The attack came two hours before dawn.
It did not rush the rods. It tested them. A long forelimb slid out of the fog, raked the nearest binding rod, and yanked back the second the blue light flared.
The rod held. The stone around its base cracked like a bad tooth. A second probe came higher up the wall—claws scraping for any hold that would let the thing climb instead of smash.
Aiden met that one with pure force. He drove the limb back hard enough that whatever owned it made a wet, offended noise somewhere in the fog. Selene reset the damaged rod and muttered under her breath.
"It's learning the perimeter."
"Then we don't sit here while it finishes the lesson."
They dropped the plan of waiting for clean daylight. While the creature circled again, they packed what mattered, cut the horses loose—better the animals ran than ended up as bait—and started up the least vertical stretch of canyon wall.
