It sounds too familiar. If not in detail, then in shape. A wheel that eats the hands that turn it.
“Surface Zmaj were part of it?” I ask.
His jaw tightens. There is that unreliable edge. He’s not lying, but what he knows and believes has been sharpened by inheritance.
“They called themselves rulers,” he says. “Guardians. Traders. Necessary hands of a necessary world. They said Tajss prospered because the stars needed what only Tajss could give.”
“And your people disagreed.”
His claws press into the stone, but not enough to crack it. Restraint again.
“My people saw the price.”
I glance at the spike. Metal hidden inside stone. The channel using old systems to move something bigger than sound.
“What price?” I ask.
His eyes lift to mine.
“The sky watched everything that glowed.”
A chill moves through me. One of the City Zmaj phrases. The sky watches those who glow. I heard echoes of it in the Council chamber. Syin’s fury. Virn’s caution. Secrets keeping armies away.
Kavor’s people have their own version of the warning. Maybe older. Maybe not. Maybe all survivor cultures keep the same warning and swear they invented it first.
“The Cavern Zmaj went below before the Devastation,” Kavor says. “Generations before. We were taught that stone was the last free place on Tajss.”
I hold very still. He has never given me this much in one piece.
“The surface did not see a cage?” I ask.
His mouth hardens. “Some saw comfort. Some saw power. Some saw only no choice. My people judged them for all of it.”
There. A crack in doctrine. Small, but important. He sees it too, maybe. Or hears himself say it, but he doesn’t take it back.
“The caverns were not comfort,” Kavor continues. “No open sky. No trade routes. No towers. No off-world eyes. We followed zemlja paths. Pressure seams. Dead heat. Old water. We learned how to live where supply lines could not follow.”
“That sounds like freedom.”
“It was.”
The answer comes too fast. Then silence.
“And?” I ask.
His gaze drops to the channel.
“And it was hunger. Darkness. Stone sickness. Children taught not to cry where sound traveled. Warriors taught to sleep with claws in wall cracks so tremors woke them before collapse. Females carrying offspring through passages too narrow for wings.”
The image hits harder than I expect. Not because it’s mine. Because survival has so many costumes, and every one of them smells like fear when you get close.
“But you survived,” I say.
“Yes.”
The word does not sound like victory. The wrong rhythm hums again, distant now as it travels west through hidden channels. Kavor listens until it fades. Then he speaks so quietly I almost miss it.
“We even prospered. For generations. Until the war on the surface. What they call the Devastation. After that, the caverns held. Mostly. Stone fell. Water soured. Epis dimmed. Surface fire found cracks in deep places. But we survived.”
