Dawn tasted of wet dust and iron, the kind of morning that sharpens everything it touches. Kael stepped from the tent into light that split the world into two plain truths: behind, hedgerows remembered law; ahead, the Deathlands never had.
Serenne had the horse watered and in harness, braid tight as a promise. Maraya perched on the cart's rail mending a cloak—her needle moved like gossip, quick and a little cruel. Valea knelt in the dirt with a charcoal nub, turning cold angles into a map. Selira stood at the edge of camp, cloak gathered, watching the road like a woman listening for the breath she knows is about to stop.
"Eat," Serenne said. The word wore discipline outside and care beneath.
Kael chewed bread and a spoon of preserves without tasting. Possibility was too loud in his head for flavor to find a chair. On the ground, Valea's lines resolved: the old miners' track before mines became mouths; the wind-throat that tuned the ridge to a constant moan; a ring of standing stones that had once been shrines; and the narrow crack she labeled simply—"the mouth."
"There," she tapped. "Skirt east and waste two days and all our water. Through the mouth: cold drip, shade, and—if tradition hasn't learned new tricks—only a couple graybacks that can be persuaded with fire and insults."
Serenne's brow lifted. "If tradition behaves."
"Everything new nests," Maraya said, amused. "It's how the world flirts."
Selira looked from the charcoal mouth to Kael. "Through," she said, as if she'd negotiated it with the morning already. "We don't have the water for the long way. We don't have the time for longer."
Kael nodded. Thresholds tempted him; the System's quiet weight at the edge of his sight felt like agreement.
"Pack light," he said. "We walk the cart. If we have to choose fast, I don't want the horse between us and the choice."
Serenne's glance asked Are we running? Kael let a small smile answer: We're ready if we do.
They folded the tent with the competence the court had never credited them for. Kael dragged the saplings he'd torn last night and lashed together four honest, ugly deadfalls—hinged stakes bound with rope and pitch, teeth smeared with marrow to interest flies and less polite appetites. He laid them in the cart like spare arguments.
They set off as the sun cleared the ridge. The civilized road shed memory and kept only insistence. Stones lay where larger hands had shrugged them. The cleft cooled the air in three steps, and sound learned to echo. Water spoke ahead in patient syllables. The horse tossed its head; Selira pressed her palm to its jaw and gave belief a place to stand.
"Graybacks smell like wet coin," Valea said. "If the market arrives without stalls, lift a torch."
"Already lit," Serenne answered. Pitch took flame with a practical glow. Amber washed claw-flayed walls.
"Stop," Kael said.
The word came soft and complete. He crouched. An ankle-high line stretched across the track. Not vine—gut, lacquered and twisted, one end looped through a pulley-rock, the other balancing a shelf of stones already nodding to gravity.
"Not graybacks," he murmured. "Hands."
"Bandits?" Serenne asked.
"Anything with hands and time," Valea said. "Cut, don't trip."
Kael fed the dull knife under the gut, sawed carefully. The line gave with a sticky sigh. The stones stayed obedient. He coiled the gut and pocketed it.
Maraya smiled, pleased by reversals. "Teach a prince to steal a trap," she said.
"Teaches him not to be one," Kael said.
The cleft widened into a stone amphitheater. Water dripped into a crystal-rimmed basin. The air smelled of wet coin and something fatty underneath.
"Graybacks," Serenne murmured.
"And something that prefers fat," Selira added.
Kael dropped two deadfalls and set their teeth where weight would plant before thought. A sound came—tap-tap-tap—many legs in a cluttered cadence. Itchcrabs poured in low and armored, butcher-hook forelimbs reaching, matte shells refusing the torchlight.
"They'll peel a mule," Selira said. "Then argue about the bones."
"Unromantic creatures," Maraya judged, lifting her cane.
They hit like hunger. The first dashed itself onto hidden stakes and shrieked; the rest piled forward, turning the air rancid. Serenne's sword sang; her torch wrote hot arcs across shell. Selira slid, levered the dull knife into a joint, and popped a plate with a wet click. Maraya cracked a mandible like punctuation. Kael looped rope, yanked another forward, let it topple into the second trap. Teeth clamped his calf—pain bright and simple—and the world snapped clean.
Hunter's Instinct woke—cool, precise, addictive. Motion stopped arguing. He planted a palm on shell, drove an elbow into a seam, found meat, pulled red. The clicking stuttered and forgot itself.
