“Knows what?”
Rverre doesn’t look at him, keeping her gaze focused on the horizon and whatever it is she sees that we don’t. She kneels, pressing her palm to the stone at her feet, fingers splayed, breathing shallow but controlled. I recognize the signs in her—the edge of overwhelm she is trying to ride instead of fighting.
“That we’re listening,” she says.
The wind shifts as if in response. It’s not stronger or weaker, but coming straighter. It stops worrying at loose sand instead sliding cleanly along the surface, as if guided. I swallow.
“That happens,” I say, as much to ground myself as anyone else. “Land reacts to movement. Weight. Heat.”
Rverre’s eyes lift then, and when they meet mine there’s no challenge in them. In her eyes I see something older and quieter than disagreement.
“Different than yesterday,” she says.
I don’t have an answer ready and that bothers me.
“Does it want us to stop?” Korr asks at last, like he already trusts the reply.
She shakes her head once. “No.”
Illadon’s shoulders ease a fraction. Mine don’t.
“What then?” he asks.
Rverre hesitates long enough to make the pause matter. She frowns, brow knitting, pulling her small horns down.
“It wants us to keep going,” she says. Then, softer, “Just… not the same way.”
Korr nods as if that confirms something he’s already been weighing. He adjusts his course by degrees, angling us slightly left where the stone ribs break through more consistently. He doesn’t announce the change, he just moves. And the land responds.
The faint vibration I hadn’t fully admitted feeling fades. The subtle wrongness that’s been needling at my awareness loosens its grip. It’s not gone, but it is quieter.
Coherent.
The word presses into my thoughts again, unwelcome and persistent.
Korr shifts me higher against his chest without breaking stride, redistributing my weight as the grade changes. His forearm firms at my back. I hate how natural it feels. How part of me is happy to be in his arms.
Ahead, Illadon guides Rverre with an ease that tells me he trusts this adjustment without understanding it. No one looks back. No one questions. The desert stretches on, vast and indifferent, and yet—it feels like we’ve stepped into something already in motion. Something that noticed the moment I stopped fighting the fact that I can’t hold everything together on my own.
I don’t say that out loud. There’s no way I’m going to announce that, but it gnaws at me. Dancing around the edges of my thoughts, throbbing in time with the pain in my ankle.
I stare out at the horizon and tell myself this means nothing. It’s temporary. Once we reach the city—if we reach it—everything will return to the shape it had before. But the problem with coherence is that it doesn’t care how you feel about it. It doesn’tannounce itself or ask permission. It simply works, and in doing so, exposes everything that doesn’t.
We move for another stretch without incident. The kind of calm that feels borrowed instead of earned. I watch the way Illadon’s steps align with Korr’s adjustments, how Rverre drifts just slightly ahead of her own body, attention tethered to something deeper than terrain.
And despite all the apparency of calm, I feel pressure. Consistent, ramping up, making it hard to take a full breath.
My ankle throbs in a low, steady rhythm, not sharp enough to demand attention, but insistent enough to refuse being ignored. Epis dulls the edge, but it can’t erase the truth. I am not healing out here. I’m managing. And management has a cost.
Korr slows.
It’s subtle. Barely perceptible unless you’re being carried by him. His stride shortens by a fraction, cadence shifting to something more deliberate. Illadon notices though, easing Rverre to match without being told. I close my eyes for a heartbeat.
Don’t react. Don’t fight it.
When I open them again, the land has changed.
Enough that my breath catches. Ahead, the stone ribs rise higher, clustering closer together, forming shallow channels where sand has been trapped and compressed. It’s not shelter or our destination, but it’s direction. A path shaped by patience instead of force.
