Track 3 — "Stampede and Prey" (Run For Your Life) They hear it before they see it. A sound that has no equivalent on Earth — not thunder, not an earthquake, not a crowd, but something that borrows from all three. A low, building pressure in the ground beneath their feet that arrives in the soles of their shoes before it arrives in their ears. The forest around them goes silent first. The birds — creatures that are not quite birds, that have extra joints in their wings and eyes on both sides of their heads — stop calling all at once. The undergrowth stops moving. Even the dying flowers seem to hold what is left of their glow. Then the trees at the far end of the clearing begin to shake. Not from wind. From something moving through them that is too large and too fast and too frightened to care what it walks through. The canopy shudders. A tree at the edge of the clearing — old, thick as a car, roots deep — leans, holds, then does not hold. It falls slowly the way large things fall, with a kind of inevitability, and the sound it makes when it hits the ground travels through the earth and up through every person standing on it. Serath says one word. The group runs. What comes through the treeline is enormous. It is one of the grazing giants from the opening — the same species, possibly the same creature, though there is no way to know. Its bioluminescent markings, which pulsed slow and steady in the morning light of the valley, now flicker in rapid, arrhythmic bursts, fear signals firing faster than the body can process them. Its eyes are white-edged and rolling. It is not charging at anything. It is simply moving, at full speed, away from something behind it, and anything in its path is not a target — it simply ceases to matter. The group scatters. Serath pulls Erik one way. The heavyset man with the axe grabs Lina and goes the other. The two young fighters split without being told, each taking a different angle through the trees. The woman with the staff plants it for half a second, throws up a deflection ward that turns the creature's near-foot by a few critical degrees, and then runs. The giant passes through the clearing like weather. In its wake — silence for exactly two seconds. Long enough to breathe. Long enough to think it might be over. Then the smaller things come. They pour from the treeline in the spaces between the giant's footprints — predators, a dozen species of them, none larger than a horse, several much smaller, all of them moving with the particular frantic energy of animals that have completely abandoned hunting instinct in favor of pure flight. They are not chasing the group. They are not chasing anything. They are running from the same thing the giant is running from, and the group is simply in the way, and in the way is the same as prey. The first attack comes from the left — something low and fast and scaled, its jaws snapping at the nearest warm body, which happens to be one of the young fighters. He twists, takes the hit on his arm instead of his throat, goes down on one knee. The mage is already turning, hands moving, and something bright and sharp fires from his palm and the creature veers off shrieking. The young fighter gets up. He does not stop moving. Erik has never run like this in his life. He is fit the way a man with a full life is fit — he takes the stairs, he cycles on weekends — but this is not that kind of running. This is the kind where the ground is uneven and things are trying to kill him and Serath is ahead of him moving at a pace that should not be possible for a woman her age and he is doing everything he can to keep her in sight. She shouts directions without looking back — left, duck, step right, jump — and he follows them on instinct because there is no time to think and instinct, it turns out, is all he has. Behind him he can hear Lina. He cannot see her — she is with the heavyset man, somewhere to his right, separated by a stand of trees — but he can hear her. She is not screaming. She is breathing, hard and controlled, and occasionally she says something to the man beside her in a tone that is focused rather than panicked, and the man — who has said almost nothing since they met — responds in kind. She is twelve years old and she is handling this better than Erik is. He will think about that later. He will be proud of her later. Right now he runs. The attacks come in bursts. A shape drops from the canopy — something winged, not a dragon, smaller and faster, talons extended — and the woman with the staff cracks it sideways without breaking stride. Something in the undergrowth parallels them for thirty feet, testing, looking for a weak point, and then the mage makes a sound and it peels away. Something charges from the right and the heavyset man, without putting Lina down or slowing down, swings his axe one-handed and the charging thing decides against it. The forest opens without warning into a rocky slope, and below the slope is a river, and on the far side of the river the trees are thinner and the corruption's purple-black discoloration has not yet reached. Serath does not slow at the edge of the slope. She goes down it the way water goes down it, fast and finding the path of least resistance, and the group follows her because there is nothing else to do. Erik hits the river at full speed and it is cold in the way that resets everything — cold enough to cut through the adrenaline for just a moment, cold enough to make him aware of his own heartbeat, cold enough to remind him that he is a man who picks his daughter up from school and makes dinner on Tuesdays and is currently crossing a river in another world with predators behind him and an ancient corruption spreading through the earth beneath his feet. He reaches the other bank. He turns. Lina is right behind him. The heavyset man is behind her. The young fighters are behind him, one supporting the other. The woman with the staff is last, walking backwards, staff held across her body, watching the treeline. The shapes at the edge of the forest do not cross the river. They pace the bank — some of them — and then, one by one, they stop. Not because the river stops them. Because the thing driving them has shifted direction, or lost interest, or found something else to consume. They stand at the water's edge and breathe in ragged bursts and then, slowly, they begin to disperse back into the trees. The group stands on the far bank and breathes. Lina is soaked to the waist and has a cut on her cheek from a branch and she is looking back at the forest with an expression Erik has never seen on her face before. Not fear. Something more than fear — something that has processed the fear and come out the other side of it into a place that is very alert and very present and very much alive. She looks at her father. He looks at her. Neither of them says anything. There is nothing to say yet. Serath turns away from the river and looks at the sky. The corruption's discoloration has reached the canopy on the far bank now — patches of darkness spreading through the bioluminescent glow like ink dropped in water. A dragon passes overhead, high and fast, moving away from it. Then another. Then a third. She watches them go. Then she looks at Erik with the expression of someone who has run out of time to ease into things. End of Track 3. Bloodline: The Ofelia Prophecy An original story by Ande Arrangement by Ande © 2026 Ande Records