Wet coin thickened. Two graybacks lumbered from a side fissure—hyena shapes reinvented as plates and malice, faces mapped wrong. One lowered its head and met Serenne's torch; the other lunged and met a stake. Habit—his and the System's—wrote quick arithmetic through him: step, angle, weight; gift an enemy its speed as a gift it can't return. One smashed its jaw on the basin; the other carried the stake three paces before learning what blood means.
Silence returned, tired rather than brittle. Water resumed its alphabet.
A neat halo of symbols warmed Kael's vision.
[Combat sequence complete.]
[Fragment Chain: +18%]
[Experience awarded.]
[Level +1.]
[Drops: Itchcarapace (Low), Grayback Plate (Common).]
[Conditional unlock—requirements nearly met.]
He drank until the cold taught his body its limits and filled the keg. He washed the bite; it would scar like a boy's proud lie. Serenne cleaned her blade without admitting to fatigue. Maraya evaluated a cracked mandible as if choosing earrings. Valea teased a bead of milky venom into a vial. Selira rinsed forearms with a method never meant for audiences.
"Another mouth," Kael said, nodding at a narrow ramp shouldering toward daylight. "Tight, but it'll take the cart."
"Then it will," Serenne said.
Boards complained, then forgave. The fissure spat them into sun.
Below lay a shallow bowl—the bones of a village: three roofless rings of stone, a scatter of cobbles, a blackened tree. At the far lip, twin tracks resumed their argument with distance.
"Once," Selira said, shading her eyes, "this was market day."
"There will be again," Kael answered, surprised that the truth arrived before doubt.
He knelt in the square and pressed his palm flat. The System leaned in like a co-conspirator.
[Site Survey.]
[Water: near. Defensibility: moderate. Arable radius: limited. Traffic: historical. Rift proximity: edge.]
[Assessment: Viable—Waystation (Temporary).]
[Quest Branch: Found Waystation.]
[Rewards: Blueprints—Palisade, Kiln, Rain-catch; morale bonus; map mark.]
Pleasure bit like cold fruit. "Can you ward this," he asked Valea, "to tell us if anything comes while we're gone—and lie about where center is?"
Valea's smile made her briefly young. "Especially the lying."
"Good. We'll come back. Water. Seed. Rope. Today we get through; tomorrow we build."
Serenne weighed him and saved her questions like coins. Selira—born knowing stone's leverage—nodded. Maraya tapped a circle to test its note. "And paint," she decided. "A place should be beautiful. Beauty irritates monsters the way incense irritates cats."
They ate bread rubbed with garlic, a smear of preserves, water that still remembered the basin. Kael bent grayback plate around cart board to make a wheel guard, lashed it with stolen gut, hammered knots with the knife hilt because knives become hammers when asked. He rewrapped his calf with a clean strip torn from his shirt.
[Micro-quest: Field Dressing complete.]
[Endurance +1 (temporary). Infection resistance (minor).]
"You're cheap," he told the System. It declined to be offended.
They climbed out of the bowl. Afternoon pressed. Two standing slabs ahead hummed—a note and its echo.
"Gate," Valea said. "Old. Opens to things that don't ask."
"Can it be coaxed?" Maraya asked.
"Tricked," Valea said, "with math."
She set both palms to stone and sang numbers and weights. The slab flinched and cheated a handspan. Heat breathed through, fennel and rot.
"Through," Selira said, already at the bridle. Serenne walked backward, torch high, blade low. Maraya shepherded hubs with a conductor's cane. Valea held the stone until the last board squeezed past. It closed behind them with the self-satisfaction of a door that thinks well of itself.
Beyond, cracked mud lay like old parchment. The rift-flare they'd watched last night strode along the horizon, unimpressed by day. Poles ahead wore faded cloth like tired flags.
"Wards," Valea said. "Or laundry."
"Either way," Maraya murmured, "I object."
The ground rose under their feet. Dust flung itself off like a blanket. A beetle-tortoise unfolded—sandgrinder: four long legs beneath a gravel-stippled carapace, head a scoop lined with chewing plates, a mill that had decided to walk.
"Does it eat carts?" Maraya asked.
"Everything," Serenne said.
It wanted wood and rope and water. It came for the cart. Kael moved before thought could preen—ripped the wheel guard free and flung it under the grinder's right foreleg. The leg overextended, slid; the joint complained in a language that raised hair. The scoop ploughed where the cart had been a blink before, because Selira chose fast and pulled.
