They saw the watcher three times before noon and each sighting stitched a new thread of unease through the day.
First at a bend where the ridge dipped and the trail kinked around a chorten whose whitewash had scaled off like fish skin. The figure crouched above the path, one knee up, cloak pooled like spilled ink. A faint red glow winked from the hood—once, twice—like someone testing a coal with a breath. By the time Sagar swung his gaze up, the rock shelf was empty except for a line of goat droppings and a prayer flag whose knots had been retied by a left-handed auntie.
The second sighting was worse because it was deliberate. At a narrow cleft the trail squeezed through, pine roots clawing the rock from either side, the figure stood in plain view with his palms out. He didn't move; he didn't speak. He only let Arya see the red eye and the dark one, both amused, before stepping straight back into a seam that wasn't there until he made it. The air closed like lips finishing a secret.
The third time came when they reached the saddle that looked north into a bowl of terraces. In daylight the bowl was a map of labor: low stone walls, water glinting in channels, the far side stitched with footpaths. Yet the terraces were empty. No smoke. No women in bright shawls bent over seedlings. Even the scarecrows felt embarrassed to be standing guard over nobody. On the nearest wall, a scroll lay pinned by a clean stone.
"Don't touch," Gita said, even as everyone took a step toward it.
"It's for me," Arya said, and hated that he was correct.
They ringed the wall, careful to keep boots from the irrigated lip. Ketu angled his horn across his chest and whistled two notes that kept Guards from doing heroic foolishness. Sagar stood half a pace behind Arya, trident slanted, his shadow laid across the stone like a spare line of text.
Up close, the scroll was not paper. It was skin: not animal, not human, something stretched thin enough to drink light. The ink on it made Arya's stomach tighten. It didn't sit on the surface so much as float above it, strokes raised as if written with a quill dipped in cold shadow.
Across the top: Terms of Pursuit.
"Reading is consent," Mira muttered.
"Yes," Yeshe said, "and also sometimes survival. Choose which it will be before you open it."
Arya pinched the stone away, the way a boy careful with his last piece of bread lifts the corner of a cloth. The scroll unrolled itself in a ripple, eager.
Clause One. The Storm-Bearer admits he is chased.
"Accurate," Ketu said. "Hate that."
Clause Two. He will not hide his breath in rooms, in bells, in cups of tea, in other people's chests—
"Rude," Mira sniffed.
Clause Three. He will answer when named. The name we use is Arya.
The ink lifted at his name as if to sniff him.
Clause Four. He will receive a guest. He will not unmake the guest. If the guest leaves with a memory, he will not chase it.
Arya's palm throbbed across his vow-scars. Heat rolled under the bones of his hand.
"Not a curse," Gita murmured. "An invitation shaped like a trap."
"Yes," Yeshe said. "Like tea offered with a thumb on the cup."
At the bottom, a space waited for a seal. The ink did not demand it. It expected it.
Behind them, the terraces breathed. Not wind. Not water. The bowl of land leaned forward the way an audience leans when a storyteller draws a breath.
"Who pays if the guest steals a village?" Sagar asked the paper mildly.
Ink beaded, lifting a line. Arya did not read it aloud. The answer made his teeth ache.
"Don't sign," Mira said.
"I'm not signing," Arya said, and laid his palm very gently on the margin, not the words. "I'll set my own."
His breath settled. Small circles. No fear. No pride. No harm to mine. No storm on a plea. No village as price. No ally mistaken for obstacle. No curiosity-theater. And the new ones, the ones he'd needed only after Harish: no map that forgets feet are names. Breath before ink.
He didn't draw a circle on the paper; he drew one under it—on the stone, on the terrace, on the habit of people carrying baskets up and down these steps. The circle took because the land recognized being asked, not told.
The scroll hummed, annoyed and interested. The ink prickled up like the hair on a cat's spine.
"I accept your guest," Arya said softly, "under my terms."
