Morning came without ceremony. The ridge shouldered the sun up and the light slid over them, thin at first, then warmer, picking out damp on leather and the ash-gray of last night's coals. They packed in an easy silence. Ribs were wrapped, haunches lashed, skins checked for leaks. Kaelen paced the edge of the drop, reading the slope below like a page already half-remembered.
"North and a touch west," he said. "We ride the spine until it gives us gentler ground. Two days if it's kind. Three if it isn't."
"When is it kind?" Bren asked, deadpan.
"Once a year," Nara said. "On its birthday."
Rohuun grunted, which might have been a laugh if you knew his family.
Arsanguir fell into place between Bren and Nara. His shirt was new only in the sense that Nara had cut it shorter and tied the worst tears. The ravaged cloth sat oddly on skin that showed no mark. He didn't bring it up. No one asked. The forest had its own collection of unbelievable things. One more lived there now.
They moved.
The ridge kept its promise of kindness for nearly an hour—stone underfoot, scrub pines spaced like patient teachers, a breeze that remembered the courtesy of keeping flies off faces. Below, the forest bruised into lowland greens, with the far smudge of wetlands winking dull in the slanting light. Hawks wrote their names in the air and pretended they didn't. Somewhere out of sight, water made the small silver noise of insisting it was going somewhere.
Bren talked because someone had to. "First time I came this way I was shorter. And the trees were taller. Or I was bad at measuring. Hard to tell."
"Both," Nara said.
"Kind," Bren corrected.
"Honest," she said, and her mouth made a line that might have been a smile if it had more time.
Kaelen set a pace that pleased no one and offended nothing. Rohuun dragged the sleigh with the stubborn contentment of a man who had already decided he would be tired later. Arsanguir fell into the rhythm that had saved him twice now—small breaths, low center, let feet decide and then pretend it was your idea.
They stopped twice to drink and once so Kaelen could tug a thin thread of Kucholel out of the air and lay it in a shallow bowl. It gathered as a clear bead, no bigger than a thumbnail.
"What's that for?" Arsanguir asked, trying not to stare too hard.
"Weight," Kaelen said. "You don't feel it?" He tilted the bowl and the bead drifted to one side like liquid thinking.
Arsanguir blinked. He tried to feel. The world always felt too much, lately—edges, drifts, the small ways things wanted to be. Under no pressure he could almost sort them. "I feel… a choice. Like the path wants to tilt."
"Good," Kaelen said. "Name it, even if the name is bad. Later we'll name it better."
He tipped the bead back into the air and it dissolved without admitting it had ever been there.
————————————————————————————————————
By afternoon the ridge lowered into shoulder-height scrub and the path widened. Signs of human patience appeared—a cairn with a red ribbon tied under the top stone; a pair of cut stumps facing each other like chairs in a long-forgotten room; the ghost of cart tracks, more idea than trench.
They walked past a fence that had started life straight and ended life philosophical. Beyond it, a field lay fallow under a net of thorn, and beyond that a huddle of trees marked water. The birdsong sounded different here. Not braver—just busier.
Nara nudged Arsanguir with an elbow. "Watch," she said, nodding to Bren.
The scout had a habit of tapping the ground with his spear-butt, sometimes for rhythm, sometimes for rudely waking a stone. He did it now, but the tap left a faint shimmer where wood met dirt—thin as a hair. He took two steps and tapped again, weave-weave, a zigzag of invisible stitches along the ground.
"Why?" Arsanguir asked.
"So my feet can say sorry before they slip," Bren said over his shoulder. "Little threads to keep balance honest. Useful on leaf duff and lies."
"You can do that?" Arsanguir blurted, then winced at how eager he sounded.
Nara made a small noise. "You can, too."
"I can't," he said. "Not like that."
"Not yet," she said.
Kaelen slowed them a fraction, listening without letting the conversation break the road. "You can already do more than you think," he said to Arsanguir. "You don't choose it yet. It chooses you."
