The Maw of the Trap
The air above Hollowreach Bay grew sharp with the scent of wet stone and salt. Waves rolled in slow and deep like the breath of something sleeping beneath the sea. Fog clung low to the ground, snaking between the ruined watchtowers like a living thing. Somewhere beyond that gray, the creature moved—wearing stolen faces, echoing stolen voices.
Alaric stood over the map table, inked vellum pinned down by knives, claws, and dreamstones. Around him, the commanders of the Accord leaned in: Caelen, Mira, Packmistress Rhoan, Seer Athela, and even the Greybrood twins, blood-sworn berserkers with a penchant for chaos.
"This thing learns," Alaric said, fingers hovering above Hollowreach's crescent shoreline. "It doesn't just kill. It studies. Each victim adds to its shape—adds to its mind. We don't have the luxury of striking after. We lure it now, while it's still forming."
Mira tapped the central mark on the map: the Shale Pillars, a natural formation of jagged black stone rising out of the bay like broken teeth. "This is where it pauses. It mimics grief there—draws in survivors by wailing like the lost. I felt it in the aether. It's feeding on mourning."
Caelen's jaw tightened. "We're going to use the grief of others as bait?"
"We're going to use our own," Mira said softly.
Alaric nodded. "We plant echoes—dream-flame wards. Memories. Symbols of deep loss, sharpened and tuned. It'll come thinking it's devouring more emotion. But it'll be walking straight into a cage."
---
Preparations began before the next moonrise. Accord mages stitched lines of runes beneath the sand and salt, invisible until activated. The Wyrmkin forged obsidian pylons that vibrated when touched by aether, singing low and mournful notes that echoed like heartbeat.
Athela stood before a bloodwell and summoned ancestral pain—channeling the memory of the Wyrmkin exile into woven strands of sorrow. Mira linked the strands into a dreamcatcher six feet across, glowing faintly with silver heat.
"These are not just traps," she explained to the wary soldiers. "They're reflections. We'll show the creature what we want it to believe—that we are weak, fragmented, aching. We'll mirror its hunger with our own. And when it reaches to consume…"
Alaric raised a hand, and Caelen drove his blade into the earth. The ground pulsed, and a dozen ward circles flared to life across the bay like stars underfoot.
"We close the teeth."
---
Days passed. Each night, Mira dreamwalked through the aether, dancing dangerously close to the creature's awareness. She could feel it circling the bay, not just as a beast—but as a mimic, an idea sharpening.
She saw its shapes.
An old mother clutching a burnt child.
A lover standing knee-deep in surf, calling for the dead.
A wounded knight dragging half a shield through water.
The thing was perfecting its performance.
And Mira fed it what it wanted.
She made herself the broken dreamer in her walks, the mourning seer. Her emotions, raw and seeping, became the honey that drew it in. It watched her through cracks in reality, emboldened by her visible vulnerability.
But the truth was sharper.
She wanted it to see her.
And it did.
On the sixth night, it began to approach the real world.
---
Alaric was already in position by then, crouched in the water-slick shadows of the Shale Pillars. With him, a team of elite hunters—scouts from the Ridgefall wars, Caelen himself at his side. They did not speak. Every movement had been drilled. Every step measured.
Above them, invisible from the surf, Mira waited with the binders: dream-channelers and memory weavers. They held the cage together. One frayed line, and the creature would escape—stronger, more evolved.
It came on the seventh night.
A shape like a man with eyes too wide and mouth too still. Draped in seaweed, smelling of salt and ash and regret. It sang without breath. A mourning ballad stolen from Mira's own memories. A melody no one but Alaric and she should have ever known.
It knew them now.
And still it walked into the trap.
As its bare feet touched the sand, Alaric gave the signal.
Runes flared, red and gold. The dreamcatcher above ignited with a soundless shockwave. The surf around the Pillars inverted as the binding net fell—a woven sphere of light and sorrow. The creature shrieked—not just in pain, but confusion. It was seeing things it hadn't yet devoured. Memories it hadn't yet earned.
Alaric stepped forward, eyes burning gold.
"Do you like pretending to be us?"
The creature hissed, its stolen face melting, warping into Mira's expression, then Caelen's, then Alaric's own.
He lunged.
The hunters struck with blessed steel and ward-etched arrows. Dreamweavers anchored every lunge with pulses of memory. They forced it to see—not their pain, but their rage. Not loss, but wrath. Not fear, but truth.
It screamed again—now in its own voice, its own forgotten sound.
As the final binders closed the cage, it buckled.
Alaric stepped over its twitching form.
"Now we learn what you are."