The scroll smiled. Not the ink—something beneath it. The surface trembled. A crease at the scroll's center parted, thin as a cut in dry skin. From that slit, ink breathed out—a slender figure uncoiling like smoke bent on being a person: not the red-eyed watcher, but a new shape in a robe the color of burnt ghee. Where a face should be, writing glimmered—letters so small they looked like pores.
The guest bowed—not low, not high. "We've been very patient with you," it said, voice like brush on paper. "You've made small promises. Admirable. Untidy."
"Be specific," Mira said. "He enjoys disappointment."
The figure ignored her and kept its gaze—its script-face—on Arya. "A storm is an author if it is anything. It writes hills and erases paths. You have been stingy with your pen."
Ketu snorted. "He's seventeen."
"Yes," the guest said. "We enjoy first drafts."
Arya's heart rattled. He kept his voice flat. "What do you want?"
"Receipt," the guest said. It flicked its sleeve and a ledger formed—thin, black, already filled. Names crawled across it like ants. "Not coin. Not bodies. Narrative."
Sagar shifted his trident a thumb in his hand. "Explain."
"When you make circles," the guest said to Arya, "you refuse certain endings. Endings are valuable. We collect the ones you deny, so the world's accounts stay balanced."
"Take mine," Arya said. It came out too fast.
"No," Yeshe said.
"Fine," the guest agreed, cheerful as a tax clerk hearing a confession. "We will take yours, later. For now: the bridge that didn't loop. The mile that refused to be eaten. The drum that didn't get to sing. We will be taking those endings, please."
"That's not how endings work," Mira said.
"That's exactly how they work," the guest said. "They stand around in fields like scarecrows until someone claims them. We are here to collect what you did not use."
Ketu leaned on his horn. "If you take the endings, what do the people get?"
"Beginnings," the guest said simply. "Almost as good."
"You don't get to take from villages," Arya said. "Clause four."
"Your clause, not ours," the guest said. "But we admire audacity."
Gita's voice went low. "Take mine. I have many bad endings I did not use."
"No," Arya said again, harsher than he meant. He breathed. The circle under the scroll tightened. The terraces below them remembered harvest. Names rose under his skin, warm as broth—men bent under wicker baskets, girls racing down paths, hands stinging with chilly water. Feet are names. He set that line deep.
The guest tilted its head. Ink letters scattered then rearranged across its face. "Ah. You believe in nouns. We are partial to verbs."
From the far end of the terraces, a sound rattled like loose grain. People rose from behind walls he'd thought empty—women, men, a boy with a sling, an old man carrying a hoe because a hoe is a good opinion. They did not look angry. They looked wary the way a field is wary in hail.
"Stay back," Sagar called without turning. His voice never had to shout to carry.
The guest spread its sleeves. The air warmed as if pages were being turned very quickly near a fire.
"Payment," it said. "We'll take a story. A small one. Today."
Ketu's fingers slid to his mouthpiece and stopped because Sagar's hand lifted a fraction. Mira's staff tilted to guard-not-attack. Yeshe's cane touched Arya's ankle; he felt the tap in his bones: breathe first.
"What story?" Arya asked.
"The one where the watchers take a child," the guest said pleasantly, as if proposing tea.
A murmur ran through the terraces. Not fear at first—recognition. This had happened here before. It had a path worn into conversation.
"No," Arya said, because he had to. "No village as price."
"Then pay with your own ending," the guest said. "Give us the one where the storm breaks early. We'll take it now; you can keep the later thunder you fancy so much."
Arya could feel that ending—sitting in his chest like a fired pot cooling on a sill. He had not been planning to use it. He had been planning to need it later. But he knew what it was: himself burning a seam shut with a net wide enough to cook the sky. He licked his lips. He could hand it over. The guest would fold it into its ledger like a moth wing and go.
"Don't," Yeshe said, not unkindly. "Ruin is not a coin."
"Another offer," the guest said smoothly. "Give us Harish."