Arsanguir thought of the way his body had refused to fall. Of cuts that un-happened. "That doesn't feel like choosing."
"It isn't," Kaelen agreed. "It's reflex. Useful. Also dangerous if you trust it before you understand it. Kucholel wants what you want when you're calm. When you're not, it wants what you fear."
Rohuun glanced back. "Practice when no one's biting," he rumbled. "So when someone is, you're rehearsing, not inventing."
Arsanguir nodded because it seemed wise to agree with a man carrying a stone hammer like a pet. "So… how do I practice?"
"Small," Nara said. "Never big first. Try this—" She reached into her pouch and plucked out a dry seed head, brittle and brown. She tossed it to him. "Make it not break when it hits the ground."
He looked at the seed. The wind nudged it in his palm, a papery thing with a life's worth of faith bound up in its curve. "Just—want it?"
"Want is a clumsy word," Kaelen said quietly. "Listen. Decide. Name. Let go."
"Or," Bren added helpfully, "cheat."
Arsanguir crouched and set the seed at knee height above the dirt. He could almost see a thread, or maybe he was imagining it because he wanted to be useful. He breathed the smaller breaths. He thought not of stopping the fall, but of the ground welcoming the seed instead of greeting it like an enemy.
He released.
The seed dropped, touched soil—and didn't burst. It sank as if the dirt had been a little softer for a heartbeat. Still whole. Still itself.
"What did you do?" Bren asked, genuinely curious.
"Asked the ground to be kind," Arsanguir said, half embarrassed.
"Good ask," Nara said.
Kaelen nodded. "Good shape. Hold on to that one."
Arsanguir pretended not to grin. The grin happened anyway, small as an apology.
————————————————————————————————————
They camped that night on a shoulder of earth between two old beeches, where leaf litter muffled steps and the wind combed the branches into a low, clean sound. They hung strips of K'ahal over a shy fire and pretended not to be hungry while it turned dark edges into a gloss. Bren unpacked a stamp-sized iron, set it on a flat stone until it warmed, and branded their bundled meat with a small mark shaped like an eye with three lashes.
"Guild habit," he said when Arsanguir asked. "Ajtz'akol hates fights over food as much as fights over gold. You mark it, you own it unless you sell or share. Cuts down on throat-stabbing."
"Only by a little," Nara said.
"Enough to matter," Kaelen added, and something in his voice suggested he carried a longer tally than he'd ever say out loud.
They ate. Conversation came in pieces. Rohuun told a story about a B'aakal aunt who could smell rain a day early by the way rock sweated. Nara talked about a desert market where the merchants traded in shadows at noon—lay a cloth down, step onto it, watch your shade pool black, haggle over its size, then sell it to a man who needed it for his tent. Bren contributed three riddles that weren't and one that was. Kaelen listened and arranged the edges of their little circle with glances and a hand on a pot that wanted to boil over.
Arsanguir practiced. He balanced a pebble on the back of his hand and asked it not to roll off when he tilted his wrist. He coaxed sparks from the fire to leap and then die before they could bite a dry leaf. Once, he asked a small thread to tug his boot free of a root's grip and the root decided to be generous. Nara corrected his words when he said "stop" and "make"—too sharp; use "let" and "keep." Bren gave him a slap on the shoulder when he overthought and a nod when he didn't. Rohuun told him once, without looking up, "Eyes on your breath when you lose it." It sounded like advice about fighting and also about everything else.
Sleep came patient. The ridge wind ruined the insects' plans and the stars saw their chance. Arsanguir fell under with his hands folded on his chest, the way men who have not yet admitted they want to protect something sleep.
————————————————————————————————————
The second day turned the world into long repeats: step, breath, watch; step, breath, listen. They passed a stone boundary marker with a carved symbol that looked like a water reed. Later they found a painted post with three notches—toll gate once, long abandoned. In the afternoon they skirted a farmstead in a shallow bowl of land—fences new, fields clean, two children driving ducks toward a creek while a gray dog trotted behind with an expression of too much responsibility.
