Draft 15 – Updated 28 AUGUST 2026 (C008/D015)
Autumn was distracted. He was supposed to be moving into position to surveil the camp and prepare to play his part in their abduction of the fugitive. But he’d stumbled across something he hadn’t expected to find—something he frankly didn’t think was even possible anymore.
Yet, here it was next to a puddle in the pasture: a set of tracks too big and too deep to be anything other than what they appeared to be. And if what they appeared to be checked out, their plan would need changes immediately.
Urgently.
Gnolls—the only thing that left tracks like these—were towering, bipedal wolves. They were in a permanent state of war with every sentient species around them.
But they didn’t live here anymore. So they shouldn’t leave tracks here anymore. So they must be something else.
At least, he hoped they were.
Humans, alone, were no match for gnolls in combat. An average human with an ordinary weapon had no hope one-on-one against a gnoll. Even a gnoll pup would defeat an adult man—and then eat his corpse to celebrate the easy victory.
An elite human warrior, properly trained and equipped with superior weapons, might … might prevail against a single adult gnoll in hand-to-hand combat. But a pack of gnolls with the advantages of surprise and darkness against four deputies, a single overseer, and a bunch of unarmed slaves? That, if it happened, would be a massacre.
And while Autumn knew that Hunter would prefer to stick to their carefully laid plans, he knew, also, that discovering gnoll tracks was far too important to ignore. The presence of gnolls here, near the river camp tonight, would complicate everything in the worst possible way.
But what if he was wrong? He needed to know more before saying anything about it to Hunter.
The tracks he followed took him away from camp, increasing in number as he went. Out of sheer bad luck, he was a considerable distance away, at the bottom of the pasture on the riverbank, when the gnolls’ first war yelps confirmed their return to the Beard.