No rat born in Burrowdeep ever forgot the sound of the pipes.
Not because it was music, but because it wasn't. It was something older than song and far more dangerous a call written into blood and claw, buried deep into the bones of their kind. When the pipes sang, rats died. Or worse… they remembered.
Ashfang was only a child when he first heard it, huddled beneath a broken comb beneath a dresser in the human's world a cranny called Whittlecrack Niche. His mother, Matron Thistlesnout, had thrown herself over him, whispering something about "the Old Sound" and pressing her claws against his ears.
He hadn't forgotten.
Now, years later, the pipes sang again.
Only this time, they didn't call him to hide.
They summoned him to the Council.
---
The summons came on the back of a squirrel-bone scroll, inked in soot and sealed with a fang-scratch sigil of the Queen herself. It arrived in the talons of a nightjar — trained, blindfolded, and sworn never to speak of what it saw. No rat questioned the bird's oath. No rat dared.
Ashfang, now grown, scarred, and shouldering the jagged-bladed spoon he called Toothreaver, read the seal in silence. The messenger waited just long enough to be sure he wouldn't be killed, then vanished into the gloom above.
The summons read only:
> Burrowdeep opens. The Queen watches. The pipes have awakened.
Return, Ashfang, son of the Broken Vow.
He rolled the scroll shut. Fire danced in his eyes.
"I'm not ready," he muttered.
But tunnels never waited for the ready. Only for the willing.
---
Burrowdeep was not one city, but many stacked in centuries of tunnels, chambers, bridges, and fortress-warrens carved from stone, bone, and rusted human ruin. Its central chambers glowed with oil-fire lanterns made from glass beads. Everything smelled of damp fur, rotted parchment, and old secrets.
Every clan had its corner.
The Steelfangs, with their iron-spiked armor and bladecraft. The Whiskerborne, famous for trade with humans and covert diplomacy. The Dregclaws, who raised their young in slop pits and lived on the warfront edges. The Tailscribes, memory-keepers and poisoners. And of course, the Scentless outcasts. Exiled. Disgraced.
Ashfang was one of them.
Son of the Broken Vow.
---
He arrived at Queen Murin's Den of Echoes just before nightbell.
The guards stepped aside without a word both wore the royal emblem: a crown twisted from fishbone, held between two molted whiskers. He bowed low as the doors opened with a hiss.
The Queen did not rise.
She sat atop a mound of bent silverware and polished stone, eyes half-lidded, grooming her long black whiskers. Her robes were stitched from thread stolen over decades silks of dead kings, linens soaked in blood and triumph. When she spoke, it felt like fur brushing against your spine the wrong way.
"You heard it," she said.
Ashfang nodded once.
"All of them have."
"Even the humans?"
The Queen's left eye twitched. "Especially the humans."
---
The great pipe the one that had once summoned rats from cities to fields, from tunnels to riversides, from safety to death was human-made. Its music had once enslaved their minds.
But that was centuries ago. The War of Whistles. The Fall of Piper's Hollow. The breaking of the Scentbound Pact.
Or so they thought.
"Why now?" Ashfang asked. "The Piper is long dead. No human plays the Old Tongue anymore."
"That's what we believed," said Queen Murin, "until last dusk."
She tossed something at his feet.
It clattered.
A flute.
Small, wooden, human. Blood-smeared at the tip.
Ashfang stared at it.
Then smelled it.
Rats.
And something older.
Not human.
Not rat.
Something between.
Outside, in the world of men, something stirred.
In the cracks between floorboards of Crespin Manor, a boy was playing a song he'd found on a page no longer supposed to exist — an old, burnt scrap beneath his grandfather's bed. He didn't know why it made the shadows flinch or why mice ran into walls when he played it.
He only knew it made him feel less alone.
In the tunnels below, a conspiracy whispered.
In the chamber above, Ashfang picked up the flute.
And in the hidden burrows beyond the throne, something very old began to remember.