Nara made them angle wide. "Ducks announce strangers," she said.
The gray dog watched anyway, chest rumbling a quiet decision. Arsanguir raised a hand in what he hoped read as harmless. The dog decided to let the world survive another hour.
Toward evening, clouds stacked in the west like someone had forgotten to tie them down, and the heat that had ridden them since noon turned into sweat that couldn't find a reason to dry. They pushed to a small cave Bren knew—"Not a good cave," he said, "just familiar"—and found it as promised: a dark mouth under a lip of stone tilted east, with enough ceiling to stand and enough dry floor for five tired people to pretend they weren't taking turns being on edge.
They set the fire just inside the lip where smoke would escape and light would not advertise. Kaelen's face softened by a fraction when the first coil caught. "We cook and clean here," he said. "Early rest. No stories."
"Agreed," Nara said, eyeing the cave's back wall as if it might develop opinions.
Rohuun set the travois against the stone and began dividing the meat. Bren unstoppered the clay vial from two days ago—the one Kaelen had fed spores into—and held it up between finger and thumb.
"Use or save?" he asked.
"Save," Kaelen said immediately. "Tonight we don't need poison. We need quiet."
They ate K'ahal again—less salt, more smoke. It tasted like work should taste. Arsanguir chewed and let fatigue count his bones. When they finished, Nara made a quick coil of damp moss around the thin fire and braided a thread through it that told heat to go up and not out. "Less light," she said. "We don't invite."
Kaelen checked their packs by feel, then set watches. "I'll first," he said. "Rohuun second. Bren third. Nara last. Arsanguir—sleep. You move strangely when you're tired."
"That's kind," Bren said.
"It's honest," Kaelen answered.
Arsanguir tried to argue and found the energy to do so had wandered off. He lay down on his side with a folded cloth under his head. The fire was a hush-colored coin. The cave breathed old air. He slept.
————————————————————————————————————
He woke to the sound of nothing, and then of something pretending to be nothing.
Kaelen's hand was on his shoulder, gentle, not urgent, and his voice was a thread drawn close to the ear. "Slow," he said. "Don't breathe deep. Don't look at the fire."
Arsanguir didn't ask why. He let wakefulness climb in pieces—first his fingers, then his eyes, then the parts of him that made decisions. He kept his face turned toward the wall and looked sideways from the corners of his eyes into the cave.
The fire wasn't itself anymore. It was smaller, more disciplined. And the light it threw didn't behave. It dented. It retreated into itself like a herd. The shadows around it had grown teeth.
The sound came again—a far rain you could almost be tricked into saying. Then closer. Then under his skin.
"Kulkul," Nara breathed. Night-roaches.
Bren's whisper had less respect. "They're early."
Kaelen didn't move. "Smoke stays. We do not. Back against the far wall, under the lip. Pick up nothing you can live without."
They slid like people who had promised not to be heard. Rohuun shifted his hammer and his big body became a quiet shape—how something that size learned to make itself small was a question for another day. Nara gathered her quiver against her chest so the feathers wouldn't say their names. Bren eased the pack with the vial into his arms and hugged it like a precious child. Arsanguir made his hands be hands and not fists.
The first roach crept over the firestone, as large as a man's palm. Its abdomen glowed with a faint pulse like starlight drowned under thin milk. It reached the edge of the ember and paused. Light bent away from it, shrinking in a clean line, and the shadow under its body bulged like a thing breathing wrong.
Three more followed. Ten. Many. They did not buzz; buzzing would have been honest. Their little feet made the sound of dry ink on paper. They moved to the light the way thirst moves to water.
