A low tremor ran the length of the stone like a breath held too long and released. Every line around us thrummed in sudden sympathy. I felt it under my skin as a note that made my blood want to answer. Auralia hissed and clapped her palm over her chest as if the mark had bitten her. Elya winced and pressed both hands to her ears.
From further up the wall, a chant rose. Not words I knew. Not entirely words at all. It was body-language made into sound: boast, promise, welcome. The Rask'Vul around us fell into hush the way snow settles—soft, complete, inevitable. They looked up as one thing.
On the ledge above, a figure stepped out where the silk hung thickest.
She was small. All the Rask'Vul were, lean and tight with a predator's grace. Her skin was paler than the others—sand rather than brick—but the scars were the same: a map etched along cheek and brow, a net of neat white lines across throat and collarbone. Spider-silk wrapped her like a queen's habit—layers and layers that caught the light in a cascade of silver. Over her face hung a veil of strands—no cloth—so fine it was like rain frozen mid-fall.
Through the veil, her eyes found ours.
I could not say how many there were. Two, and more than two. For a heartbeat, I felt the thing Elya had found words for earlier—the sense that the walls did not have eyes so much as that eyes were what walls had been trying to be.
The Rask'Vul bowed their heads. Some pressed their fingers to their scars. The Gorrachs stilled, legs half-lifted, as if they'd all remembered the same story at once.
"Skra'ith," Auralia breathed.
The figure tilted her head in that artless, young way of the first goblin who'd laughed at me, and the silk veil moved. The wind made it ripple like water. Her voice when it came was almost gentle. "Warden," she said, as if tasting a word she had invented. "Shadow-dancer. Star-child." Her accent stretched the syllables, made the s's into secret things. "We have listened to your steps for a day and a night."
My runes throbbed. Auralia's mark burned bright as a coal behind leather. Elya did not hide. She looked up, chin lifted, jaw set stubbornly. If fear wanted her, it would have to queue.
"What do you want?" I called, keeping my voice level and flat. Giving the web nothing but tone.
Skra'ith's veil shifted with her breath. "A story," she said simply. "You pass our walls and pluck our strings and leave no blood in the bowls. That is impolite. Even to a queen."
"Queen of what?" Auralia asked.
Skra'ith spread her hands, palms marked with tiny scars like a rosary. "Of what has always been here. Of the spaces between. Of the listening."
A Rask'Vul to my right clicked his teeth in quick, proud little notes. Skra'ith lifted a finger and he fell silent.
"You'll let us pass if we tell you a story?" I asked.
She swayed a little, veil whispering. "We will hear you. That is not the same as letting."
My mouth went dry. Words wouldn't feed this. Neither would steel if we let them choose the rhythm.
Auralia's hand brushed mine once—follow—and she lowered her rapier until the point kissed the stone. "We don't come to steal," she said, pitching her voice to the web, not the ears. "We don't come to carve your walls or foul your bowls. We come east."
"East is not a reason," Skra'ith said, amused.
"No," Auralia agreed. "But it is a direction. Sometimes that is better."
Skra'ith laughed softly. It sounded like a small bell rung behind silk. "Your blood says you are very interesting," she said to me. "It hums without drums. It has learned a new song and is afraid of it."
"Good ear," I said.
She tilted her head. "We have many."
Something tugged at my sleeve.
Elya stood on her toes, mouth by my arm so she didn't need to speak louder than breath. "If you step there," she whispered, "the web will sing, and they will drop the big one."
"What big one?" I asked without moving my lips.
"The mother," she said. "Below."
Of course there was a mother. There is always a mother.
"Skra'ith," I said, to buy a breath, to shape one more edge of time. "We'll leave your totems sweet. We'll cut no cords you want whole. We'll give you back the coins that don't belong to us. We'll use the goat path when the road is too narrow."
She watched me as the wind put its hands through her veil. "And if I say no?" she asked, not unkind.
"Then we fight and most of us go over," I said. "Some of yours. One of mine. Maybe two. The web eats well today and badly tomorrow because our friends will light it where it meets the cliff."
Skra'ith considered that like a mathematician considers an equation. She lifted one hand and made a small sign in the air with her fingers, a gesture I did not know. The web near her trembled in a pattern that wasn't wind.
"You have not asked what we want," she said.
"I assumed you would tell me," I said.
