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.The dark shape twisted, and Harp could see two yellow eyes glowing through the gloom.Still half-asleep, Harp reassured himself that getting eaten by a forest beast wasn't the worst way to go."Put me out of my misery," he whispered to the monstrosity below him."I haven't had the guts to do it myself."But the monster seemed to lose interest and moved into the shadows.The way it vanished from sight made Harp wonder if it had been more spirit than flesh.In the last moment before dawn, the din of the jungle finally ceased.The nighttime chaos was banished with the dawning of the sun, and a serene quiet accompanied the first rays of morning light.Finally, Harp dropped off to sleep.And then the screaming began.Harp jerked awake, asthe high-pitched wails rang across the jungle, reverberated against the mountains, and echoed back across the valleys.A call of feral pain, it was loud enough to leave a ringing in his ears and primal enough to make his blood run cold.He heard the splintering of wood as something massive crashed through the undergrowth, followed by a thud that rattled the ground and jostled the branches under them."What is that?" Verran asked, his eyes wide and fearful."What makes the ground shake like that?""Let's get out of the tree before we're tossed out," Harp said.They hurriedly gathered their things and made their way back to solid ground.They left the tree crown and climbed back onto the rocky plateau.As they climbed to it, two unseen adversaries faced off somewhere in the direction of the river.They could hear the sounds of ripping skin, snarls and gnashing, and giant bodies flattening the landscape as they fought."What's that sound?" Verran asked."Is it coming toward us?""Verran!" Boult snapped."Why do you keep asking us? Am I not standing beside you? Do you see a spyglass in my hand?""You don't need to bite his head off, Boult," Harp chastised him."What, a little rumble in the jungle makes you crabby before your morning cup of tea?""If I had a cup of tea in front of me, I wouldn't be in the stupid jungle," Boult shot back just as the sound of a bone snapping echoed across the clearing.As the thrashing between the beasts intensified, the birds in the trees screeched a harsh cacophony of warning calls.Kitto covered his ears as an unnatural screech of pain pierced the air.Then something very large fell very hard, shaking the ground again, and it was quiet.•"Did it die." Verran started to ask, but he caught Boult's glare and shut his mouth.Harp motioned for the others to follow him and scrambled through the undergrowth and down a rocky slope in the direction of the river that he'd seen the night before.As they neared the river, the ground leveled out, and he could hear the rushing of water.They came out of the trees at the edge of a small valley and the place where one of the monsters had met its end in the morning's battle.A gargantuan lizard, easily twenty-five feet long from the tip of its spiked tail to the front of its fanged maw, was sprawled across the ground.Its pebbly yellow skin had black stripes branching out from its spine, and given its muscular haunches and tiny front legs, it must have walked on its hind legs."If that's not at the top of the food chain, what is?" Harp said as they walked down the slope to the corpse of the monster.The monsters had felled several of the large trees that ringed the valley, and as Harp crawled over one of the massive trunks, he saw claw marks slashed deep across the bark.When they reached the corpse, they stopped and stared in wonder at the massive creature splayed out in the crushed and bloodied underbrush."I thought they were nightmares," Kitto said quietly."What were, Kitto?" Harp asked."The monsters I saw last night," Kitto told him."No, I saw them too," Harp said as he circled around the lizard.Bony frills stuck out around the base of its skull, which was twisted sideways on its neck.Gaping wounds bisected the lizard's back, and thick blood still oozed out of the claw marks, although the creature was decidedly dead.Verran was standing near the lizard's head with a thoughtful look on his face and his head cocked as he inspected the lizard's blank yellow eyes.Each was bigger than a man's head and had a dark, vertical pupil that reminded Harp of a snake's.In death, a thick, cloudy shroud covered the eyes, and buzzing insects were amassing along their edges."Whatever killed it had to be bigger," Verran said."Look at the way the neck is snapped.""And why didn't it stay to eat it?" Boult asked, swiping an insect away from his face.Carrion bugs were moving into the sticky gashes and buzzing over the bloody ground."It could have been a purple worm," Verran suggested.He sounded almost excited at the idea of seeing monsters he had only heardabout."Or maybe a basilisk.Did you know it can petrify you?""I know that I don't want to spend another night in the jungle," Boult said."Let's get going.""A hydra!" Verran continued."What if it was a hydra? The only way to kill one is to cut off all of its heads.Did you know that?""If we run into a hydra, I'm going to kill you, Harp," Boult said."If we run into a hydra, I'm going to kill myself," Harp told him.They had just reached the other side of the depression when Kitto turned around and looked behind them with a puzzled expression on his face
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