The wolf den was supposed to be south.

  This was according to the quest notice, which Levin had unpinned from the guild board that morning with the practised efficiency of a man who had now unpinned seven quest notices in ten days and was developing calluses in places that the heroic ballads never mentioned.

  Specifically the pad of his right thumb and the tip of his index finger, which were the two points of contact required to remove a brass tack from a cork board and which were, by this stage, doing more active combat duty than any other part of his body.

  The notice read:

  WOLF DEN — CLEARANCE

  Pack of 6-8 grey wolves reported denning in the ravine south of Cairn Bridge.

  Livestock losses: 3 sheep (Gretta), 1 goat (Tommas — unconfirmed, possibly escaped).

  Threat Level: Moderate.

  Reward: 12 silver pieces.

  Requirements: Level 4+, combat class preferred.

  Post by: Thornwall Village Council

  The "Level 4+" requirement had given Levin approximately zero seconds of pause, which was the amount of pause it deserved, given that he had recently cleared thirty-one giant rats in a basement at midnight and received five silver coins and a notification for Boiling.

  Ria walked beside him on the south road, her satchel over one shoulder, the bronze medallion catching the mid-morning light with each step. She had packed provisions — bread rolls (Berta's, naturally, serving dual purpose as food and emergency ordnance), cheese, two apples, and a waterskin.

  She carried herself with the particular energy of someone who had survived spiders, earned a commendation, and was now operating under the assumption that the universe owed her an interesting day.

  The universe, as it turned out, was about to overpay.

  "How far is Cairn Bridge?" Ria asked.

  "About three miles. South along the road, past the elm stand where the bandit was, then another mile and a half to the river crossing."

  "The bandit. The ditch bandit."

  "That's the one."

  "Do you think he's still out there?"

  "I think he's either moved on to more profitable territory or he's still drying out. Either way, he's not our concern today."

  They walked.

  The road unspooled ahead of them in its usual state of packed-earth ambivalence, neither welcoming nor hostile, simply present. Nothing but a suggestion rather than a commitment, a line drawn across the landscape by people who had wanted to go somewhere and had settled for going in a direction.

  The morning was warm.

  Insects hummed in the wildflowers along the verge.

  A hawk circled overhead in slow, patient loops, scanning the fields below for anything small and edible. Said small and edible hid under the canopy and within bushes because said hawk's shadow warned them.

  Levin's staff tapped the road in its steady rhythm.

  The micro-fractures — still visible and annotated by the Staff Maintenance skill that he had not asked for and could not remove — glowed faintly in his enhanced perception, seven tiny fault lines that he had memorised against his will and that now occupied a permanent corner of his awareness, like a song stuck in his head except the song was about wood grain and it had no chorus.

  They passed the elm stand. No bandit to be seen. The ditch was still there, green-tinged and placid, its frog population undisturbed.

  They continued south.

  The landscape changed gradually — the open farmland giving way to rougher ground, the gentle hills steepening, the vegetation thickening from "pastoral" to "assertive" as the road descended toward the river valley. Trees closed in on both sides. The air cooled. The light shifted from the warm gold of open country to the dappled grey-green of canopy shade.

  Cairn Bridge appeared around a bend in the road approximately forty minutes after they'd left Thornwall.

  It was a stone bridge — old, solid, strong, built from blocks of grey granite that had been fitted together with the kind of precision that suggested the builders had cared deeply about their work and had access to tools that no longer existed.

  The bridge spanned a river that was perhaps thirty feet wide and moving at a pace that communicated quiet competence — deep enough to drown in, fast enough to carry you somewhere you didn't want to go, and cold enough that falling in would produce the kind of full-body gasp that rearranges your priorities with immediate effect.

  The bridge had a name because it had cairns. Two of them, one at each end, stacked stone pillars about four feet tall that served no obvious structural purpose and existed, as far as anyone could determine, because someone had once started stacking rocks and nobody had told them to stop.

  Levin stopped walking.

  He stopped approximately sixty feet from the near end of the bridge.

  Ria, who had been two paces behind him and in the middle of a sentence about whether wolves could be reasoned with (her position: possibly, if you spoke slowly and carried cheese; Levin's position: no), walked three more steps before she noticed he'd stopped and turned back.

  "What?" she said.

