Nom followed a snowy ridge until he could no longer see the promontory, then cut down through the rocks to the forest line below. He made decent time through the open landscape, and camped in the forest at night. Each new day, Saythi was curled by the fire when he woke. Nom would follow the morning sun, trend lower on the mountain, and by afternoon Saythi would be gone.

During the clearest evening on the third day, he was about to stop for camp, when he heard heavy rain drops approaching through the woods from the south. The sound of a torrent quickly moved in a band, about a quarter mile ahead of him. He watched a barely visible shadow pass through the dusk sky and descend out of sight to the north. Trees crashed far away, ending in a muted boom. He drew his sword and picked his way cautiously through the forest to the newly wet area. The sounds of birds and insects diminished in proportion to a rising sickly sweet stench of rot. In the filtered starlight he saw globs of red sticking to the trees and groundcover. He twisted one side of his upper lip in disgust, touched the point of his sword blade to the substance, and it pulled away in gooey strings, like hot pine resin. Insects flopped about with their legs and wings stuck in the glop, fluttering and crawling in an attempt to escape. A bird, plastered against a tree by a bigger glob, slowed its frantic struggles, then stopped, exhausted or dead.

Nom didn't want to camp near this, didn't want to go back, and was hesitant to cross the swathe of sticky goo, which as far as he knew ran up and over the entire mountain range. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he knew the only likely path around it was downhill, beyond the crash site of this phenomenon. He stepped back and the string of goo attached to his sword cracked to pieces, having hardened while he stood there. He tapped his blade on the glob around the motionless bird stuck to the tree, and it too had hardened, sounding with a dull tunk tunk. With a sigh, he turned north and stumbled downhill.

He hiked half a mile in the dim light, occasionally catching his clothes or scratching his skin on branches. He soon put the Mule back in its scabbard and used his knife to blaze a path. A giant crack sounded through the pines, sending birds flying and calling in the distance, followed by a series of smaller cracks and a loud whump. Nom froze, listened and peered into the darkness. Despite no further disturbance, he decided more distance would be a good idea, and started off northwest to quietly skirt the area. Almost immediately a series of slow cracks and whumps sounded off. He paused and they slowed down into creaks. A horrible animal scream bleated from the same direction, trailed off into a gurgle and then silence.

Nom hastened his movement, took big steps downhill, cursed at the branches and brambles along the way. The calamitous noise picked up again, almost straight east of him, and moving closer. Tree tops started collapsing in his direction, disappearing out of sight down into the foliage. He ran, slashing indiscriminately to barrel through the brush. The crashing trees rushed toward him and he sprinted in a panic, panting, tripping and rolling, stumbling headlong through dense thickets, barely looking back. He altered his route, curving left, but the wind and booming vibration of falling trees followed him, getting closer, even as he swerved uphill.

Going uphill hampered his progress more than it did his impending doom, so he whirled around to confront it, drawing his sword, and assumed a desperate defensive stance. An wide trail of red destruction cut through the forest. The path flickered in the starlight, seemed to ooze toward him, drawn into the monstrous dark mass right in front of him.

Nom held his breath in terror. A dark red glob towered twenty feet overhead. Branches, leaves, rocks, boulders, and entire trees stuck out of it in all directions. The flotsam slowly oozed out of it and fell to the ground in a circumference of debris. A crushed deer was half immersed in the goo, and other small creatures stuck to the outside. Unlike the brush, they were slowly sucked further inside. The massive surface of the glob quivered and rippled in front of him, and he could dimly see more materials moving just under the surface: a decimated small rodent, squashed insect parts, and then a human arm shifted past.

Nom spat out his breath, shuddered, and almost retched. The surface of the glob lunged a tendril toward him. He swiped with the Mule, striking the offshoot with a glup then a ching as the blade hit part of the arm he had seen, sending it flying to the side in pieces with a splattering of red resin. He waited for the next attack with his sword and knife ready to strike. He waited some more, tense, motionless, ready, but nothing happened other than the thing's sluggish absorption and emission of materials. He slowly took a step backward, and it shifted in his direction, grinding the sticks on the ground in front of him. A branch snapped, and Nom stopped. The blob stopped too.

Nom stood there wondering what to do. He couldn't run. He didn't think he could fight this thing. He was exhausted from hiking all day, and his limbs were starting to burn from brandishing his weapons aloft. He lowered his arms slowly and quietly. The thing shifted only slightly closer, the immense surface continuing their faceoff four feet away.

With each motionless minute, Nom's discomfort and weariness grew, and he couldn't think of a solution. He didn't know if he could risk even the small action of sitting down.