Sagar's trident twitched and stilled. Ketu's horn made a tiny distressed sound that might have been accidental.
The guest's robe rippled as if amused by its own suggestion. "He has names on him that want to be elsewhere. We will make room."
"No," Arya said again, and felt childish and correct.
"Then give us the boy who plays the flute badly," the guest said. "He has already agreed to most contracts people invent for him."
Gita hissed between her teeth. "If you take the boy, I will follow and learn your kitchen."
"We haven't got a kitchen," the guest said. "We eat out."
Mira snorted. "You eat through."
"Language," the guest approved.
It moved its sleeve and a new scroll slipped free—the same skin, the same ink. This one was shorter. It had two blank lines, one for a name, and one for a witness. "We prefer neat resolution," it said to Arya. "Choose an ending you can live with, and we will take the others off the road so your feet stop tripping on them."
He thought of the mile beyond the bridge, bruised into loops by men singing. He thought of Harish's weary precision. Of the boy's breath fussed by a flute. Of the way the shrine had exhaled when he let it be a room again. He thought of a child in these terraces stepping behind a wall to pee and never coming back because a story had been tidily balanced.
His palm burned. The vow-ink under his skin pulsed in rhythm with his breath.
"Fine," Arya said.
Everyone except Yeshe said some version of what at the same time.
"I will give you a story," Arya said to the guest. "Mine. The one where the storm ruins my life and saves everyone. You can have it."
The guest's head tipped. Lettering across its face broke into exclamation and question marks before settling into something like a smile. "Be precise."
"I'm not the boy from the prophecy you keep pretending I am," Arya said, and felt a weight lift as he told the truth he'd been holding shut with teeth. "You don't get that ending from me. I refuse it. Take it. Write it in your ledger as canceled."
Ketu's laugh came out hard. "You're returning a storyline for store credit."
"Yes," Arya said.
The terraces murmured. The old man with the hoe barked something like a laugh and spat into the furrow at his feet.
The guest considered, very still. The ledger fluttered in wind that didn't exist.
"Accepted," it said finally. "The ending where you become precisely what an army wants—we have taken it. We will sell it elsewhere. There is always a market."
Sagar made a noise too small to translate. Relief? Loss? An officer liking and disliking the same sentence.
Mira exhaled, then inhaled again because the air wasn't done yet. "What's the price today then?"
"None," the guest said. "Accounts balance. For this bowl. For this morning."
It rolled the shorter scroll up without needing hands. It tucked it somewhere sleeves go. It flicked the ledger closed; the sound was a nail pushed home.
Arya felt lighter and heavier at once. The future where he had to perform for altars had been picked clean out of him with a neatness that made him want to throw up. In its place: breath. A blank page that was not empty—available.
The guest bowed again. "You need a new map," it told Arya. "Not the hungry kind. The kind that knows it is drawn by feet."
"Where do I get one?" Arya asked.
The guest smiled in punctuation. "Hire Harish. He is already drawing you without meaning to."
It turned to go, paused, and looked directly into the shadowed gap between two terrace walls. The air there thickened. The watcher stepped out—cloak smooth, one eye ordinary, one red and faintly amused.
"Teacher," the guest said with the kind of politeness reserved for colleagues who do not eat together.
The watcher tapped the scroll pinned to the wall. "You never sign your work," he said. His voice was warm in shape and cold in temperature.
"We leave that to boys," the guest said lightly.
The watcher looked at Arya. The red eye dimmed to a coal. The ordinary eye was impossible to read and very human. "Lesson one," he said. "You can refuse a prophecy, but you still owe the day its chores."
"Yes," Arya said, hoarse.
"Lesson two," the watcher went on. "When you give up an ending, you must fill the hole with practice. Or hunger will plant in it."
"Yes," Yeshe said, pleased like a baker finding someone else had already kneaded the dough.
The watcher stepped backward into the seam the guest had left in the air. He did not hurry. He vanished anyway.
