Page 46 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Zareth." His fingers clamp around my forearm, tight on the armor. "Stop."

I cannot stop.

"Listen to me." His voice drops to something I have not heard from him before. Not command. Not judgment. Something quieter and far more final. "Build something. Not a kingdom for surviving. A place worth living in." A breath. "Don't let them—don't let us—be remembered as what they made us."

I feel him go still.

The bond with Cybele hums, distant, alive, pulling like a thread through the dark, reminding me there is still a world on the other side of this tunnel. I focus on it until I can breathe again.

The mountain screams.

The tremor that follows drops a section of ceiling thirty meters back, and violet light bleeds through the fractures in the stone—Wildspont light, contaminated and spreading, illuminating the dust and the dead in sick, unnatural color. The floor vibrates beneath my knees as the mountain's own structure begins to come apart.

I feel the tremors through the stone. The resonance of an enormity unraveling. I stay on my knees beside Veyrik for three more seconds. I count them. Then I close his eyes, stand, and look toward the direction of the Wildspont chamber.

No more war. No more politics. No more time. The stabilization ritual must happen now, or Veyrik's sacrifice and everything we've fought for will be buried in rubble.

25

CYBELE

The first time I entered these tunnels, I was dragged. I'd been terrified and my body had shut down completely, every instinct screaming at me to be small, to disappear, to stop existing loudly enough to attract attention. At that moment, I felt like cargo.

Now I'm at the front of a column. Forty-three miners, rebels, and three of Theren's most seasoned tunnel workers move behind me in loose formation, their torchlight throwing long shadows across the passage walls. I can hear Theren muttering about structural integrity and his ongoing regret for every decision he's made this past month. Edrin is at my left, his cane finding a steady rhythm on the stone, and he hasn't spoken in a while, he’s either frightened or thinking. With Eddie, those look identical.

Different, I tell myself, and mean it. You are not the same person they dragged in.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. But I move like it is.

The first signs of the Wildspont appear forty minutes into the descent: thin rivulets of violet fluid seeping through the stone, slow and pulsing, like the mountain bleeding from the inside.

Theren stops walking. "What in the name of⁠—"

"Keep moving," I say, not slowing.

A figure steps out of the shadow at the tunnel's bend. Several miners grab for weapons. Someone swears. The figure is small by Vrakken standards: dark burgundy hair cut close to her jaw, pale gray skin, silver markings around her eyes catching the torchlight like embedded stars. Her healer's robes are rumpled and ink-stained, her pack heavy enough to have her listing slightly to one side.

I start to say her name, to introduce her to Eddie and then —

"Seralya," she announces, stepping forward with a hand extended toward no one in particular, already scanning the group. "Healer, scholar, and apparently now an underground guide service. You must be the surface contingent. You're shorter than I expected, collectively speaking. I say that with warmth." Her eyes land on Edrin and stay a beat longer. "Not you specifically. You're — well." She clears her throat and looks at me. "Cybele. You look terrible. I'm glad you're alive."

I glance at my brother. Edrin is staring at Seralya with a gobsmacked startled expression on his face.

Okay. Weird atmosphere.

"Same," I tell Seralya. "Lead us in."

She guides us through passages increasingly difficult to read as stable. The violet fluid has spread to the ceiling in stretches, dripping in slow rhythmic pulses that make the torchlight waver as the walls hum. Seralya narrates as she walks and Edrin falls into step beside her.

Twenty minutes in, he pulls the ancient records from under his arm and says, almost apologetically, "I know this isn't the time, but something in this passage has been bothering me since Cybele showed me the diagrams." He tilts the parchment toward Seralya, pointing at a dense section of archaic notation I'd translated twice and still found only partially legible. "This word. You translated it as a channel. But the root is the same as the Vrakken term for thread — like a thread pulled through fabric."

Seralya takes the parchment without breaking stride, eyes tracking across it. I watch her expression shift.

"It's the same root," she says slowly.

"So when the records describe reconnecting the surface magic to the underground channels—" Eddie hesitates, working it through. "It's not a flow. It's a weave. The ley lines were threaded together once, surface and underground, like two pieces of cloth sewn at the seam. And when the Wildspont was opened⁠—"

"It cut the thread." Seralya stops walking entirely.