The mountain held its breath.
Smoke pooled in the gorge like fog that had learned to hate. The copper tang of blood clung to the timbered yard and to tongues, and every plank of the barricade had a memory gouged into it. Above, the cliff loomed—a jagged wall of shale and stubborn granite, veined with old cracks like a clenched fist. Men, wolves, and fae stood at its foot and looked up as if they were studying the face of a god they meant to topple.
No one spoke for a long time. Even the children had gone quiet. Somewhere a length of rope creaked over a hook; a lantern guttered and then steadied with a sigh.
Riven broke the silence. His voice was not loud, but it travelled to every ear with the ease of breath. "We end it here. No more waves. No more running. The gorge dies tonight."
Garrett tightened the rope harness across his chest, testing the knot with a savage tug. Two oil barrels hung from it, knocking together with a dull, busy sound. "Then let's make a corpse," he said.
Amber checked the pouch at her hip, flint and steel and wicks, her expression pared down to the simple essentials of intent. Ailis the air-turner stood a little apart, palms open, eyes hooded; fatigue had made thin shadows on her face, but there was still something sharp and spare about her, like wind in a high place.
Torvee shifted Jonah on her hip as the boy clung to her tunic. He'd stopped shaking but his breath still came too fast. "You don't have to watch," she murmured.
"I want to," he whispered, stubborn. The whisper had awe in it, and hunger, and the aching copycat courage of the young.
Elara stood at the edge of the light, staring up at the cliff. The silver inside her hummed in a low, steady way—no blaze, no flare, just the sense that some invisible thread ran from the moon to the stone through her bones. She reached up, found the thong of her weapon; her fingers shook only once.
Caleb stepped to her side. Soot smudged his cheekbone, and a nick on his mouth had bled and dried there like punctuation. His bow was already strung; the string made a faint singing if you listened for it. "Stay near me," he said quietly.
"I can look after myself," she said, but the words didn't carry an edge; they were habit, not armour. Her fingers brushed his, brief as a breath.
"I know," he said. For half a heartbeat his mouth tilted, the ghost of a smile. "Humour me."
Riven's gaze found Elara. Some of the weight in it was order, some was something else. "You lead the climb. Use what you are to feel the seam. Garrett, Amber, Ailis with you. Luke as runner. Torvee, you hold the first turn with Jonah and keep the rope clear. Caleb covers the path. If the line below calls, we don't waste time arguing with whatever's coming up the slope."
He didn't add if anyone falls. He didn't need to.
They moved.
The path up the cliff had begun as a goat's bad idea and been improved by men with rope and profanity. It ran across rotten shelves and through clefts that smelled of damp and the old breath of stone. The first few steps were always the worst; afterwards, fear exhausted itself and left room for attention.
Elara went first, hands finding places for themselves as if the mountain had grown holds for her because she had promised to be careful. The silver thrummed in her fingers when she touched the rock. Behind her Garrett came, the barrels knocking. He breathed like a bellows used for proper work. Amber moved with fox-quick care, light on the balls of her feet, carrying wicks and a bundle of oiled cloth. Ailis followed with that economy older women have when they have learned to keep strength for the step that matters.
Luke trotted at the back with a coil of rope, cheeks wind-burnt and eyes bright. "Left at the spur," he murmured, mostly to himself. "Up two shelves. Then the seam."
Below and behind, Caleb watched the slope and the black mouth of the gorge. He moved backwards at times, walking by touch, loosing an arrow now and then at movement too fast for a clean thought. His breath was steady; his eyes flicked and counted and placed. Torvee set Jonah down at the first turn and flattened him with palms on shoulders when he leaned too far: she didn't bother with explanation; the position itself was instruction.
The higher they climbed, the colder the air got—thin, clean, sharp with the smell of shale. The village fell away beneath them: the barricade, the yard, the pale faces turned up. Elara didn't look back. She put her palm flat against the cliff face and closed her eyes.
There.
Not a sound. Not exactly a feeling. A difference. The way a table tells you it has a crack in it when you run your hand along the underside. The seam ran diagonally from a pale scar of quartz towards the first bend of the gorge. Old water had worried it once. Heat and weight would make it remember.
"Here," she said. Her voice came out low. "And here."
