The stone screamed.
The scream had no throat behind it, no lungs, no air. The stone screamed the way stone did: a subsonic groan that traveled through the bedrock as vibration, hitting Gellan's bare feet like a second heartbeat, one that was wrong, one that was hot.
He pressed his palm flat against the tunnel wall. Fungal bioluminescence pulsed along the surface — amber and faint blue, the living veins of the Pallid's home network. The light had rhythm. It always did. In the deep halls, where no sun had reached since the world was young, Gellan's people had learned to read the stone the way surface-dwellers read weather. Warmth in the east-wall meant the old thermal vent was cycling. A pulse in the floor meant the river-table had shifted.
A scream meant something was burning through.
"Stone-Speaker."
