A quarter mile along the western Possibility trail, the fog smelled of warm chalk and shed horn, and the dead skins began to move in the wind.
Tern saw them first. The younger iron wolf dropped into a low crouch in the wet sedge, his hackles lifting and a metallic growl vibrating in his chest as a twelve-foot shape rose six inches off the terrace ahead of them, spread four ribbed fins like sails, and settled back into the grass with a dry, papery rustle.
“Hold, Tern,” Kiv said quietly, touching the wolf’s iron-grey shoulder before sniffing the air himself. “No blood in it. No breath either.”
They stepped out onto a wide, stepped bowl of warm limestone shelves. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of translucent husks stood or lay among the knee-high ferns. Every one of them was hollow, split neatly down the spine or the breastplate where a living creature had stepped out of an unfinished evolution and left the outer casing behind like a cicada’s shell on summer bark.
Because the mineral vents beneath the terrace breathed warm updrafts through the ferns, the lighter husks never stayed completely still. A long-necked casing with gills behind its ears nodded gravely as a gust passed through its open mouth. Near the rim, a coil of shed glass-scales rolled over twice and hooked against a bush. Even Lilt tucked her wings tight against her sides as she walked, eyeing a shed sky-skate skin that rocked in the breeze like an empty cradle.