"We want you to remember," she said, and for the first time there was no smile in her voice. "Tell your stones and your sky and your cities that the web was here before the road. That is all. Forgetting is how your kind steals."
Auralia nodded once, a small bow that conceded a point. "We will remember," she said. "And we'll pay the tithe."
Skra'ith's veil stilled. "You do not know what it is."
"We'll figure it out," Auralia said.
Skra'ith laughed. "You will try." She moved her hand again and the web around us loosened a fraction. Silk lines that had been tight enough to sing now hung slack enough to speak. "Go," she said. "Before my sons grow bored. Boredom has always been hungrier than hunger."
We eased a step. Two. The Rask'Vul did not follow. Skra'ith watched. The Gorrachs placed their feet in the way that made cliffs jealous.
We almost made the turn out of the choke when the web changed.
Not Skra'ith's doing. Not the wind. A wave rolled through it, slow and heavy, as if something enormous had plucked a line far below and the note had swollen until it had to move. The Rask'Vul stiffened, heads cocked, eyes pinning to an angle of rock none of us could see.
The first scream had been violin and hinge. This one was a horn, deep and wet, dragging its sound against the cliff until there was nothing in the world but the promise inside it.
Skra'ith's head turned sharply. For the first time, I saw her veil shiver with a tremor that wasn't wind. She lifted her hand to settle the web, to soothe it, to say not now, and the web ignored her like a child who had found a flood.
Elya's fingers stabbed the air. "Down," she said. "Down, down—now!"
We threw ourselves flat as the shadow rolled over the shelf, blotting the light. A shape like a moving cliff shouldered into the world below our ledge, legs as thick as ship masts, each step a lesson for the stone.
The mother Gorrach had come to listen for herself.
The sound of the mother's movement was not one sound—it was every sound made wrong.Stone groaned. The web shrieked. Even the air tried to pull away from her as she climbed into view.
Eight legs, each thicker than a tree trunk, dug into the cliff, and a tide of smaller Gorrachs scattered before her weight. Her eyes—dozens, black and moon-bright—fixed on the ledge where we crouched. The cliff itself seemed to breathe.
Skra'ith stepped forward, veil trembling. "She does not come for you," she hissed to her kin. "She comes for me!"
The Rask'Vul bowed, murmuring in their clicking tongue. The queen's fingers twitched, tugging invisible threads. "Mother, no," she whispered. "The offering is not—"
The mother Gorrach lunged.
The web screamed as it tore, strands snapping like thunder. Elya's cry vanished under the roar of shattering stone. Auralia yanked her against the wall, her rapier sheathed before instinct could even argue. "Move!" she shouted. "Now!"
I didn't think. My runes ignited.
Power leapt from my arm in wild arcs, searing the silk and sending bright rivers of molten web cascading into the abyss. The air stank of burning resin. The mother shrieked, a sound that turned the world sideways.
Auralia grabbed my collar. "You'll bring the whole cliff down!"
"Working on it!" I roared back.
We ran. The web collapsed in sheets around us, raining embers and ash. The Rask'Vul scattered up the walls like frightened crabs, their songs turning to panicked wails. Skra'ith stood amid the chaos, veil snapping like a banner, fury boiling through her calm façade.
"This is not your place, Warden!" she screamed.
"Then stop chasing me out of it!"
The mother lunged again, leg spearing the stone where we'd stood. The impact threw Auralia and Elya forward; I caught them both before they hit the edge. The runes along my arm blazed brighter—too bright. The pain came after, sharp and electric.
The cliff gave way.
We fell.
For a heartbeat there was nothing but air and light and the scream of breaking web. I reached for them both, power screaming through me, and the runes answered without permission. A pulse of raw force cracked from my palm, slamming into the cliff wall. The blast hurled us sideways into a narrow crevice, just wide enough to break our fall.
I didn't remember landing. Only the silence that followed—the silence after the world ends and hasn't quite started again.
Auralia's voice found me through the dark. "Eiran?"
"Still breathing," I rasped. "You?"
"Barely. Elya?"
A soft whimper answered.
We lay there a moment, the earth trembling as the mother Gorrach's shadow passed overhead. Then, slowly, the sounds faded—the skittering, the chanting, the distant clicks swallowed by the wind.
When I looked down at my arm, the runes were still glowing, faint and alive, like veins of molten iron under my skin.
Auralia's gaze followed them. "It's changing," she whispered.
I didn't answer. I was afraid she was right.