  Levin was looking at the bridge.

  Specifically, he was looking at the thing sitting on the bridge.

  The thing was large.

  "Large" was, in this context, performing the same kind of charitable work that "damp" performs when describing the ocean.

  The thing was enormous.

  It occupied the full width of the bridge and most of its length, sitting cross-legged on the stone surface with its back against the far cairn and its knees jutting out on either side like two boulders that had been upholstered in skin.

  It was a troll.

  Levin had read about trolls.

  The Principia Arcana — the very informative doorstop — had devoted an entire chapter to them, wedged between "Theoretical Limits of Spatial Manipulation" and "Why You Should Never Attempt to Polymorph a Cat" (the answer to the latter being, essentially, "because the cat will remember, and cats hold grudges across dimensional boundaries").

  The chapter on trolls had been clinical, thorough, and illustrated with woodcuts that the artist had clearly produced while experiencing some form of personal crisis.

  The illustrations had not prepared him.

  The troll was approximately nine feet tall, seated.

  Standing, it would have been twelve, possibly thirteen — the kind of height that stopped being a measurement and started being an architectural feature. Its body was a study in disproportionate mass: shoulders wider than a cart, arms that hung past its knees even when sitting, hands the size of serving platters with fingers like sausages that had been left in the sun too long and had developed knuckles.

  Its skin was the colour and approximate texture of a riverbed — grey-green, mottled, covered in lumps and ridges and protrusions that might have been warts or might have been some form of natural armour or might have been the result of a skin condition so comprehensive that it had become a lifestyle.

  The skin glistened with a thin film of moisture that caught the dappled light and gave the troll the appearance of something that had recently been dredged from a canal and had not yet dried.

  The face was where things became genuinely difficult.

  The troll's face occupied the general area where a face should be — between the shoulders and above the chest — but it had been assembled with the aesthetic sensibility of someone who had been given a description of a face, had never actually seen one, and had decided to improvise.

  The jaw was massive, underslung, jutting forward like the prow of a ship that had been designed by committee.

  The mouth was a horizontal slash that extended from approximately where the left ear should have been to approximately where the right ear should have been, and it was filled with teeth.

  The teeth deserved their own lesson.

  They were yellow. They were uneven and sharp. They pointed in directions that teeth should not point, including sideways, backward, and, in the case of one particularly ambitious canine, slightly upward, as though it had given up on the mouth entirely and was making a break for the nostril.

  There were too many of them.

  The mouth contained more teeth than any single mouth had a right to contain, and they were arranged with the organisational logic of a collapsed bookshelf — everything present, nothing in order, and the overall effect suggesting that a significant structural failure had occurred at some point and nobody had bothered with the cleanup.

  The nose was flat, broad, and had two nostrils that were each large enough to accommodate a child's fist, though no child in recorded history had ever attempted this experiment, because children, whatever their other failings, possessed a basic survival instinct that adults often lacked.

  The eyes were disproportionately small. Two dark, wet beads sunk deep into the skull beneath a brow ridge that protruded like a geological shelf. They were the eyes of something that did not think quickly, did not think often, and did not think well, but that compensated for these deficiencies by being very, very large and very, very strong and very, very difficult to kill.

  The tag above its head shimmered.

  Levin focused.

  Level 14. Bridge Troll.

  His staff stopped tapping.

  Ria, who had followed his gaze to the bridge and was now seeing the troll for the first time, made a sound. The sound was small, involuntary, squeaking, and originated from somewhere in the back of her throat.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It was the sound a person makes when their body has processed visual information faster than their brain and has begun the fear response before the conscious mind has finished loading the relevant file.

  Her hand found Levin's sleeve. Her fingers closed on the fabric.

  "Levin," she whispered.

  "I see it."

  "That's a troll."

  "Yes."

  "That's a big troll."

  "They don't come in small."

  "What level is it?"

  Levin considered lying. The consideration lasted approximately one-quarter of a second, which was the time it took him to weigh the benefits of reassurance against the costs of dishonesty and conclude that Ria would find out eventually and that "eventually" in this context meant "the next thirty seconds."

  "Fourteen," he said.

  Ria's grip on his sleeve tightened.

  Her knuckles went white.