Garrett grunted satisfaction and dragged the first barrel forward, heel to rock, wedge to hand. The pry bar went in with a thick, rude sound; he leaned, body a simple machine, and the seam widened by the width of a thumbnail. Amber was already stuffing oiled cloth into the new mouth. "We'll give it something to drink," she said.
Ailis crouched, eyes half-closed. "Tell me when," she said. "And mean it."
The gorge below muttered. The sound of claws on stone travelled up the rock like words through a floor. Riven's howl came back in answer—a single note that set every ribcage humming.
"Faster," Garrett said, not unkindly.
They worked. Oil sloshed into the seam, ran down into the rock's old grievances. Wicks were pegged along the run. Amber set a second, thinner line farther out, a throat for the flame to follow when it was time to be loud. Elara moved along the face, pressing her palm here, here, finding places where wedges would kiss and make something yield.
Caleb's voice came up the path, level and too calm. "Movement," he said. "Small groups, testing the slope."
"How far?" Elara called.
"Near enough that I'm shooting at shadows to remind them manners exist," he said, which was a Caleb way of saying close enough to count. An arrow whispered and thudded into something that made a soft, annoyed noise. "Keep working."
Luke's head cocked. He'd begun to know the pack's signals, the way different howls laid threads across the air. "Amber's spur is holding," he said, almost to himself. "If they break there we'll hear it."
The last wedge went in. Garrett leaned. The seam widened again, and this time a little trickle of powdered stone ran out and down the face like spilt flour. He exhaled, satisfaction as plain as hunger. "That'll do."
"Wicks," Amber said briskly. She moved like a woman laying out a supper for guests who meant to eat and run: neat, efficient, no fuss. Ailis pinched the furthest end, and the smouldering coal under her thumbnail brightened at once, obedient as a dog. She smiled a small, private smile at it.
"On your word," she said to Elara.
Elara looked down.
From here the yard looked like a child's drawing—little blocks of light, little lines of men. The barricade had a colour she could only think of as tired brown. The mouth of the gorge was an absence, a blacker black. The air rising from it tasted wrong. She felt the silver stir under her tongue. The seam under her palm had the patient, hungry feel of something that would be happy to fail as soon as it was given permission.
She looked at Caleb.
He had stepped up beside her now, the better to shoot and to be in the way if she fell. His eyes were the colour of old cider in a glass held up to lamplight. He saw what she saw and didn't pretend otherwise. He didn't say we'll be all right. He would never insult her like that. He said, "Say when."
"Now," Elara said.
The word sat in the seam like a command that had been waiting for its name. Ailis kissed fire onto the first wick. Amber touched the second. The cloth didn't flare; it took and glowed and then ran along the seam, a thin orange vein brightening as it went. The smell came up—the heavy, ugly sweetness of oil turned to intent.
"Back," Garrett said.
They began to withdraw—not hurried, not slow, the pace of people carrying something delicate and dangerous in their mouths. A small shower of grit fell from the face. Then another. The stone made a noise—not a crack, not yet; a long, irritated groan, as if you had woken it in the middle of a decent sleep.
Below, the ferals answered the change in the air the way wasps answer the sudden presence of jam.
The first cluster came over the lower lip at a scuttle, four, six, eight bodies scrabbling, claws doing their old impatient work. Caleb shot, clean and quick—one dropped, another twisted away. Torvee hissed, and two young wolves in human skin slid past her to meet the first climbers with knives. The slope was dirty with loose stone; boots slipped; bodies hauled. There is a way the world fills with the detail of not falling.
"Keep coming," Garrett said, as much to himself as to the rest of them.
The wicks reached the deeper oil. Flames crawled sideways. The seam's groan deepened to a note you felt through your guts more than heard. A hairline crack jumped up the face, following a thread of quartz towards the first bend, and Elara felt the silver in her bones say there without words.
"Back," she said, louder now.
They moved round the first dog-leg of the path—Luke handing the rope past a jut of rock, Amber ducking under the barrel as Garrett shouldered through, Ailis keeping two fingers crooked as if she were teasing a draught into doing tricks.
The mountain changed its mind.
The sound it made was not one thing. It was a series of decisions: this seam failing, that shelf letting go, a buried grin of shale remembering it had never been welded to the rest, only pressed. The first slab peeled away in a sheet and paused as if wondering whether to be dramatic, then went with a rumble that became a roar. A cloud of dust leapt up and ran into their faces like a living thing.