The guest, suddenly small against the bowl of the terraces, made a last neat bow to the land rather than the people. "We'll send a receipt," it promised, and pinched itself back into the scroll. The skin shivered once, then lay harmless as a shed glove.
No one moved. Then Gita reached out and very carefully turned the scroll over. On the back, in ordinary charcoal, a thumbprint smudged—Arya's, though he had not made it. Beside it: another, smaller, oval and neat. Yeshe touched it with her fingertip, sniffed, and smiled.
"Flute boy," she said. "He signed for his breath back last night."
"Accountant ghosts," Ketu muttered. "Hate them. Respect them. Hate them."
Sagar grounded his trident and finally, finally breathed out as if he had been waiting for permission from a paragraph. "Move," he said.
They moved. The terraces watched them go the way a classroom watches a bell.
When the ridge leveled into scrub, Mira fell into step beside Arya and shoulder-bumped him hard enough to jolt his spine. "You all right?"
"No," he said honestly. "But I'm not a story someone can order from a catalog. That helps."
Ketu trotted ahead, then turned and walked backward so he could talk with his hands. "For the record," he said in Lhakpa's tone, "I liked the part where you gave up the big, stupid ending with flags."
"Thank you," Arya said.
"You're still going to do something foolish," Ketu said. "Just different foolishness. I approve."
They camped early on a ledge shaped like a question. The wind came up from the bowl and fluttered the prayer flags so they pegged at their knots. Gita coaxed a fire from the stingy wood the ridge offered and made tea that reminded everyone of being scolded, which is to say, it was perfect. Sagar drafted a report he would never send because the office it was meant for would inevitably ask the wrong questions.
Yeshe wrote with her finger on stone, letters no one else could read, not because they were secret but because they were the kind you feel through the wrist and not the eye.
Arya took the scroll—cold now, pliant—and slid it into his pack, not because he wanted it, but because he didn't want a child to find it and think paper always wanted to be helpful.
He lay back and looked up. The clouds arranged themselves like a committee pretending to be mountains. The storm in his ribs hummed—no word, no order—just readiness, like a net folded and warm in the hands.
Hunger showed itself at last after moonrise—not the guest, not the watcher, but men. Three of them, rope and sticks, eyes too bright, the smell of fear masked under rum. They stepped into the firelight and lifted their hands the lazy way people do when they plan to be brave until someone barks.
"Evening," the biggest one said. "Road tax."
Mira rolled her eyes so hard she could have polished a prayer wheel. Ketu stood and put the horn to his lips. Sagar did not rise, which is how you know trouble is about to become education.
Arya's palm itched—but underneath the itch lived a new, steady line: No ending where I become the story others bought.
"Sit," he told the men, surprising himself again with a word that came out like a door closing softly. "We'll pay you with work."
They blinked. People always do when paid in what they did not ask for but might actually need.
"What work?" the big one asked finally.
"Carry water," Gita said, as if it were the only answer sensible people ever gave. "My wrists are old and your dignity looks thirsty."
By the time the pots steamed, the men had remembered they had mothers and that mothers have opinions about sons who bully cups.
Ketu played a tune into his horn that could not possibly be mistaken for any summoning. It sounded like a goat arguing with a fence and losing politely.
Mira jabbed Arya lightly with her staff. "You returned your prophecy," she said. "Now you have to write something more annoying."
"I'm good at annoying," he said.
"Yes," Yeshe said in approval.
When they banked the fire, the ridge went black and then very gently gray under the unrolled belly of cloud. The wind slipped down to breathe across their faces and moved on, uninterested in small circles and huge decisions. Far below, the bowl of terraces glimmered faintly as if someone had laid moonlight carefully between the rows.
Arya slept with the steady exhaustion of someone who has paid with something he had not planned to spend and who has not yet missed it in the ways that will matter.
He dreamed nothing. Which, for once, felt like being told the truth.