The Queen of Thorns loved nothing more than to hunt and prowl in the woods. She did it almost every night without attempts to sck or shirk, and she regurly brought her lord fresh corpses and carcasses to keep its favor. Somehow, though, despite that, the dread Lich still saw fit to ruin her joy by saddling her with a new responsibility.

  “But I don’t need help,” she protested. “Have I not bested every small God and Goddess that I have caught the st of?”

  “You have,” the Lich agreed. “This is not a punishment, though it be if you wish it. It is exactly as you said. I o catch the st of something, but know not where it is.”

  “But I —” she started to protest.

  “Silehe Lich roared through her mind, making the Queen of Thorns tremble as the power of that and froze every part of her being. She felt it briefly sift through her soul, looking fns of disloyalty before it tio speak.“This is an old grave from turies past. I must find it, and so I will add it to your endless hunt.”

  The dark Goddess knew better than to question the darkness roiling in her mind a sed time. Instead, she merely nodded and answered, “Whatever it is you require, I shall do.”

  The Lich went on at length after that, expining the worm to her in broad strokes and how it expected it to be some a god of decay or death that it wished to harvest and dissect. That was also when it expihe nature of the hound to her and how he’d vivisected to better uand it before releasing it into her servibsp;

  “It will obey you in all things,” the Lich promised her, “But never remove its colr. It is a powerful, single-mihing, and it will rip you to shreds should you give it the ce.”

  The Queen of Thrones doubted that as she eyed the gaunt and mangy, pony-sized wolf, but it had only taken a couple of weeks in the nighttime forests with it to see that there might be some truth to it. The thing was a mohat could rip the throat out of anything they entered and had a nose sharp enough to hunt down anything she cared to name.

  her of those frightened her. It was the way it looked at her, with a glimmer of malicious intelligehat made her worry about what it might be scheming or pnning. The Lich had told her it was no smarter than an animal, but she’d fought and devoured almost every animal that the forests had to offer her at this point, and none of them looked at her like this, no matter what form she took.

  None of this was enough to stop her from doing what she had beeed for; she just e less now. Bloodshed was always fun for her. She enjoyed ripping her pretty to pieces when she was allowed to do so, but even more than that, she ealking and hunting her prey fhts at a time before she attacked it to truly uand it.

  That was impossible with this giant wolf in tow. It was a giant ball e and violehat never failed to charge loudly through the underbrush, baying for blood. Its prey wouldn't get away very often, but it was exhausting work that could be handled much more elegantly.

  Despite that, they were still rgely successful. Together, over the few months, they brought down small groups and rge game, but there was no joy in it. It had bee work instead of pleasure, arusty hound made short work of even notoriously difficult-to-kill beasts like hydras with their nearly infinite capacity feion.

  Of course, there were some mohat tested the hound’s limits as well. The Lich had told her that the thing could not be killed, but on a day when they were ambushed by a hunting party made up of a vengeful goddess and a band of angry forest children armed with those terrible blows, the Queen of Thorns was fairly certain that the thing was dead, at least for a day or two.

  That was bound to happeually, si had sense of stealth or timing. The beast rampaged everywhere that it went like a force of nature, but the Queen of Thorns didn’t mind. She just melted into the foliage and huhem o a time until the only living things left in that piney wilderness were small birds chirping pleasantly away while she tried to decide what to do with the beast.

  The answer, of course, turned out to be vast quantities of blood. It healed or perhaps revived nicely after that. She wasn’t sure which.

  After that, she stayed away from the forest for a while, instead leading the things through ss and anywhere else she could think of that a worm might like to be. She was desperate to get rid of this burden aurn to the life she’d had until she’d been saddled with it.

  However, they found no trace of whatever it was the Lich was looking for. Not until one day when they were crossing a particurly rugged se of foothills on the north side of the Wyrmspires. The two of them were there in search of fresh hunting grounds where the denizens wouldn’t be expeg them enough to set an ambush, when suddenly the hound stood stock still, sniffing the air.

  The Goddess paused, unsure of what had happened. Did it sense arap? She wondered.

  However, before she could even attempt to draw that information out of the beast in its limited way, it bounded off into the night. The Queen of Thor her legs grow longer so that she could stride ever further in an attempt to keep up with the thing’s desperate sprint as it charged through the hills, but eventually, she was forced to transform into a cat just to keep up.

  When it reached the Barrows, the only reason it stopped was because she yelled out, “Freezzze…” in a strangled voice that was more of a cat screech than human words.

