THE DOOR
The silence that followed the death of the first monster was not peaceful. It was pregnant and heavy, the kind of stillness that precedes a flash flood or an ambush.
Mwajuma stood over the broken, eight-foot corpse of the humanoid beast, her broad chest heaving as she pulled the thick, humid air into her lungs. The air in the Nation of Mizizi tasted wrong—it was cloying, sweet with the scent of massive, blooming parasitic flowers, yet underpinned by the sharp, metallic tang of decay. She looked down at her right hand. The stone gauntlet she had conjured had crumbled away, leaving her knuckles scraped and smeared with the creature’s dark, almost black blood.
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