  The bronze medallion on her satchel strap, which had been catching the light with cheerful regularity for the entire walk, suddenly looked very small and very bronze and very much like the participation trophy it had always been.

  The troll had not moved.

  It sat on the bridge with the monumental stillness of something that had been sitting there for a long time and intended to continue sitting there for a long time more.

  Its breathing was audible — a slow, wet, rhythmic sound, like a bellows being operated inside a swamp.

  Each exhale produced a faint mist that drifted from its nostrils and dissipated in the morning air.

  It was, Levin realised, asleep.

  Or something adjacent to sleep.

  Its eyes were half-closed, the dark beads visible beneath heavy lids.

  Its jaw hung slightly open, revealing the lower row of teeth in all their chaotic glory.

  A thin line of drool — viscous, greenish, disgusting, horrible, catching the light in ways that drool should never catch the light — descended from the corner of its mouth and pooled on the stone of the bridge in a small, glistening puddle.

  The smell reached them a moment later.

  It arrived on the breeze with the quiet inevitability of bad news, and it was — there was no polite way to say this, and Levin was not feeling polite — extraordinary.

  It was the smell of something that had died, been buried, dug up, left in the rain, dried in the sun, buried again, dug up again, and then rolled in a mixture of swamp water and old cheese and the particular musk that large predators produce when they have not bathed since the concept of bathing was invented, which, in the troll's case, was almost certainly never.

  Ria's free hand went to her nose.

  "We could go around," she said, her voice muffled by her fingers. "There must be another crossing. Upstream? Downstream? Anywhere that doesn't have that on it."

  Levin looked upstream.

  The river curved away into dense forest, the banks steep and overgrown.

  He looked downstream. More of the same — thick vegetation, steep banks, fast water, lots of time wasted.

  "The next crossing is at Millhaven. Thirty miles north," he said.

  "Thirty miles is fine. Thirty miles is a lovely walk. I enjoy walking. Walking is my favourite activity. I have a skill notification for it somewhere, probably."

  "Ria."

  "It's Level 14, Levin. Fourteen. The spiders were Level 2. The rats were Level 1. The wasps were — what were the wasps?"

  "Level 0. The wasps didn't count."

  "The wasps didn't count and this thing is Level 14 and we are standing sixty feet away from it and I can smell it from here and it has more teeth than a — than a — I don't have a comparison. Nothing has that many teeth. That many teeth shouldn't be possible. There should be regulations."

  "There probably are. Trolls don't read."

  The troll shifted.

  It was a small action — a settling of weight, a readjustment of position, the kind of movement that sleeping things make when their body reminds them that gravity exists and that sitting cross-legged on a stone bridge for extended periods produces consequences in the lower back.

  The shift produced a sound. The sound was the stone of the bridge groaning under the redistribution of a thousand pounds of troll, and it carried across the sixty-foot gap with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty church.

  The troll's eyes opened.

  They opened slowly, the heavy lids rising like curtains at a theatre where the show was about to begin and the audience was about to wish it hadn't bought tickets.

  The dark beads focused on the road. They focused on the trees. They focused, with the gradual and terrible precision of a predator whose brain operated on a delay but whose conclusions, once reached, were absolute, on the two small figures standing sixty feet away.

  The troll's nostrils flared.

  Its head tilted — a slow, grinding rotation, like a boulder being turned by hand. The jaw closed and teeth clicked together. The drool line broke and fell to the bridge in a silent, glistening strand.

  It stood up.

  The standing was a process. It involved stages, each one accompanied by sounds that suggested the troll's joints had opinions about the transition from horizontal to vertical and were expressing those opinions through a series of pops, cracks, and grinding noises that belonged in a quarry rather than a body.

  At full height, the troll was thirteen feet tall.

  Its shadow fell across the bridge, across the near bank, across the road, and across Levin and Ria, who were now standing in the shade of something that weighed more than Marda's entire inn and was looking at them with the slow, dawning interest of a creature that had just identified its next meal.

  "Levin," Ria said.

  Her voice had gone very quiet. Her hand on his sleeve was trembling.

  "Get behind me," Levin said.

  "What are you going to—"

  "Behind me. Now. Twenty feet back. Find a tree. Put your back against it. Shield up."

  Ria's hand released his sleeve.

  She stepped backward.