  Still, it chaffed at her and, and for the first time sihe Lich had assigned her this monster, it tried to disobey her. It struggled at its colr and tried to push forward the st few feet to what it had found. It even growled at her, but in the end, there was nothing it could do. Their Master’s magic was much to.

  She didn’t know what it was the thing had found, but there was no way she was going to let it go eveep further before she found out. That would have to wait until she recovered from the ued exertion, though. She took a few mio catch her breath and watch her hound’s lungs heave like it expected to start breathing fire at any moment. They’d eaten up miles in only a few minutes, and both of them were spent.

  When the Goddess recovered, she asked, “What is it? What’s down there? Is it the worm our Master seeks?”

  The hound didn’t answer. It couldn’t, but it barked as it pawed the groulessly in a way that she read as restless. Holy, despite its strange bestial intelligehat was as close as she’d seen it e t her so far.

  Once she walked past it and started to desd into the gaping doorway, it began to bark and growl more loudly. Was it ed about her? Was it dangerous down here?

  She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter to her. There were few things in this world more dangerous than her, and to prove the point, the cws on all six of her hands grew as she desded the stairs, and she traced the stoh them, just loudly enough to let whatever was down here know that she was ing.

  Sadly, the effort at intimidation was wasted. The tomb, or whatever it had been once, was empty. Worse, it was ransacked. Something had been here once, but the sarcophagus was broken on the floor, and the bodies in the alcoves had been desecrated and smashed. Whatever it was the Lich had been looking for robably long gone.

  The Goddess of Thorns sighed. Now, she would never be rid of that beast.

  She stood there for several moments, studying the se. If the hound outside wasn’t still baying and desperately howling like it had chased the fox back to its ir, she wouldn’t have given this pce a sed look. It had obviously been sacked and looted by men long ago. Still, the beast seemed certain, so she would look harder.

  The Queen of Thorns reached out to the pnts that had taken root in the cracks betweeohat made up the floor, the molds and fungus that blossomed in the ers, and the slime in the areas he door where water pooled. Then, when she had collected her audience, she began to hum a melody.

  It was a sad song, and she’d long since fotten the words. She wasn’t even sure which part of her had known it at first. Still, even so, the leaves and the mushrooms began to sway slowly in time to it.

  Then, slowly, they grew and blossomed, sending little roots and tendrils wherever they could, searg for something that didn’t make sehis was a slow process, for the dance of a pnt was a very sedate thing. Even so, almost an hour after she started, a climbing vine on a wall he far end of the tomb found something.

  The Queen of Thrones walked to it specifically, and when she reached it, she pced three of her hands on it and began to hum louder. The effect was immediate. Pnts might be slow to dance, but they were fast to grow, and as she filled it with life energy, it spidered across the wall, sending tendrils deep enough to make the outline of the hidden door unmistakable. Once she had that, she started to rip it apart with her bare hands, which didn’t take long, sidering how old the stones were and how rotten the mortar had bee.

  The door revealed a set of stairs desding into the darkness. She strode down them fearlessly, though she had no idea what to expect. What she found, though, was nothing special. It was simply proof that whoever had built this tomb had been smart enough to create a decoy. That the chambers above had tained a false tomb and treasures was a little strange.

  Surely the treasures should have been down here, she thought briefly before discarding the thought. Humans didn’t have to make sehat was what separated them from the animals.

  The room here was a and dusty, but it was still possible to read the carvings, and the squiggly lihat were probably worms bined with the carvings of skulls and starving me made it very clear that something terrible had been buried here. More importantly, though, there was every indication that this might, in fact, be what the Lich had sought for so long.

  When she reached the casket and saw it was still sealed with a bead of lustrous lead and ruhat were well beyond her prehension, she stopped. This part of the tomb was still undisturbed, unlike everything else she’d seen so far, and she was almost certain that her master would fy her until she was nothing but shredded leaves and scraps of flesh if she screwed this up. This was what it wanted, and this is what it would get.

  The dark Goddess carefully walked back the way she came, careful not to step anywhere she hadn’t already stepped, and then when she reached the area that had already been ransacked, she turned aed the a mound to where the hound still paced outside in agitation.

  She ignored how badly it wao slip the leash and go inside. Instead, it would find the closest bckbird ahe Liow. Then perhaps it might reward her by freeing her from this sveri so she could go back to the joy of prowling the wild pces on her own once more.