Bren set something on the rock by his knee—two little bundles twisted from cloth, each with a tiny bead of Kaelen's spore-vial touched to the knot. He didn't throw them. He set them. The smell reached Arsanguir in a thought: green, bitter, a memory of the swamp trying to climb into your throat.
The roaches stopped as one creature.
Kaelen touched Arsanguir's wrist, a small permission. "Now learn," he murmured.
"How?" Arsanguir whispered.
"Look away from wanting the fire bigger or smaller," Kaelen said. "Forget the flame. Listen for the line where light stops." He paused. "Do you feel it?"
Arsanguir did. Not in his eyes—behind them. A thin edge where brightness argued with dark and lost ground. He felt a thread if he wanted the place to be sharp. Instead he asked it to be fuzzy—to fray. "Let the edge be kind," he thought, not sure if he was doing anything but thinking words that felt too soft.
The nearest roaches clicked like teeth. Their bodies shifted, agitation or confusion or the roach version of a bad idea. The hard edge where light shrank softened by the width of a fingernail.
Nara's breath didn't quite catch. "Good."
Kaelen's voice wore approval like a coat he didn't often take out. "Keep that."
The bundles on the rock steamed, only a little. The smell made memory in their noses of drowning on dry land. The roaches recoiled, not in panic but in principle. A second wave crept over their backs. One clambered on a carapace and raised itself, antennae tasting the air.
"More?" Bren whispered, lifting a third bundle.
"Wait," Kaelen said. "We may need to run. Save sting."
Rohuun said nothing, but his big hand slid the hammer closer. His eyes glittered in the dim, reflecting light like stone pretending to be water.
A roach reached the nearest bundle and touched it. Its limbs recoiled as if burned. The glow in its belly brightened once, then dimmed. It backed away. The swarm shivered—a decision wobbling.
Arsanguir breathed the small square breaths. He worked on the edge again—let the light fray, be less worth devouring. He didn't force; he asked. The edge softened more. Tiny victories. The roaches questioned their hunger.
One of them broke the collective doubt and scrambled up a seam in the rock wall, away from the fire and toward the packs. Nara moved, finally, a quick flick—the blunt tip of an arrow, not the head, swatting the creature off the wall. It hissed, more wind than sound. Rohuun's thumb pressed quick, breaking its back without noise. He set it gently aside like a man storing a tool he hated.
"Left," Bren breathed.
Another line of them came, this time not for the fire but to pass through it, diving their bodies through the glow to drink the light on the other side. The bundles alone wouldn't turn them.
Kaelen's hand found Arsanguir's wrist again. "A small weave. Not a wall. A curtain." He lifted his other hand, index finger and thumb almost touching, shaping a space. "From here—" he touched the floor—"to the lip above. Invite the light to fall down along it, as rain on a thatch."
Arsanguir swallowed. The words were simple. The doing felt like building a bridge from spiderweb. He saw—no, sensed—four anchor points: floor stone, the notch where smoke slid out, a crease in the left wall, a crack on the right. He reached—not with hands—with the part of him that had once asked the ground to be kind.
Curtain, he thought. Kind curtain. Keep the light with us. Let the roaches think the feast is smaller than it is.
Something hung in the air—thin, shimmering, like heat over stone. The fire's light slid down it, brighter inside their small corner, dimmer beyond.
The roaches pushed, then slowed, then stopped. A few touched the shimmer and paused like animals feeling glass for the first time. They did not like it. They did not understand it. They turned their work back to the small open patches they could bully.
Bren let relief out slow. "Useful curtain."
"You surprised it into existing," Nara said. "Try to remember how you did that."
"I… asked it to be kind?"
"Good," Kaelen said. "Right words for now."
They waited out the first rush. The roaches fed where they could, and where they could not they seethed in slow, mindless argument. The bundles of spore-stink held a small territory around their knees. Twice a roach got too bold and Rohuun solved boldness with a thumb. Once, Bren made a small hiss sound at one that crept onto his boot, and it decided it had made a mistake and left.