  She reached a broad oak at the roadside. Her back pressed against the trunk and hands came up. The golden shimmer of the shield spell — stronger now, steadier with a week of practice and spider caves and evening theory sessions having transformed it from a guttering candle to something closer to a lantern — wrapped around her in a thin, luminous shell.

  Levin faced the bridge.

  The troll faced Levin.

  Sixty feet of road separated them. The river murmured beneath the bridge. The hawk that had been circling overhead had departed, having performed its own threat assessment and concluded that the airspace above this particular stretch of road was about to become professionally hazardous.

  The troll took a step.

  The step covered approximately four feet of bridge. The stone beneath its foot cracked — a hairline fracture that spread outward from the point of impact like a web, because the bridge had been built to support carts and horses and the occasional herd of sheep, and a thirteen-foot troll exceeded its design specifications by a margin that the original engineers would have found distressing.

  A second step. Another crack.

  A third.

  The troll was off the bridge now, on the road, and the sixty feet had become forty, and the smell had intensified from "extraordinary" to "weaponised." The dark bead eyes were fixed on Levin with a focus that contained no intelligence, no malice, no strategy, no anger — just hunger, vast and simple.

  Levin raised his left hand.

  The Arcane Bolt formed. Blue-white. Humming. Larger than the ones he'd used on the goblins and the ones he'd used on the rats — a sphere of compressed force the size of a fist, crackling with arcs of energy that leapt between his fingers like tiny, excited lightning bolts.

  He released it.

  The bolt crossed the forty feet in a blink and struck the troll in the centre of its chest.

  The detonation was significant.

  A sphere of blue-white force expanded outward from the impact point, and the sound, a sharp, clean crack that echoed off the river valley walls, was loud enough to send birds scattering from the trees on both banks.

  The troll staggered.

  It staggered backward one step, one single, four-foot step, and its hand went to its chest, where the bolt had struck, and it looked down at the point of impact with an expression that cycled through confusion, annoyance, and something that might have been offence, as though it had been poked by a stranger in a queue and was deciding whether the poke warranted a formal response.

  The bolt had left a mark. A dark, scorched circle on the troll's chest, roughly the size of a dinner plate, where the skin had been burned and the flesh beneath had been damaged.

  Briefly.

  Momentarily.

  Because as Levin watched, the scorched skin began to move.

  It rippled. It shifted. The edges of the burn drew inward, contracting, closing, the damaged tissue knitting itself together with a speed that was visible to the naked eye. A process that should have taken days or weeks compressed into seconds, the flesh regenerating with the blind, mechanical efficiency of a system that had been designed to do one thing and did that one thing extraordinarily well.

  Within five seconds, the burn was gone.

  The troll's chest was smooth. Grey-green. Glistening. Unmarked.

  As though the bolt had never happened.

  The troll looked up from its chest. It looked at Levin. The dark bead eyes contained, for the first time, something that resembled recognition — the recognition of a creature that had been hit and had healed and had now categorised the thing that hit it as "small, annoying, and insufficiently powerful to matter."

  It charged.

  The charge was not fast in the way that a wolf's charge is fast, or a goblin's panicked sprint is fast. It was fast in the way that an avalanche is fast — slow to start, gathering momentum, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, inevitably there, filling the available space with mass and motion and the absolute certainty that anything in its path was going to have a very bad time.

  The road shook.

  Each footfall sent tremors through the packed earth that Levin felt through his boots. The troll's arms swung at its sides, the massive hands clenched into fists that were, individually, larger than Levin's head.

  Thirty feet.

  Twenty.

  Fifteen.

  Ten.

  Levin cast.

  The barrier spell left both hands simultaneously — a wall of blue-white force that materialised in the air between him and the charging troll, six feet wide and eight feet tall, shimmering and translucent, humming with the compressed energy of a mana pool that was five hundred and fifty-one percent of its original capacity and that had, until this moment, been used primarily to vaporise goblins and accidentally set kitchen floors on fire.

  The troll hit the barrier.

  The impact was, there was no other word for it, spectacular.

  The barrier held. The troll stopped. The kinetic energy of several thousand pounds of charging troll meeting an immovable wall of magical force had to go somewhere, and it went into sound.

