The desert changed everything.
Tanaris stretched before them — endless dunes of pale sand under a sun that felt heavier than any sun had a right to be. The air was dry and thin, carrying the scent of dust and distant salt. Durn had traveled through many climates, but this one felt different. Ancient. Unforgiving.
Radomir had procured a text in Gadgetzan. An old journal from a scholar who had ventured south decades ago. They had spent the night before leaving reading passages by lamplight: descriptions of creatures that crawled from the earth, of hives that pulsed with a rhythm that was not quite life.
Durn had listened. He had packed the carapace fragments carefully. And in the morning, they had walked south.
For two days, nothing.
Then the sand shifted.
Durn felt it before he saw it — a vibration through the ground, subtle but wrong. Not the rumble of distant thunder. Not the tremor of a beast moving above ground. Something beneath.
He stopped. Raised a hand.
Radomir halted beside him, reading his expression.
"What is it?"
Durn didn't answer. He was already scanning the dunes, his senses reaching outward, feeling for the source of the vibration.
The sand erupted twenty paces ahead.
It came up fast — a spray of dust and chitin, a form that unfolded from below with movements that were too quick, too deliberate. Durn had seen many creatures in his years. He had tracked bears through the forests of Feralas, followed the trails of wolves across the foothills of Mulgore. He knew the shape of a predator.
This was not a predator.
This was something else.
It stood on six legs, its body segmented, armoured in plates of the same black shell Durn had carried in his pack for weeks. Mandibles clicked in the air, sensing, tasting. Its head turned toward them with the precision of a mechanism.
Radomir's hand moved to his blade.
Durn shifted.
The change came fast — the world widened, his senses sharpened, his body grew and thickened. He rose onto four legs, massive and dark, and placed himself between Radomir and the creature.
The silithid tilted its head. Mandibles clicked again.
Then it charged.
The fight was short. Brutal. Durn had fought bears, wolves, even an ancient crocolisk in the swamps of Dustwallow. But the silithid fought differently — no fear, no hesitation, no regard for its own safety. It attacked with a single-minded purpose that felt less like survival and more like a command.
When it was over, Durn stood over the broken shell, breathing hard.
Radomir approached slowly. He knelt beside the creature's remains, studying the plates of its armour, the structure of its limbs.
"This is what we've been tracking," he said quietly.
Durn shifted back. His hands were shaking. Not from fear — from the knowledge that what they had found was far worse than what they had been searching for.
"No," he said. "This is just the scout."