They do not eat light. They hoard it, Arsanguir remembered from Bren's marginalia. He watched their bellies pulse brighter, dimmer, brighter, like little lungs of stolen morning. He found pity for one heartbeat and replaced it with caution.
"Are we safe?" he whispered.
"No," Kaelen said, because lying wastes energy. "But we are not dinner."
They kept their stillness until the swarm had eaten enough of their own argument to slow. Roaches crept toward the back of the cave to squat, bellies dulled by excess; others filed out the lip in ones and twos, seeking new light that wasn't there. The curtain thinned at the edges. Arsanguir let it fade as gently as he had asked it to appear.
"Sleep in turns," Kaelen said at last. "We move before dawn. No one touches a dead Kulkul. Not with hands you plan to put in your mouth."
"That is a rich image," Bren muttered, lying back with a sound like a sack finding the floor. "Thank you."
Rohuun took watch with eyes that pretended to be stone. Nara wrapped herself in oilcloth and turned her back to the dim. Kaelen sat with his back to the wall, hands on his knees, doing the opposite of sleeping while making it look a little like sleep. Arsanguir settled, pretending his bones weren't listening for a hum in the ground and that his skin didn't remember claws that hadn't happened.
When sleep found him, it did so sideways, like a cat that has decided he is probably harmless.
————————————————————————————————————
Dawn made the cave mouth into a silver line. The roaches were gone as if they'd only been an especially rude dream. Kaelen gave the place a last look that was not sentimental, and they slid out, light-footed, packs tighter, meat smoked deeper from the night's careful coals.
The day was kinder. The path bent into low hills and followed a creek that had chosen generosity early and stuck with it. Children's shouts floated thin from far fields and surprised laughter rang out when a dog got too bold with a goose. They passed a shrine stone painted with a circle and a slash—the road ward, Bren said—and set three pebbles on it because there is no reason not to.
By afternoon the signs of Larion thickened. The fields ran wider, the fences straighter, the scarecrows better dressed. A pair of mounted patrols passed on a ridge across the creek—lacquered breastplates, green-and-black pennons tugged by the wind—and did not cross to challenge them because people who carry meat and do not run usually belong to someone.
"Larion," Nara said softly, a theme more than a word.
"Kingdom," Bren corrected for Arsanguir's sake without looking at him. "Not city. Cities move. Kingdoms linger."
They climbed one last rise and the land at their feet spilled into a bowl of settlement: not one city but many woven tight—a market town around a stone keep; three villages braided by roads; a square watchtower visible from everywhere like a finger raised in admonition. Beyond, the river that gave the lowlands their life made a wide turn, gathering the light and keeping it.
Banner colors bent in the breeze over rooftops. The Ajtz'akol mark was there too—chalked on a gate post, stitched into a sleeve, painted small on a wagon wheel—the eye with three lashes, neutral and watchful. It meant: here is a house you can knock on and not be turned away unless you deserve it.
"Where?" Bren asked.
Kaelen's finger moved a thumb-width. "There. By the second bridge. Half-house, half-stable. They'll let us in back."
They entered Larion's reach with nothing dramatic. The gate guard didn't ask questions because Kaelen nodded in the right way and Bren said the right name—"Rax of the North Gate," as if leaving a coin on the threshold. Vendors argued without heat over onions. A woman wove a reed mat and didn't look up when a stray dog stepped on it, which told Arsanguir more about peace than any wall. Somewhere, a boy practiced a flute with real earnestness and no skill. It was a good sound anyway.
The Ajtz'akol house looked exactly like half of it had been stables once. The front had a counter and a board with notices pinned to it—two written, three drawn for those who had better hands than letters. The other half was long benches, a kettle on a hook, and a wall with hooks for gear. The smell was stew and boots and hot iron.
The woman behind the counter took one look at Kaelen and the edges of her face moved from guarded to less so. "You look like you did not die," she said.