  A deep, resonant boom that rolled across the river valley like thunder from a clear sky and into the ground, which cracked beneath the barrier's anchor points in a starburst pattern that extended three feet in every direction.

  The troll bounced backward approximately five feet, landing on its back on the road with an impact that Levin felt in his teeth. It lay there for a moment, arms and legs splayed, staring at the sky with the bewildered expression of something that had been running very fast and was now, without explanation, not running at all.

  From behind the oak tree, Ria's shouted. "Did that—"

  "No," Levin said.

  The troll sat up with the slow, grinding deliberation of something that was not accustomed to being on its back and was processing the experience with the limited cognitive tools available to it.

  Its hand went to its face.

  Its jaw worked. A tooth, one of the sideways ones, had been knocked loose by the impact and was hanging from its gum by a thread of tissue. The troll reached up, gripped the tooth between two massive fingers, and pulled it free.

  It looked at the tooth then at Levin.

  It threw the tooth away.

  The tooth sailed through the air and embedded itself in the trunk of a birch tree approximately twenty feet to Levin's left, where it stuck, quivering, like a very small and very disgusting throwing knife.

  The troll stood up again. The standing was faster this time. The joints still popped and cracked, but the process had acquired an urgency that the first standing had lacked.

  The urgency of a creature that had been surprised once and did not intend to be surprised again.

  It charged once more.

  Levin dropped the barrier and moved to the right, off the road, into the trees. The troll's charge carried it through the space he had occupied a half-second earlier, and its fist — swung in a wide, sweeping arc that would have connected with approximately everything between Levin's waist and his shoulders — passed through empty air and struck a tree.

  The tree was an elm.

  It was approximately eighteen inches in diameter. It had been growing at the roadside for perhaps a forty years, minding its own business, contributing oxygen to the atmosphere, and providing shade to travellers.

  The troll's fist went through it without resistence.

  The trunk shattered at the point of impact, splinters exploding outward in a spray of pale wood and bark. The upper portion of the tree — crown, branches, leaves, and the accumulated biomass of four decades of patient growth — tilted, paused for a moment as though considering its options, and then fell with a crash that shook the ground and sent a cloud of leaves and dust billowing across the road.

  Levin looked at the stump.

  The stump was ragged, splintered, and approximately waist-high.

  The troll's fist had passed through the trunk the way Levin's Arcane Bolt passed through goblins. With a total disregard for the structural integrity of the thing being passed through.

  The troll turned.

  Its eyes found him.

  The dark beads locked on and massive body pivoted, feet grinding the road surface, and it came again. Slower this time, more deliberate, the charge replaced by a stalking advance that was, in its way, more frightening than the charge, because it suggested that the troll was learning.

  Trolls were not supposed to learn.

  The Principia Arcana had been quite clear on this point: trolls operated on instinct, reflex, and a metabolic imperative to consume approximately twice their body weight per week. They did not strategise. They did not adapt. They hit things until the things stopped moving, and then they ate the things, and then they found more things.

  This troll was adapting.

  It had charged twice and missed twice, and it was now approaching with the measured, heavy-footed caution of something that had identified a pattern — small thing moves when big thing charges — and was adjusting its approach accordingly.

  Levin raised both hands.

  Chain Lightning leaped from his grasp — a jagged arc of blue-white energy that leapt from his fingers to the troll's left shoulder, crackled across its chest, jumped to its right arm, and earthed itself through its right foot into the road surface.

  The troll's body convulsed.

  Its muscles locked.

  Its jaw clenched, teeth grinding together with a sound like millstones.

  Smoke rose from the points where the lightning had entered and exited, and the smell of burned troll-skin joined the already considerable olfactory landscape.

  The troll dropped to one knee.

  Its left arm hung limp — the shoulder joint damaged, the muscles beneath the grey-green skin twitching and spasming as the residual electrical charge dissipated through its nervous system.

  Levin watched.

  The arm began to heal.

  The twitching stopped. The muscles stilled. The burned skin rippled, contracted, regenerated, and became new. The shoulder joint — dislocated or damaged by the lightning's passage — shifted, clicked, and reset itself with a wet, grinding sound that belonged in a butcher's shop.

  Seconds passed...

  The arm rose and the fingers flexed. The fist clenched.

  The troll stood up.

  "Oh, come on," Levin said.