Page 50 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Twenty," I correct, and move us through it before he can argue.

The archive room is barely a room. More of a decision the mountain made centuries ago, a pocket of resistance where the stone refused to fall. A single shelf of crumbling Vrakken record-keeping, a floor smooth enough to sit on, and walls that muffle the screaming to something almost bearable.

We don't have long. So I unfold the records across my knee the moment I sit, and I make myself slow down.

The vellum is old enough that it doesn't crinkle. Thin as skin, the kind of material that was expensive even when it was made. Whoever commissioned these records wanted them to last. The ink has deepened to near-black over the centuries, but the hand that wrote it pressed hard, carved intention into every stroke. A cartographer would call this a survey document. Detailed. Systematic.

My finger traces the third column of sigils and I finally find the sequence that's been folding back on itself since Seralya and I decoded the opening passages in the library. It isn't a natural disaster report.

"Oh."

The word leaves me before I realize.

"What." Zareth's voice comes from behind my left shoulder. I didn't hear him move.

I don't answer immediately because I'm still reading. Still pressing my cartographer's eye against every word the way I'd press my palm flat to a tunnel wall to feel for hollow spaces beneath. I need to be certain. I need to have read it three times before I say it out loud, because saying it out loud means it's real.

Third time.

"The Wildspont beneath Hollow Mountain," I say slowly, "was manually triggered."

Silence.

"Not a natural rupture. Not a war wound that never healed. This was opened. By someone who knew exactly what it would do to the underground magic, to your people." I look up and find him watching me with that absolute stillness that always reads, to the uninitiated, like calm. I know better. "The order came from a noble house. There's a seal here, Zareth. A family seal." I turn the vellum toward him. "I recognize the sigil from the banners in Malachar's administrative hall. I've mapped that territory. I know that crest."

He looks at the seal for a moment longer. Then he looks at me.

"Say it plainly."

"Malachar's ancestors opened the Wildspont on purpose." My voice stays even because I need it to. "They triggered the collapse to drive your people into the deep tunnels. And then, once the Vrakken were gone from the surface — helpless, sealed underground, presumed dead — they walked into Hollow Mountain and took the mining contracts. Took the trade routes. Took the political influence that came from heroically managing the monster problem." I let that settle for a breath. "There was no monster problem. There was a land grab. And they murdered a civilization to do it."

The quality of Zareth's stillness changes.

It doesn't shift dramatically. He doesn't move. His face doesn't break open with grief or rage. But I've spent enough time watching him to read what other people can't, the slight forward weight in his stance, the way his nose flares slowly it's almost imperceptible, the cold that drops behind his eyes and sharpens everything there into something surgical and lethal.

He looks the way a predator looks when it finally identifies the exact shape of the threat.

"This wasn't a war," he says, very quietly.

"No."

"My people didn't lose a war. We were⁠—"

"Cleared." The word sits between us like a stone. "Like overgrowth on land someone wanted for themselves."

I watch his hands. The claws have extended slightly, unconsciously, I think. Just the body responding to what the mind is processing. When he finally speaks again, his voice has gone somewhere very flat and very cold, the kind of flat that means the temperature inside him has dropped below what most creatures survive.

"How many houses knew?"

I’m now looking at the records. At the secondary seals in the witness column, pressed small but deliberate along the document's right margin.

"Enough," I say carefully, "that exposing this doesn't just destroy Malachar. It destroys the legitimacy of every dark elf noble house that built power in this region over the last three centuries." I fold the vellum with steady hands. "Which is why he cannot let these records reach the surface. And why he will not stop until they're ash."

Zareth is already moving toward the door.

The passages tighten as we descend. The violet light thickens until it coats the walls in a feverish shimmer, and the tremors have stopped being individual events and started feeling like a continuous rhythm, a pulse, the Wildspont's heartbeat getting louder as we close the distance. The air presses against my lungs with a warm, metallic weight, the way blood smells if you let it sit too long.

I stay close to Zareth's back. Not because I need his shadow to move through the dark. Because the bond between us has been a physical thing for weeks now, a wire pulled taut between my chest and wherever he stands, and right now it hums with a shared urgency that I don't have the vocabulary to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. I just know that if I let too much space open between us, the hum sharpens into something close to pain.