"We saved it for later," Kaelen replied.
She made a mark in a ledger without writing the name she surely knew. "Beds in the back," she said. "Bak,"—she called to someone out of sight—"get the small room. Pay is in meat or coin; you'll choose badly either way."
"We pay meat," Bren said, handing over a wrapped rib with the eye-brand stamped on it. "It lies less than coin."
"We'll see," she answered, and took it with professional suspicion that meant she had once been lied to by meat. "Soup's hot. There's a table that hasn't given up yet."
They ate there—wooden bowls, thick stew, hot bread that startled them by being fresher than they'd planned for. The big room's noise wrapped them without asking questions. Rohuun's shoulders melted an inch. Nara let a smile sharpen and then soften again. Bren told a joke that wasn't good; it earned him a piece of onion thrown at his head; he caught it with the self-respect of a man who catches thrown food before eating it.
Arsanguir watched the room as much as he ate. He felt stares graze his skin now and then—the kind people give strangers with weapons who look like they slept outside—but no one stared long. The ajtz'akol insignia on Kaelen's collar did that work for them.
After the second bowl and the first slow exhale in hours, Kaelen tilted his head toward a side room partitioned by a curtain. "We should talk before anyone talks for us."
They crowded in, elbows brushing. A single lamp hung in a niche. It made a circle of uncompromising light and left the corners alone. For one heartbeat, Arsanguir remembered roach bellies and looked away. Then he turned back, because looking away wastes time.
Kaelen leaned against the wall like a man who had finally been given permission to be tired. "You've walked with us long enough to owe each other truths," he said. "We will ask you for one now, because the asking is cleanest here."
Nara's voice came gentler than most had heard it. "Where are you from?"
"And where do you need to be?" Bren added.
Rohuun watched without pressing. His presence made the small room feel like it wouldn't break under an honest answer.
Arsanguir put his palms flat on the table between them and studied the bones under the skin. They were his. That seemed like a useful fact to start with. "I come from a village west of here," he said. "Not far, if the roads are right and the weather doesn't argue. I don't know its name on your maps. It has names to the people in it. It sits under a line of hills and smells like wet wheat when the wind is kind." He swallowed. "I want to go back."
Bren nodded once like a man approving the obvious. "We can find a village that smells like wet wheat."
Kaelen's eyes asked and didn't demand. "Do you want to fetch something from it," he said, "or bring someone to it?"
"Both," Arsanguir said. "If they are there. If the ground hasn't taught me a lesson I don't want."
Nara's mouth made that thin not-smile again. "You're from somewhere," she said, as if that were a blessing.
Rohuun's voice was a stone set carefully in place. "Then we take you."
It sounded very simple when he said it. That was his gift.
Kaelen straightened. "In the morning we use the board and a map and Bren's nose. We'll buy what the road demands and leave what it doesn't. We'll avoid roads that teach bad songs."
He looked at Arsanguir one last time, measuring with the caution of a man who builds bridges and walks them first. "You helped keep us alive twice without knowing what you were doing," he said. "Tomorrow, we teach you enough to do it on purpose."
Arsanguir let out a breath he didn't know he'd been hoarding. The relief felt like standing in a doorway after rain and knowing the house still stands. "Thank you," he said, because sometimes the right word is small.
Outside, Larion breathed its evening—the big, layered breath of a kingdom that had practiced being itself for a long time. Somewhere a bell rang once to mark the hour and then decided it had nothing more to add. In the ajtz'akol house, bowls were stacked, boots were pulled, snores declared sovereignty in corners that had been claimed.
They agreed to wake when the city wanted to, not before. They would go north and west and stitch a path with the thinnest threads they had. The curtain in the cave had been Arsanguir's first deliberate weave. Tomorrow would ask for more. He didn't know how to give it yet. That was all right. The table between them felt strong enough.
"Tomorrow," Kaelen said, and the word contained a road.