Chapter 161: The Scar and the Axe [2]
Kaelin tested their edges with new angles.
He vanished, then returned behind an echo and stabbed its shadow instead of its body. The echo stuttered, not sure which part to rebuild. Veyra shot the shadow and the body at the same time.
Both burst, and the echo finally died.
"Trick it," Kaelin said, pleased. "Lie to its memory."
Clayton did not smile. He felt the ground watch that trick and tuck it away.
He changed tactics.
He sank a web of fine roots into the bowl, so thin they were almost thought. He did not strike, rather, he listened.
He let the echoes walk and each step sent a pattern. The bowl had its own heartbeat, slow, harsh, and steady. The echoes moved in phase with it, like dancers who could not hear anything else.
And then he did one small, quiet thing.
He made the heartbeat miss a beat.
The next echo stepped into a rhythm that was not there and stumbled. Torren took its head.
Another echo overswung by a hair and Soren split the opening. Veyra put a shaft through an eye that would have been protected if the beat had come on time.
It worked for three exchanges.
Then the bowl corrected. It pushed back, hard. The heartbeat fell into a new pattern and tried to shove Clayton’s web out.
He anchored. He grew three seedpikes and pinned the rhythm to the ground where he wanted it. "Hold," he said. The floor hesitated; the echoes jerked.
Kaelin darted in and cut their hamstrings.
Torren barked a laugh and carved.
Soren tore one in half. "Better."
Clayton did not press.
He held the beat for a handful of breaths, then let it go. He did not want the scar to learn his whole hand in one game. He would need surprises later. He withdrew the web and let the bowl settle back into its old pain.
They cleared the second bowl and climbed again.
By the third shelf, the valley narrowed into a throat. The air grew colder even as smoke still rose. The plants disappeared, and even lichens refused the rock.
The only things that moved were the echoes, and they moved less like men and more like laws given shape.
They reached a ledge above the throat and stopped.
Below, the scar widened into a crater. At its center stood a broken throne.
It had been enormous. It had been woven from living trunks as thick as towers and bound with the kind of law that made seasons bow. Now it was split into six petals of black wood that leaned away from each other like a flower blasted open by a bomb.
A pit yawned where the seat had been. Around the crater, seven rings of growth had tried to regrow and failed. Each ring told a story in bark of someone trying a different rule; none held.
Clayton stared and listened.
The pit spoke. Not words, but a pressure that pressed back. A refusal.
He did not go down yet; he needed the rest of his people first.
He noticed a faint tremor tickle his roots, running counter to the pit’s pressure. It was softer, steady and healing.
’Mirra’.
He shifted his weight and found the line.
The tremor ran under the left lip of the crater and out into a low fold of ground where a thin thread of green still dared to show.
"She’s there," he said, pointing. "At the edge, into the land."
Veyra’s breath left in a soft sound he almost never heard from her, relief. "Good."
Torren grunted. "Then we grab her and leave this hole as soon as possible."
Clayton shook his head. "We don’t grab her, she’s part of the law here now. We break the wrong thing, the valley shuts on us like teeth."
Soren nodded once. "So we touch light."
Kaelin peered over the lip, studying the broken throne. "I’d rather not get eaten by old rules today."
Clayton pulled them back from the edge and chose a path that skirted the crater’s rim. It avoided the obvious slopes and used fractures that had formed when the throne blew.
It took longer, but it kept them off the main memory veins. The echoes came less often here and with less conviction.
The scar could not be everywhere at once.
They eventually reached the fold where the green thread ran.
It was a shallow hollow. The soil there had not burned as deeply, just a thin sheet of moss grew on stone. In its middle, a single white flower opened and closed with a heartbeat too slow for eyes.
Clayton knelt and put his hand down.
The moss parted like a curtain. Beneath it, roots braided into a net. The net glowed faintly, the glow pulsing with the same rhythm as the flower.
Mirra’s pulse.
Clayton did not dig, he didn’t cut either. He shaped.
He grew the stone around the net into a bowl that lifted as one. The net came up intact with the moss on top as the glow brightened. The pulse quickened.
Soren stepped back, careful not to cast heat at it. Veyra lowered her head. Kaelin, for once, did not crack a joke.
The net shivered and then softened, unwinding like a hand unclenching.
And then, Mirra’s face formed where the roots were densest. Not a perfect face, but a map, her eyes like dew. Her mouth were like a line of petal edges. She breathed once and opened those eyes.