"Left," Kael snapped, and they obeyed without asking why.
He ran rope around a pole, back, again—crude pulley. Serenne saw the plan and added two wraps. "Now," he said, and Valea put math under the ground, lying to the creature about down. They heaved. The leg jerked backward; weight shifted into a stance the grinder hadn't chosen. Kael wedged the crystal shard under the scoop into the seam where plate became neck. Gravity did its rude, honest work. The long leg broke. The scoop hammered the shard deeper. The grinder made a small, sincere sound and stopped.
Symbols warmed his sight.
[Boss defeated: Sandgrinder (Lesser).]
[Abyssal Fragment acquired: Grinder Core (Unrefined).]
[Experience awarded.]
[Level +1.]
[Skill unlocked: Shadow Step (Lv.1).]
The new step tasted like a seam in air, a half-place cats notice. He took it once—appearing on the fire's far side without honoring the space between. Serenne's mouth twitched. Valea approved by not wasting words. Maraya filed it under Useful. Selira's eyes followed it like a knife she recognized.
"Any more?" Serenne asked.
"Not for a quarter hour," Valea said. "The ground needs time to gossip."
"Then we use rude words and leave before it finishes," Maraya said, pocketing a tooth.
The track climbed a spine. The ridge fell away like a torn page. A river to their right argued with rock. South, a smoke-dark stain muscled across the plain.
"Campfires," Serenne guessed.
"Or a burn," Selira said.
"Or a city practicing humility," Maraya offered.
"Or a rift," Valea finished, and the horizon refused to argue.
Closer, a man sat on a bend-stone, brimmed hat wide enough to be a joke, walking stick across his knees, studying dust like it was reciting poorly. Bandit was the old word. Kael filed it without privilege and walked ahead with empty hands, his weight arranged for either end of a conversation.
At twenty paces, the man looked up. Handsome gone clever, a scar drawn from ear to jaw with calligrapher's care, eyes clear brown and exasperated.
"Prince," he said, acknowledging title and fact. "You've had a morning."
Kael didn't gift the flinch. "Do I know you?"
"Not yet." Hat tip. "Oren. I keep this stretch of road for people I like."
"And for those you don't?" Serenne asked, arriving with steel and courtesy in the same stride.
"For them, I keep other roads."
"What are you for," Kael asked, "besides scenery with opinions?"
Oren considered offense and spent it elsewhere. "I sell knowledge that doesn't like maps," he said. "If we keep liking each other, I move things to places willing to pretend they belong. Today: that watchtower behind you is a liar—it calls lightning when bored and strangers when lonely. That stain is a fire that only stops when it drinks a river. Be on this side of the water by sunset. And the last man who didn't pay me walked into glass nettles and argued himself to death."
"Price?" Kael asked.
Oren's glance flicked to Selira—admiration, apology—then back. "A favor banked. Written, if you like. Or kept in my head so the surprise belongs to me."
"A promised favor costs more than a purchased one." Kael extended a hand. "Counter: a note redeemable for a pound of iron nails when we set a waystation by a broken bowl behind us. You can weigh them when you collect. Or take coin now and pay double later for nails from someone who dislikes your hat."
Oren blinked, then grinned like a man who'd found profitable weather. "You're the good sort of trouble." They shook. His palm was clean, callused, honest. The System hummed, pleased with contracts.
"Two more things," Oren said. "One free, one not. Free: a cairn of three stones with a feather under the top—don't touch. It pays a ghost's drink; thirsty ghosts are tiresome. Not free: a boy ahead with courage outpacing practice plans to feed his sister with a crossbow and a mistake. For your nails, I'll delay his foolishness a day and turn it into dinner."
"Tell him," Kael said, "to carry water to the broken bowl. We'll mark where to set a rain-catch. Bring stones; I'll pay him in nails when we return. If he points a crossbow at my mother, I'll break the bow and reschedule the lesson. Fair?"
Oren's grin widened into a story he could sell twice. "Fair." He tipped his hat and left, lighter by secrets, heavier by prospects.
"Prince," Selira said softly.
He turned. Order, not drama, lived on her face. "Your calf," she said. "Clean it again at the ford. Bandages don't negotiate with dirt."
"Yes," he said, and meant it.
They rounded the bend. The boy stepped out on cue, crossbow shaking, jaw clenched around borrowed courage. "Stop," he managed; the word cracked at both ends.
