Page 44 of Bite Bonded Bride

"This is—" He straightens. "If this is real⁠—"

"It's real."

"They'll call it forgery."

"That's why we move now. Before he can put the story together."

There are maybe eighty people in the square by the time we get there. More gathering at the edges, drawn by the same fear that's been building all week. I climb the base of the supply crane because it's the tallest thing nearby and I have done stupider things for worse reasons.

"My name is Cybele." My voice carries better than I expect, a thing the tunnels taught me. "I'm the cartographer Mordane hired to map the lower passages. Most of you know me. Some of you didn't think I'd come back."

I have their attention. Fear makes good audiences.

"The mountain didn't start shaking because of monsters." I hold up the records. The ancient vellum catches the grey afternoon light. "It started shaking because three centuries ago, the dark elf houses cracked the Wildspont open deliberately. To kill a civilization they couldn't defeat in open war. And now their mistake is about to swallow all of us with it."

The silence lasts three full seconds. Then the square erupts.

It's not panic, or rather, it's panic transforming into something with shape and direction. I see it move through the crowd like a lit fuse. The fear doesn't disappear. It compresses. Hardens into something more useful.

Theren appears at my shoulder. "They're ready to move."

I look out at the faces turning toward us, miners and families and frightened people who just discovered that the thing they feared was never the one with fangs. The pull in my chest tightens. Hold on, I tell the dark beneath us. I'm coming back.

"Then let's give them somewhere to go," I say. "Together."

24

ZARETH

She is already gone when I step into the Obsidian Citadel. The bond tells me. Not her location but the shape of her choice, pressing against my sternum. Every instinct I own screams at me to follow, to find her, to drag her back behind something that will not collapse on top of her.

I breathe through it. Once. Twice.

Her choice. The bond does not lie about that.

I face my people instead.

They fill the great chamber shoulder to shoulder, something I have not seen in decades. Rival faction banners hang limp in the stale air. Starving survivors from the outer districts stand beside noble house soldiers who would have sneered at them a month ago. The dead spaces between them are filled with an unfamiliarity.

Desperation, maybe. Or the first fragile edge of a new beginning.

Veyrik stands to my right. My mother at my left, her ceremonial robes traded for armor, her jaw set in a line I have known since childhood. She does not look at me. She watches the crowd, counting, assessing. Still my mother, even now.

I step forward. The murmuring dies.

"Malachar believes we will collapse on our own." My voice carries without effort in the stone chamber. "He has been patient. He spent centuries engineering our silence, our weakness, our hunger. He opened a wound beneath this mountain and waited for us to bleed out quietly in the dark."

Silence.

"He was almost right."

I let that land.

"We have starved. We have lost districts, families, entire bloodlines. We have turned on each other in the dark because we ran out of enemies we could reach." I scan the crowd, the gaunt faces, the hollowed eyes, the hands that still curl toward weapons even at rest. "He counted on that too."

An ugly whimper moves through the chamber. The sound of people recognizing a wound.

"We will not die as pests driven into the stone." The words come out quieter and lands harder. "If we die today, we die as warriors. We die in the open, with our names in the mouths of everyone who survives." I pause. "And if we live, we build something that makes their sacrifice worth it."