Clayton exhaled and put his other hand on the net. "Welcome back."
Mirra blinked and shivered as tears pooled at the corners of her petal-eyes. Her voice was thin and full of air and light. "You found me."
"We followed you," Clayton said. "You were loud."
She laughed, small and bright, then her face tightened. She looked past him toward the crater. "It hurts."
He nodded. "We know."
"I can hold one edge," she said. "I can’t close it alone."
"You won’t," Clayton said.
Torren crouched by the bowl and grinned at her. "You look like a garden threw up in the right way."
Mirra smiled at him through the weave. "You look like a bonfire that learned to wear boots."
"Accurate," Kaelin said. "We’re all very handsome."
Veyra touched the moss a finger’s width from Mirra’s cheek. "Can you walk?"
Mirra’s eyes fluttered. "Not like you, not yet, but I can move with you. I can spread and follow if the ground allows."
Clayton listened to the soil around them.
The scar did not like the net being lifted, but the fold was a place of mercy. The valley’s law here was not as strict; it would tolerate a slow carry.
"We’ll bear you," he said.
He shaped a cradle from living wood and slid the net into it without breaking a single strand. The cradle grew handles that fit four hands.
Soren and Torren took the front, Veyra took one back corner, and Kaelin pretended to take the other and then rested his hand on the rim without weight; the cradle floated by a hair as he bent the air around it.
Mirra chuckled at that. "Cheater."
Kaelin winked. "Efficient."
They eased away from the fold and onto the route Clayton had chosen.
The scar noticed and sent a pair of echoes to test them, but Clayton shifted the ground’s beat again, barely, and the echoes stumbled long enough for Veyra to pin them and Soren to finish them.
They kept moving.
They reached a shelf with a broken arch that once might have been a gate into the throne-terrace. The arch hummed with old, cracked law. It did not hate them, it did not help them either. It watched.
They passed under it.
The pit loomed closer, a black mouth rimmed with splinters. Heat breathed from it without warmth. Sound leaked, low, constant, bone-deep.
Clayton stopped at the last ridge before the lip and set the cradle down. He turned to his people.
"This is the heart of the wound," he said. "If the Trial is what I think, our path runs through this".
"But we don’t drop into a throat until we know how to climb back out."
"We anchor," Torren said. He nodded at the ground. "Seedpikes, webs, ladders."
"Agreed," Clayton said.
He grew two seedpikes and sank them at the ridge, then drew a fine grid of roots under the ash plates to feel the pit’s breath without letting it feel back. "We map the beat, we learn what it punishes, we give it something new to chew that is not us."
Mirra’s voice was steady now, stronger as the cradle drank light. "This wound is a fight frozen in law. It forces you to repeat the battle that broke it. If we fight on its terms, we will feed it."
"So we don’t," Veyra said. "We write a new fight."
Soren’s mouth curved. "We teach it surrender."
Kaelin looked down into the dark and smiled in a thin, dangerous way. "Or a trick."
Clayton watched the pit and listened to the scar breathe. He felt the old throne’s bones under the ash and the way the law leaned, always toward repetition, always toward reenactment, never toward resolution.
"Orientation," he said, half to them, half to the trial. "Learn the region, learn the law, and learn the wound."
He raised his head.
"We’ve learned enough to start."
All of a sudden, the sky darkened, then brightened, then settled, as if Echoterra itself nodded.
A thin line wrote itself across their sight.
DING!
~----~
[Orientation: 66% Complete]
"Scar of thrones identified."
"Bloom recovered."
"Resolution remains locked."
~----~
Clayton clenched his hand once and let it go.
"Good," he said. "We finish the map, then we make a plan that the wound cannot predict."
Torren set the axe across his knees and grinned like a wolf. "Can’t wait."
Veyra’s bow curled tighter around her arm. "We’ll need bait."
Kaelin’s eyes gleamed. "I volunteer other people."
Soren snorted. "We’ll volunteer you."
Mirra’s petals folded and opened like a calm breath. "I can steady the edges when you pull."
Clayton looked at all of them and felt the old fear shift into something cleaner. Not peace, not here, but purpose.
Compared to Trial I, his progress here was faster and more methodical.
"Rest," he said. "Then we go to work."
They settled on the ridge above the pit, under a sky that glowed like veins. The scar hummed below them. The throne’s bones waited, and the law that had frozen a war listened for the next move.
They would not give it the move it knew. They would give it an end.