HUNTER/ED

Only one of your mouths speaks.

The Red Summit Lodge. It’s a place of revelry, friendly competition, and gentlemanly discourse. If you were to ask them, they would rank themselves among the greatest hunters who have ever lived, responsible for taking legendary lives and reaping legendary riches. Their lodge has hosted and born kings, and remains alone in the favor of the Amarlans, dutifully delivering exquisite pelts and trophies to the King.

You would think, with all of those resources at their disposal, they might dig just a little deeper when a mystery presents itself.

But, they have one fatal flaw, as all great things do: ego.

You arrived at their door cloaked first in their glory. You told them their password, and then their names. You cut their questions off at the pass, gave them information that only he could know, and gave them that confident smile they knew so well that they could read it off the lips of a dragon.

They could not see anything but their own reflection in your scales, and you wasted no time in nurturing that noxious priority. You were one of them, and you were a legend among legends, and they would surely share in your glory. Your light would burn their shadows into the walls of hunter myth. You brought them the body of a truly ancient dragon like hadn’t been felled in centuries. With the power of your new, booming voice, you told them all about how you struck it down with but one single masterful arrow.

They were eager to accept that first round of poison. Your lies passed almost unexamined, because questioning the riches and renown that your hunt would bring them might mean losing it.

You watched as they picked your corpse clean, stripped it of its mighty horns, its sandy scales and brutal teeth. The moment will come when you will do the same to them. They grasp so desperately for a sense of power and notoriety, that their names might be etched at least alongside the greats. You will make it so. . . but they will not like how.

They will know the indignity of being hunted. All in time.