"Go away," Nom ventured with a whisper. It was hard for him to tell, but his vocalization elicited maybe a ripple on the surface. "Is anybody out there? Help," he softly asked the wilderness without much enthusiasm or hope. He wondered if the thing would eventually solidify like the blobs left in its wake, but it still seemed to be processing items in and out of its surface. "I suppose it's useless to ask why you're here, or what you are, or whether you'll go away." He desperately wished for a deer to wander by, but no animals were making a sound.

Instead he saw stars floating uphill behind the thing, almost outside his field of view. Not stars, he realized, flames. Paper lanterns, barely distiguishable, floated up on the breeze. Half a dozen drifted in his general direction, though higher up on the mountain. Suddenly one plummeted. Then another burst and went out. Soon they all plummeted into the forest, near where he had started his mad dash.

He could make no sense of it until an orange glow blossomed up high in the forest. The sky grew lighter as the fire expanded in a line downhill. A crackling noise filled him with hope that the horrific goopy mass would be distracted by the burning trees. Instead, the two of them just sat there as the fire quickly combusted along the resin-laced trail of destruction. Nom nervously gripped his weapons as they slipped in the sweat pouring down his skin. He could feel the fire's heat, and the crackling became a roar. Light filtered through gooey red mass, highlighting it like a huge glowing boulder of blood. Still they both sat there, unflinching.

Nom debated his preferred demise—pulverization and slow digestion, or blisteringly painful scorching—when a diffused movement caught his eye through the blob. The twenty foot mass slumped away from him. Nom breathed quickly in nervous anticipation, and darted his eyes around the flickering trees to find a way out. The sticky blob started to roll away, and Nom was about to move when he heard a fierce growling. His heart sank as Saythi stalked into view around the perimeter of the goo. He knew it wasn't really his dog, or truly even a living thing, but nonetheless his instinct was to cry out and risk his life to save the animal. Flames licked the ring of broken trees, and Nom's hands trembled as the revenant circled.

Saythi barked furiously, and the blob rolled toward her. In a fraction of a second, Nom sprung into motion, sheathed his knife, and sprinted around the clearing. The blob lunged at him, stretching out as it divided its attention. It knocked Nom in the back and sent him sprawling into the trees, his sword flying. The blob wobbled back the other direction, giving Nom a chance to regain his feet. He sprinted parallel to the flaming corridor that trailed the blob, and snagged his sword off the ground on the way. Behind him he heard a yelp, then a crunch. Nom let his tears of fear and fury flow freely.

Though he hardly cared, he was finally moving east again. He happened upon a game trail and picked up speed. Behind him he unbelievably heard a howl, which sent his emotions reeling further. He hitched a step, but kept on moving. The howl cut off abruptly, and the crashing booms started up in Nom's direction. Glancing back, he saw a burst of flames and burning wood fly into the sky as the resinous sphere hurtled back across its flaming wake. On the game trail, he was able to keep a diminishing distance, until the path stopped at a tiny creek. He could make faster time downstream, but so could the thing. Pessimistically he sloshed upstream as the sound of flames and crashing trees approached.

Breathing heavily now, he looked up and had to wipe his eyes before registering the torches that appeared in the distance. With wide steps and flailing arms, he trudged up the mountain, almost sobbing with the last-ditch effort. Ahead and to the side, a wide darkness beyond the trees was punctuated with torches on staves. He clawed his way toward it, his senses dominated by the thundering approach of the massive flaming goo.

He reached a moat of sorts, a huge damp ditch dug in the mountainside. A felled tree bridged it, with two torches marking the far side. He dropped his sword and started across it on hands and knees. Midway across, the huge flaming mass of red resin hit with a boom. Cinders showered him as the impact threw him forward, and he had to wrap his arms around the huge log to avoid falling into the trench. In desperation he looked up for some sign of the torchlighters. A shadowy figure stood at the end of the bridge, holding a huge bow at ease.

"Help me!" Nom shouted. The figure did not move. Nom pulled himself forward, and the mass behind him flowed onto the log. The blob bisected, and chunks on either side dripped into the trench, but the majority part rolled over the log toward Nom, advancing ahead of the flames. Nom clawed and scrambled until he reached the dirt and torches on the far side. "Please, please," he breathlessly pleaded to the bowman standing over him. An eternity of firelight reflected in the man's appraising eyes, as the flaming goo stretched and strained closer.

Finally the man kicked the log and it fell into the pit, pulling the thing down with it. Another man ran past, cackling, and Nom wondered whether he was watching his own insanity. He struggled to sit up, and the archer swung his bow faster than Nom could blink.