The glow fades from my palm, but the ache in my blood remains. It’s not exactly hunger. More like an answer spoken in a language I learned in a dream, then forgot when I woke.
I look at the cavern. The abundance sways overhead. The black stripe is slowly spreading.
A deep ridge curves along the left wall, formed by zemlja passage. Not a tunnel big enough for the full body. Maybe a side-pressure scrape where the creature’s movement compressed the chamber. Dark leavings gather beneath the glow in thick shelves. Epis grows brightest there.
Natural. Beautiful. Vulnerable.
At the far end, half-buried structures rise from the leavings like old bones. Pillars cut with straight grooves. A curved wall of fitted stone. A broken arch is almost swallowed by blue strands. Another signal line runs through it, pale and dead until the pulse comes.
This isn’t a cavern. At least, not only. It’s an old district Tajss swallowed and the zemlja remade. The City has been living above an abundance it couldn’t reach, while something else has woken it.
My throat tightens. Kavor shifts closer but doesn’t touch. I almost hate him for learning so well.
“We map what we can from here,” I say. “No touching the blackened sections. No crossing active channels. No harvesting yet.”
He studies me. I know that face. The one where every instinct in him wants to say no, lift me, carry me, and hide me in stone where nothing can reach. The face that knows protection can become a cage and hates the door I keep insisting on.
“Your arm,” he says.
“Stays attached.”
“Bleeding.”
“Less than before.”
“Pain?”
“Terrible.”
His eyes narrow.
“What?” I ask.
“That was honest.”
“I’m trying something new. Don’t make it weird.”
“It is already strange.”
“Then suffer quietly.”
For one impossible second, Kavor smiles. Not almost. Not a twitch of mouth hidden behind restraint. A real smile. Small. Brief. Ruinous. The cavern should dim in respect. It doesn’t.
I stare. Obviously.
His smile vanishes like something startled back into hiding. Too late. I saw it. And I will be thinking about it at the worst possible times until I die.
“Do not look at me like that,” he says.
Victory should feel better, but it feels like falling.
“Like what?”
“As if you found danger.”
“I did,” I say, my throat so tight the words barely come out.
His eyes hold mine.