Selira moved first. Her look made the weapon reconsider its calling. "You will not," she said—kitchen-steel voice—"point that at my family."
The bow lowered, lifted, nearly fell. Kael tasted Shadow Step's seam and took it—appearing at arm's length without honoring the steps between. He took the crossbow gently, checked its sorry string, handed it back butt-first.
"Carry water," he said. "Broken bowl. Find a ring scratched near the old square. If you see three stones with a feather, don't touch them. If a man in a wide hat talks nails, tell him he owes me. Come tomorrow. Bring stones. I'll pay."
The boy opened his mouth for an argument that belonged to other men. His eyes found Selira and discovered silence instead. Maraya flicked a wrapped bundle to his chest.
"Eat," she said.
He caught it by panic and reflex, smelled bread and unapologetic cheese, and nodded like a hinge learning to move. He ran toward the bowl, not away.
"What if he doesn't come?" Serenne asked.
"He will," Kael said. "And if not, another will. There's never only one hungry boy."
The river's voice grew into argument. The ford was round stones placed by people who disliked ankles. The horse hesitated; Selira whispered belief; it agreed. Midstream, Kael rinsed his bandage; grit let go like bad thoughts. On the far bank, black-barked trees leaned wrong. Overhead, a hawk wrote spirals and then held, a punctuation mark deciding not to end the sentence.
"We won't make the ridge before the burn eats the grass," Valea judged the sun. "If the stain is what I think."
"Then we camp where wind remembers us," Kael said, pointing to a low rise crowned in honest stone. "Rock to lie to fire about what can burn. Water at our back if lying fails."
They raised the tent with a speed that would have offended the palace clerk. Kael set two deadfalls for knowledge instead of blood—trip lines and bells to make even ghosts swear audibly. Serenne paced the perimeter and counted until the number felt true. Valea drew faint lines in air that smelled of chalk to no one but her. Maraya coaxed stew from stubborn ingredients and made it smell like patience. Selira stood beside Kael at the slope. The stain crawled to the river and sulked along the far bank, wanting a bridge.
"If it turns," Selira said, practical, "we go to water."
"If it turns," Kael said, "we make it change its mind."
"How?" Curiosity, not doubt.
"Words," he said, tapping his temple. "From a place where fire behaves because men convinced themselves it should. If the System's kind, it'll lend me ink."
She almost laughed—an exhale shaped like agreement. "Hungry?"
"Always."
They ate stew that tasted of garlic and stubbornness. Night unrolled. Stars pricked neat holes in the dark. Kael sat cross-legged with the crystal shard across his knees and the itchcarapace, grayback plate, and stolen gut within reach. He invited the System closer like a conspirator.
[Quest: Survive Exile — in progress.]
[Sub-quest: Establish safe route — 34%]
[Fragments: Rift-Beast Core (Unrefined), Grinder Core (Unrefined).]
[Refinery: Locked.]
[Skill: Shadow Step (Lv.1).]
He tested the seam again—weight from one side of the fire to the other without honoring the space between. Serenne logged it and chose patience. Valea approved without spending words. Maraya filed it under Useful. Selira's eyes accepted it like a knife she'd always owned.
He pressed his palm to the shard.
[Prototype Blueprint: Abyssal Refinery (Basic).]
[Materials (substitutable): ceramic vessel (high heat tolerance), metal coil, bellows/wind-channel, cooling basin (water), low-precision containment sigils, power source (fragment/heat).]
[Function: Refines Unrefined Fragments into Extracts for Fusion.]
The plan unfolded—clay belly, coil lung, bellows breath, a basin to teach hot things manners; sigils like fences a child could draw and still keep goats. He saw his hands black with work, the first extract cooling like amber.
"Tomorrow," he told the shard.
"Tomorrow," Selira echoed from the tent, a voice that made the future real by deciding it existed.
Kael lay back. Canvas breathed. Bells stayed quiet. The stain sulked itself smaller along the far bank.
The System laid a cool palm on the edge of his thoughts.
[New Sub-quest: Raise Waystation.]
[Objectives: Mark rain-catch; draft palisade; contract labor (volunteer/hire).]
[Rewards: Kiln Blueprint (Basic), morale bonus, map mark.]
He laughed softly. Nails, bellows, boys with work—interest, compounding.
Morning would come with hawk-cries, wet dust, and the next fast choice. He would meet it with a refusal as calm as stone—and a step he could take when the world forgot to be solid.