Chapter 31: THE TRACKS IN THE MUD
Three-toed, wrong-spaced, dragging something that wasn't a tail.
The tracks started at the torchline where the wrong-shaped thing had retreated and continued east toward the swamp margin. The frozen mud had preserved them well enough to read — better than I'd expected, given the chaos of the surge.
I crouched at the first clear impression and let the CDM work.
[ANATOMY READ — PARTIAL OVERLAY (ABSENT ENTITY)]
[STRIDE LENGTH: 1.4m — INCONSISTENT]
[WEIGHT ESTIMATE: 180-220kg]
[LIMB COUNT: UNCERTAIN — 5 TO 7]
[WILDS REGISTRY: NO MATCH]
[APPROXIMATE CLASSIFICATION: W3-W4]
No match. In a Registry that now contained thirty-eight documented species plus Pip's eighty years of historical addenda, this thing had no classification.
[BEHAVIOR ANOMALY: RETREAT FROM COMBAT RATHER THAN TERRITORY-HOLD]
That detail mattered more than the physical specifications. The entity had been driven here, not hunting. Something had pushed it out of its territory the same way the Nekker Patriarch had been pushed out of his — displaced by whatever was leaking from forty meters below.
"The tracks continue another sixty meters," Kasimir said from behind me. He'd followed without being asked, maintaining a ten-meter distance that let him observe without crowding the investigation. "Then they enter the water."
I stood, brushing frozen mud from my knees. "You've heard sounds like this before."
"On the eastern road. Always from a distance." His expression was carefully neutral — the professional mask of someone delivering intelligence without editorializing. "Never this close to human settlement. Never moving toward rather than away."
The gate was drawing things in. Or pushing things out. Or both.
I marked the track coordinates on my territory map and continued east.
Aelindra was waiting at the margin.
She'd walked the track line ahead of us, her Elven eyes reading the disturbance pattern with the practiced attention of someone who had spent decades observing things most humans couldn't see.
"Gate-adjacent displacement," she said without preamble. Her Common carried the slight formality of someone speaking a second language, but her meaning was precise. "In Elder Speech, the term translates roughly as 'things pushed through the wrong door.'"
I stopped walking. "Your people have a term for this."
"We recorded the phenomenon once. Eight centuries ago, around the time of the original Conjunction." She gestured toward the waterline where the tracks disappeared. "In the years before the worst period, things arrived through wrong doors. Displaced. Disoriented. Some were hostile. Some were simply lost."
"What did your people do?"
"Treated them all as threats." Her expression shifted — something that might have been regret, filtered through eight hundred years of historical distance. "I consider this a historical error."
I pulled out my documentation journal and began writing. "Tell me everything you remember about the pattern."
She did. Ten minutes of details — timing, behaviors, how the displaced entities moved through territories they didn't understand, how the frequency increased before the Conjunction's peak and decreased after.
When she finished, I had three pages of notes and a framework that aligned with everything the CDM had shown me about the gate's deterioration.
"You treat this as relevant data," she said, watching me close the journal.
"It is relevant data."
"Most humans would treat it as folklore."
"Most humans haven't seen the things I've seen in this swamp."
She studied my face for a moment, then nodded once and walked back toward the settlement without further comment.
I approached the margin alone.
Kasimir and Gervin stayed at the perimeter — close enough to respond if something went wrong, far enough to give me space for what I needed to do.
The subsonic hum registered as pressure in my jaw. Not sound — vibration, the kind that bypassed the ears and resonated directly in bone. The same 14-18 Hz frequency I'd documented on my first day in the fief, stronger now than it had been then.
[CDM — PROXIMITY ALERT]
[CONJUNCTION GATE — SEAL INTEGRITY: 96%]
[STRUCTURAL DEGRADATION DETECTED]
[DEPTH: 40m]
[RECOMMEND PROXIMITY INVESTIGATION]
Ninety-six percent.
Four percent already gone.
I did the arithmetic forward in my head, extrapolating from what I knew about the rate. If the deterioration was linear, that meant decades before failure. If it was accelerating — and the frequency of gate-driven monster behavior suggested it was — the timeline could be much shorter.
I pulled up the territory map overlay and marked three investigation approach vectors. Northern route through the dense tree line. Middle route across the open marsh. Southern route along the established track corridor.
I didn't share the percentage with anyone. The number was mine to carry until I understood what it meant.
Behind me, Gervin was repairing the spear he'd been working on since the surge. The methodical scrape of stone against metal was oddly comforting — the sound of someone preparing for the next fight without dwelling on the last one.
"That thing," he said without looking up. "Is it coming back?"
"Probably yes."
He nodded and kept working.
The tracks ended at the waterline. The water was the color of old iron, tinted by whatever was bleeding up from forty meters below.
Somewhere under that surface, the gate was four percent gone.
I didn't yet know whether four percent meant a century or a season.
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