The descent began without warning. One moment, Rill stood still amid the rust-flaked debris of the lower undercity. The next, she slipped beneath a collapsed girder, her spine folding like a hinge, and vanished into the dark. She did not beckon. She never did. Ivar followed, a step behind, the taste of iron damp already curling at the back of his throat.
The air had changed. The rot had given way to something more intimate, more wrong—chalky, old, like the breath of a long-buried crypt cracked open too soon. It carried no decay, only memory. Hollow. Sweet. Like teeth pulled too late.
Lysa was gone. Not missing. Gone.
He hadn't seen her vanish. She'd simply peeled from their path as if she had never belonged to it. No sound. No trail. No cold spot where she once stood. She had always walked as if she belonged to another tempo, another thread.
He didn't ask where she went. The silence beneath the city did not like questions.
Rill moved like she'd been here before. Her bare feet made no sound, though her soles were blackened with soot and spore, the robes cinched tight about her legs. She navigated not with sight but some buried knowledge—something deeper than memory.
The descent was a disintegration. Brick gave way to pale ridges. Mortar bled into seams of fibrous white. Pipes bent not like forged metal, but like softened cartilage, jointed and veined. Every step was like stepping through someone else's bones.
And then—there was no stone left.
Bone. Layered, spiraled, warped into architecture. Not shaped. Grown. As if some vast organism had folded in on itself, ossified, and now lay in a fossilized death-throe beneath Eelgrave's foundations.
Ivar reached out without thinking, his fingers grazing the arc of a rib the size of a railing. It pulsed. Warm—not like body heat, but like breath trapped in stillness.
He recoiled.
Rill walked on, unflinching.
Down they went. The tunnels curved like esophageal spirals. Something about the rhythm beneath Ivar's boots made his inner ear lurch. The city was wrong here—spatially wrong. The angles betrayed sense. The silence grew layered, stitched with rhythms he couldn't name.
Then came a sound—panting.
Fennel burst from the shadows like a hunted thing. Her face gleamed with sweat; her limbs were too thin, knobbled at the joints like a marionette left too long in water.
"I know this place," she said. Her voice cracked open around the words. "I dreamed it. Before it bled. Before the tracks screamed and the sky turned backward."
She pressed her hand to a nearby wall. Bone. Her fingers sank into a soft seam that pulsed like flesh. Her breath caught. Eyes wide. "It's the marrow. The marrow of the world."
Rill said nothing. Her eyes were half-lidded now, lips moving in silence. A hum, maybe. Or a prayer.
"I thought it was fever," Fennel whispered. "I didn't know it could grow back."
They walked deeper. The slope twisted. The walls narrowed.
There were tracks—rail lines, warped and brittle, threading through rib and ligament. One jutted from the wall like a splinter in skin. Fennel reached out. It throbbed.
And then they found the Threadlings.
Five of them. Children by shape, but not by weight. Their faces were wrong—porcelain gone yellow at the edges, glass eyes that blinked too slowly. Each sat in a circle around a collapsed Warden chassis, its limbs buckled inward, its plating corroded, its core cavity torn open. Moss covered its shoulders. Lichen colonized its hips. It was less machine now than corpse.
The Threadlings fed it mushrooms. Pale and bulbous. One by one, with careful fingers. They pressed them into the open slot at its throat, their faces rapt, reverent. Like offering meat to a god long-dead.
Ivar stopped breathing. These weren't children. These were effigies of hunger.
The smallest of them turned. Its eyes locked on him.
It crawled, not walked. Its limbs moved like a spider's, too fluid.
It reached up and brushed his coat.
"Your shadow doesn't match," it whispered.
The voice was soft. But something behind it scraped like rusted hinges.
Ivar looked down. The boneways were lit by no visible source, yet cast light. And his shadow did not fall where it should. It split along the ribs.
The Threadling giggled, mouth too wide.
Another of them leaned forward, face close to the Warden's. "We feed it dreams. It chews slow."
A third added, "Sometimes it sings when the marrow's right. Do you sing, clarity-man?"
"He doesn't sing," the smallest hissed. "He breaks things. That's his hymn."
One reached out with a twig-like finger and touched Ivar's jaw. "Are you the Before or the After?"
"He smells like wirefire and teeth," another chimed. "Like someone who watched the ending come and said nothing."
A fifth cocked its head, eyes flicking with static light. "Did you bring her here, clarity-man? The girl who stitches rot?"
"She made a mouth in the dark," the smallest whispered. "And whispered back."
Rill began to hum again.
He turned to her. "What are they?"
"Threadlings," she said. "Fray-born. Birthed in places where the weave thins. Grown in seams where light forgets to form."
He stared at the Warden shell. "And that?"
"What they feed," she said. "God. Grave. Same thing."
The wall behind him shivered.
Not with force. With intention.
A seam split open—not physically, but as if thought had opened a mouth. And from within came a voice.
His own.
"You're clarity," it said. "But you're pointing the wrong way."
Not echo. Not memory.
A memory-node, bonegrown and wet, revealed in the wall like a cyst splitting. Filaments curled outward, pulsing with marrow-light.
Rill repeated the phrase beneath her breath. She was swaying now.
Ivar staggered back. The bone beneath his boots cracked. Powdered dust wafted up like cremation soot. His tongue tasted salt, then blood.
He blinked—and found his hand already against the wall.
It breathed beneath his palm.
Then it opened.
Not a door. A throat.
It pulled him inward.
He fell. Crawled. Clawed his way into a tunnel made of vertebrae and woven spines. It swallowed him.
More nodes flickered in the walls. Each pulsed with light and spoke with his voice.
"We broke you clean. You sharpened wrong."
"Clarity isn't peace. It's aim. Aim without mercy."
"She makes things. You unmake them."
They spoke not to him. Through him.
He crawled.
Faces formed in the bone. Not carved—grown. Old men with mouths agape. Infants mid-cry. His own face, hollow-eyed and weeping marrow.
The tunnel narrowed. He pushed forward on hands bloodied by friction. The bone was not smooth. It tore.
And then—light. Amber, seeping like blood from the wound of a dying god.
A stairwell emerged. Mold-rimed. Steep. The walls wet with memory. Resin wept from cracks, catching the light and whispering.
He climbed.
And there she was.
Lysa stood at the top.
Silent.
She wore the same coat. Same gloves. But something had molted in her. The way her eyes refused to meet his. The way her shadow stretched backwards.
He said nothing.
Behind him, the boneways exhaled.
The opening sealed.
Not with stone.
But with breath.
And Ivar did not ask where she had gone.
He didn't need to.
Because part of him was still down there.
And part of her had come back wrong.