Chapter 322: 322: Patrolling The Mountain
---
Luna stepped into his space and set a hand on his chest near the crack in the plate. Her eyes said things that were not for the others. He put his hand over her cheeks. Then she removed it and all the tension left her shoulders in one precise...
SIGH!
It was the first time she had seen Kai’s apex transformation. She had many questions but she held them for now.
He walked her and Naaro back to the egg chamber. The line of the essence threads pulsed soft in the floor grooves like veins. The runes along the wall breathed a slow light. He stepped to the closest cradle and laid a hand on the silk barely touching the shells. They answered his palm with the almost sound of new things becoming.
He spoke without raising his voice. He did not speak to the eggs. He spoke to the mountain.
"Everything that comes here will either bend to this place or break against it."
The system’s quiet knife of a voice arrived again.
[Ding! System Notification: Egg Chamber status stable. Guardian presence logged. Defensive readiness improving.
Suggestion: Use two aura imprint sessions daily for brood guidance to the host.
Note: essence liquid stores near one hundred liters.]
He remembered the small flask and the sleeping wyrmling and the promise that the world would be a game when she grows up. He filed the reminder. First tonight. Then the next one.
He returned back toward the entrance. Shadeclaw had already placed two spike markers into the sand outside where the Stalker had first broken the ground. Silvershadow had already laid a small lattice of thin line across each of the soft places where a second burrower might rise. They did not need to be told everything. They were made for this.
He let the last of the fight move out of his limbs and into his memory where it would live as weight. The ache from the crack in his plate stayed honest and sharp. A bruise was forming along his ribs in a long arc. He rolled his shoulder again and it tugged. There are injuries you carry through the first watch because it changes how you stand and you want the mountain to see you stand that way.
Alka’s cry slid down from the sky. Not a warning. A statement. She had seen nothing yet. She would and might...
Kai set his back to the stone beside the entrance and watched the desert until his heartbeat felt like part of the sand. He was back to his human form.
The moon had tilted down. The cold came in thin sheets and pooled in the low places. The carcass lay in the bowl. Something small and bold had already crept up to try a bite and had learned a hard lesson. It did not try again. They had gathered all the parts that could be used in the forge.
Footsteps sounded inside the corridor. Soft ones. Naaro. She stopped at his left elbow but did not cross the threshold. He did not look down at her because he did not need to. He could feel the small even hum from the cradles through her body as if the eggs were a tune and she was a string.
"Do you need anything," she asked.
"Yes," he said. "You to sleep."
"I will soon," she said.
"Then I will lie twice as long later so you can lie twice as deep now."
She wanted to argue. She did not. She bowed her head with the same dignity she had kept in labor and turned back to the chamber. Luna took her place in the corridor without any ceremony. She did not speak either. They looked at the sand together for a time that did not try to become a number.
When she did speak it was in the low voice she used when she had already decided her anger was finished burning and had turned into iron.
"Our home is good," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"We are enough," she said.
"For now," he said, and the honesty pleased her more than a pretty lie.
She squeezed his hand one time and left him with the watch.
The mountain settled by degrees. The wind that had helped hide their sounds lifted and ran elsewhere. The quiet that replaced it was not thin. It was thick and patient and full of listening. Shadeclaw walked the west line and Silvershadow the east. Vexor and Shale stood a little below the lip in shadow with their bodies turned to cover angles. Flint and Needle kneaded small ridges into the sand with their feet, the simple repetitive work a way to keep blood warm and attention relaxed but not loose.
Kai stayed until his breath and the night’s breath were the same size. The system said nothing else. He liked it that way.
A long time later he turned, stepped inside, and let the warm air catch at the edge of his plate. He went down to the cradles and changed nothing. He did not need to. He went to his room where Miryam slept and looked at the small gold coil of her. He did not wake her. He felt the last of the fight leave his hands.
He lay down only when he knew that if something came he would hear it first and last and in between, and he slept the way soldiers sleep, with one part of his mind sitting up straight inside the rest of him.
Outside, the desert considered the line where their world began and stayed on its side of it.
When dawn came the light did not pry. It arrived like a friend. Shadeclaw and Silvershadow traded places without a word. Alka folded her wings and blinked a slow blink that meant she had seen enough to trust the day. The carcass in the bowl looked smaller. It would look smaller again by noon. The first beetles had found work in it that would keep them pleased for hours.
Kai rose, set his palm on the nearest cradle, and felt thirty days stack themselves up like stones he could climb. He smiled once, small and real.