needed to rethink his strategy, since most of the gear he'd brought with him was worthless now.
He started with letting a few wild hogs back into the valley, to watch her hunt, and get a better understanding of how she fought. Out of the three he release, he only saw one taken, and that one only just barely. Which meant she was even faster and smarter than she seemed at first. She used cover and stealth rather than brute strength. Closing the distance with speed before prey could sense her.
But she knew he was watching. As closely as he watched, he couldn't get a good mark on her. The only thing he could think of why she hadn't slain him his first hour in her territory was that she had been hunted before, and knew how dangerous a professional hunter was. If she'd suspected he was an amateur, he wouldn't have survived the first night. From then he knew it was only a matter of time before she made her move on him.
His hand was forced though when he woke up to her creeping up on his campsite in the middle of the night. Leo's screech was the only warning he had, before he dove for cover, her black form blinking against the night, straight through his camp sight, clawing the earth he'd been laying in a heartbeat before. She was gone again, before he could gage where she was. He never even saw her, but he was certain that night was the closest he'd ever come to dying in all his years of hunting. He used every trick in his book to spook her off, flares, bombs, smoke, and whistles; but in the end he was forced to ditch all his belonging and jump a ravine into a river, in the pitch dark, to avoid being killed and eaten. Even as he swam blindly, he could feel her eyes on him from the dark. The next couple days he spent just trying to stay ahead of her, Leon his eyes and ears, as he ran blindly across an unexplored side of her territory. He found refuge in an old Storm-Bear pit. The bones in the entrance were fresh, but he covered himself in old skins disguising himself as leftovers, knowing Storm-Bears refuse to eat carrion. The Empress stalked the den for a few nights but refused to meet the Bear in open confrontation, and left him after a few days. And it was in those few days that he'd come up with his plan.
So good!
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