"Down!" Elara shouted, and they ducked by instinct, arms over heads as grit pattered and a fist-sized stone bounded past, insulted at their existence.
"Nearly there," Garrett barked, coughing. "Keep your—"
The rest was lost in thunder. The overhang coughed, and then everything under it had to be somewhere else in a hurry. Rock folded and fell, broke and fell, slid and fell. The gorge became a throat stuffed in an instant with too much, the sound of it like water turned to weight. Ferals screamed—not fear, not exactly; surprise, pain, the offended outrage of hunger meeting something that didn't care.
Elara's mouth tasted of lime dust and old iron. She grabbed for the jut of rock by the turn and found it with a hand that had been told by something older than her nerves exactly where it was. She twisted, reached back blindly. "Caleb!"
"I'm here," he shouted, and then he wasn't, not exactly—not as a position you could rely on. The shelf under his right foot shifted a sly half-inch. He snatched for a hold; his fingers slid on the dust. The stone under him sheared. For a second he was still there because he refused not to be.
Elara lunged. Her fingers closed on his wrist—skin rough, familiar, a pulse that had always made an answering thing in her.
The mountain had other plans. The stone beneath Caleb went entirely, a plug pulled. His weight tore at her shoulder. Pain flared like electric fire up her arm. For a breath she had him.
Their eyes met. The world made too much noise to permit words. He put something into the way he held her gaze that had always been there—protect, promise, stubbornness.
His skin slid in the dust slick on both their hands.
He dropped.
"Elara!" Garrett's hand slammed round the back of her jacket and hauled with the guiltless strength of a man who has a different list of things he refuses to lose. She kicked at him, uselessly, automatically, not because she meant it but because her body was trying to continue something the world had stopped. "No—no—Caleb!"
The path where Caleb had been broke and tumbled after him, a curtain of rock. The gorge swallowed the fall—stone on stone, the brief, obscene interruption of a body. Dust boiled up and made a second night inside the first.
"Back!" Garrett roared into her ear. "If you go over I can't pull both of you!"
The rest of the team lurched round the next dog-leg, half-blind. Luke's horn went with one short, wordless note that didn't try to be brave. Amber shoved Ailis ahead and then turned to put her weight into Elara because experience had told her there are moments when all you can do is be heavier than another person's grief.
They ran.
The path bucked and skittered under their boots; small slides chased their heels; the twin barrels banged Garrett's ribs; Luke tripped and didn't fall because the rope knew him. The world behind them became a series of collapses. The gorge complained and then stopped complaining because it did not have enough throat left to make a sound.
The yard opened like a punctuation mark. Hands were there—wolves', humans', someone's—pulling them through the sally gate, dragging them into the big shared breath of being at the top of something when the bottom has gone. The dust followed, a grey animal, and then gave up, defeated by air.
Silence fell in pieces.
It wasn't real silence. Men coughed; a child cried once and was hushed; a wolf sneezed like a big dog and presented the sneeze to the world with dignity. The mountain itself had stopped talking. The mouth of the gorge was gone. In its place lay a jumbled, brutal quilt of rock: slabs, chunks, boulders, a slope of ruin that had been a throat and was now a tomb. No black. No gap. No way through.
They'd done it.
The thought came partway into Elara's head and sat there without knowing what furniture to use. Victory was a shape that didn't fit round the other thing in her.
She dropped to her knees at the lip where the path began and began to dig.
At first it was method: lift a stone, throw it aside, find another. Then it became the blind business of refusal: hands tearing, nails breaking, skin splitting, blood greasing dust into something that clung. The rock was hot where fire had come, cold where old stone was new to the air. She muttered his name between breaths. Then she said it aloud. Then she shouted.
"Caleb! Caleb!"
The rubble answered in small shifts and little falls. Behind her someone said her name and was not a person she could hear. The silver under her skin was white noise now, her own blood throwing static at her ears.
"Enough," Riven said.
He didn't speak harshly. He put the word down like a beam across something that needed holding up. Elara ignored him. She got her fingers under a flake and pulled until it came away with skin. The pain made a clean flare. It didn't matter.
