The creepers come in low, whiskers sweeping, tasting the air. Behind them something heavier scuffs stone, a gray-white hump with plates like bad pottery shoved under skin.
"Dinner guests," I say.
"Marrow, heel."
The bone hound settles at my left knee, skull angled at the nearest creeper. The leash hums faintly against my sternum, a quiet reminder that if I get clever with overlapping orders, something will trip over something, and that something will be me.
Anchor breath. Four in, hold two, roll out on three. The floor agrees to be a friend for exactly as long as I respect it.
The first creeper lunges for the sound of my exhale. I move on the line it doesn't expect—outside slip like a boxer, forearm frame as if the muzzle were a man's head and not a zipper made of knives. It isn't, so I adapt mid-motion: judo idea, wrestling grip, sabre intent. The blade clears without a song. One pulse of the current in the hip, not a flood, and the cut through the hinge behind the mandible goes clean.
"Left," I say.
Marrow darts past my shin and scythes the second creeper's foreleg out from under it with a shoulder check only a hound made of good ideas and bad engineering can manage. It crashes, all elbows and apologies, and I am there, knee on the hinge, blade at the seam. Ugly noises. Honest work.
The heavy thing—the boar-shaped wrongness—decides it would like to test us. It makes the sound of a floorboard giving way. It lowers its head and shows me plates that would love my kneecaps. I look at the angle of its charge and see the story: the plates don't overlap all the way; there's a soft seam behind the shoulder.
"Here," I tell Marrow, because the concept of "don't get run over" is easier than the geometry lesson.
The boar commits. I don't. I let the current sit in my heels for one beat, then step out of the way the way a matador would if the bull had bad manners and a dentist. The sabre kisses the seam on the exhale. It's not graceful. It doesn't have to be. It's enough.
The boar's momentum tries to write my obituary on the wall. I don't let it. Hip turn, a cheating shove that would get me yelled at in any gym with a mirror, and the thing scrapes past, shrieking something that was probably not kind. It stumbles, skids, and collapses into a sound like punctuation.
Silence does not fall. Silence lurks, then decides I am not interesting and goes somewhere else. Water keeps being water.
"Good," the Compass says pleasantly in my head. "No toes lost, one unpleasant ceramic pig neutralized, two creepers discovering the joys of not breathing. Would you like to make a bird out of your day?"
"A bird," I say.
"Eyes above," it says. "Marrow is an excellent museum of a dog. He is not an air tower."
I look at the creeper ribs, slender and springy. I look at my hands, which act like they were built by someone who knew a thousand ways to hold a problem wrong and one way to hold it right. I feel the leash thread hum when Marrow noses my palm and settle when I say "stay."
"Another construct while the thread is this thin," I say.
"The thread will hate you briefly," the Compass says. "If you do not overlap orders like a drunk conductor, it will forgive you."
I work on a flat stone. Ribs for the arc of wings. Long toes for struts. A jaw hinge reimagined as a beak. The current in my fingers in sips only when the leather cinches; if I pour, my hands go to sleep and the ties go stupid. I have learned this lesson. It will not get to have me twice.
"Penmanship," the Compass reminds me, lighter now.
Hook. Loop. Line. The small heart-mark sinks into the little sternum.
"Wake word?" it asks.
"Above," I say.
The bones take a breath they don't need and remember a bird. The rib-arches twitch, then rise; the struts flex; the beak tips; two empty sockets tilt like they remember they used to be eyes. It stands, if standing is what you call hovering a finger's width above a stone, then settles again, light as a promise.
"Name?" the Compass says.
"Hollow," I say, because it feels right and wrong at the same time.
"Hollow is yours," it says. "Please do not throw sticks for it."
The thread between my chest and the new sternum is thinner than Marrow's, a filament I could break with a bad idea. I test it gently. Here brings a hush of wings. Scout sends it three paces and back like a paper held just above a breath. If I say heel to both at once, the line fuzzes—overlap, slop, the sensation of trying to push two carts with one hand. Rotate commands, then. "Hollow, scout. Marrow, heel." The hum goes clean; the cave stops trying to watch me trip myself.
"This body only started training at sixteen," the Compass says, as if I'd asked. "Mana work begins when the frame is mature enough not to warp. Your Armand had just a few years with darkflow. He was loud, not deep. This is why your thread feels like thread and not rope."
"Years," I say. "Explains the wobble."
"Explains the vanity," it says, dry. "Depth takes time and choices no one can applaud from the stands."
Marrow presses his skull into my palm again, and the leash hums with the quiet of a good dog waiting for the next thing. Hollow clacks its beak once and lifts on nothing at all, then clicks down again as if to say it is still learning how to be a bird in a cave.
I set off toward the draft, because moving is better than thinking too hard in places that smell like old secrets. Hollow rides the air a few paces ahead, a leaning punctuation mark that makes no sound. Marrow keeps heel like a rule he invented. The leash is a wire pulled taut between us all, ready to sing or snap.
"One more thing," the Compass says, almost demure. "When you keep both of them steady while moving and use them sensibly in a scrap, your thread may decide to stop being offended and become something friendlier."
"Friendlier," I say. "That a technical term?"
"It is a culinary term," it says. "Stir slowly. Do not scorch."
I do the thing I know how to do: walk, listen, breathe, watch corners, test footing, look for stupid, and do not oblige it. We pass survey chalk, faded to a rumor on rock. We pass fresher boot scuffs where someone went in a hurry and did not enjoy it. We pass a shaft where the air sighs like someone kept a promise and left.
The leash holds. My hands don't buzz. Hollow learns that walls are not sky, and Marrow learns that some shadows are not feeding opportunities. I keep the current where it belongs, not where it wants. I do not flood. I pulse, like a sane man.
When the tunnel bends toward breath and broader dark, I let myself smile again. It feels less like blasphemy now.
"Two on a thread," the Compass says, satisfied. "You are learning to juggle without the part where things hit you in the face."
"Small steps," I say.
"Small steps keep people alive," it says. "Please continue."
I do.