"Elara." A heavier hand landed on her wrist—Garrett. He didn't squeeze. He just was round the bone. "If you keep this up you'll go in after him."
"There's air down there," she said, hoarse. "There could be. He could—"
"Not with that weight on him," Amber said, kneeling at her other side, voice gentler than it had been all night. "Not under that."
Elara yanked her hand free and tried another stone, and another. She got three in a row and then could not find a fourth, and then the breath went out of her. It wasn't the dust. It was the part of breathing that agrees to practise being alive. It had had enough for the moment.
She sagged back on her heels. The world swam, then steadied. The cliff face was a different shape. The moon looked the same.
The pack stood in a crooked arc behind her. Some had blood drying in their fur. Some had human faces smeared with soot. The fae had their hands on their knees, spent, green light guttering like little lamps. Torvee had Jonah's head under her chin; he wasn't crying exactly; he made those small wet breaths children make when they are trying to be admirable. Luke stood with his hands open and empty and stared at them like he'd forgotten what they were for.
Riven looked down into what had been the gorge and then at the people who had made a decision and lived long enough to see what it cost. His golden gaze returned to Elara. There was something like pride there. Something like fear. Mostly there was that quiet: the kind he wore when he'd made space inside himself for grief and refused to let it set anything on fire.
"We've closed the wound," he said. "They won't pour through again."
No one cheered. You don't cheer at a graveside, however large.
Elara dragged the back of her hand across her mouth and tasted blood. Her voice came raw. "He was right there."
"I know," Riven said. He didn't say I'm sorry because that had too many mouths and too few teeth. He said, "We'll name him when the sun gets up."
"We'll name him now," she said, throat tearing on the insistence. She looked at the stone until it blurred and then snapped back into focus, as if her eyes were tired of helping with this. "Caleb," she said to the rock. "You stubborn bastard." The last word broke on something that might have been a laugh if there'd been any space for it.
Ailis came and crouched, palms on her thighs. "He went faster than most," she said, not for comfort. "Stone is kinder than teeth."
Torvee crossed herself with a gesture that belonged to no temple and all of them. "We'll tell the pups," she said. "We'll tell them the man who kept their Luna from falling into a hole the night the mountain moved."
Elara didn't correct the word. She had tried once or twice to hold that title off; the world kept giving it back to her like a cloak shoved at a girl who'd forgotten cold exists.
She turned her palms up in her lap and looked at them. They were raw. Bits of stone were embedded in the cuts. Blood made brown rosettes as it dried. Caleb's last warmth had been there a minute ago. It had already gone. Skin cools so quickly.
The yard remembered itself. Someone fetched water. Someone else laid out blankets on a bench. A boy took a hammer to a bent nail because his hands needed a job that had a sensible outcome. The fae lifted their palms and pulled life back into a man who had chosen not to die that morning; he gasped and swore at them and then apologised because he had been raised, once, by someone who'd taught him where words go.
Riven squatted so his eyes were level with Elara's. "We've bought time," he said softly. "Not safety. Time. Use it. Grieve him, and then train. Your voice will be asked for again."
She nodded without meaning to. The silver inside her didn't blaze. It lay like a coin under her tongue: present, weighty, impossible to swallow.
Amber offered a cup. Elara drank because the cup existed and that was sometimes enough reason. Water tasted of iron and the miraculous fact of being wet.
A horn sounded from the far spur—one long, tired note. Not alarm. The noise a man makes to say we're still here. Wolves answered from the yard with a soft, collective breath, the pack's version of a nod.
"Get them in," Garrett called without raising his voice. "Rotate. Eat. Sleep in turns. The wall's shut but the world isn't." He looked at the rubble and then at Elara. "We build a cairn when it's light."
Night thinned a fraction. Not dawn—not yet. A different kind of grey stood up in the east, as if the sky had decided to have a look but wasn't prepared to commit. The cold deepened, then eased.
Elara stayed a while longer at the lip, hands loose now, grief heavy in the bones where strength sits. She said his name once more, quietly, into the new shape of the gorge. The sound did not come back. She didn't need it to.
When she stood at last, her legs argued. She ignored them. Caleb would have rolled his eyes at that and then stood in the doorway until she lay down to prove a point. Luke drifted to her side without speaking. Torvee brushed her shoulder in passing. Jonah, small and fierce, slipped his hand into hers br