“You’re not going in there,” Kazimierz says, and his voice has the flat certainty of a bolt being driven home.
“I’m already in here,” Serena answers. “We all are.”
She’s right. We’re standing inside the Thornmaw — a canyon carved so deep into the Ashfeld Ridge that sunlight only reaches the bottom for twenty minutes each afternoon. Right now it’s midnight. The walls are close enough to touch on both sides. And somewhere ahead, the Velk is hunting.
I’m Haruto. I keep the gear. I know what the gear can and can’t do.
Right now, it can’t do enough.
“Talk me through it again,” Kazimierz says, turning to Lian. “The whole mechanism. From the beginning.”
Lian doesn’t sigh. She just sets her jaw the way she does when she’s already explained something twice and doesn’t want to explain it a third time but will anyway, because that’s Lian.
“The Velk isn’t just a creature,” she says. “It carries a curse the way a cart carries stone. The curse is the weight that keeps it moving. If the Velk dies without the curse transferring to a willing host, the curse doesn’t end — it disperses. It soaks into the canyon walls, the soil, the water table. Every village downstream of the Ashfeld drinks from that water.”
Silence.
“So we can’t just kill it,” Kazimierz says.
“We can kill it. But only after.”
“After someone agrees to take the curse.”
“Yes.”
More silence. The Thornmaw makes sounds at night — a low, grinding resonance, like the canyon itself is chewing something it caught long ago and hasn’t finished yet.
I check the pack on my back. Twelve bolt-plates, two compression launchers, one seismic anchor, and the containment coil I built in a single night using parts I stripped from three separate rigs. It works. Probably. I tested it four times and it held four times, which in my experience is either excellent or a very specific kind of bad luck.
The Velk moves again somewhere ahead. We hear it before we see it — a sound like a millstone turning inside wet earth, and then the smell, which is the worst part: iron and old fire and something that has been alive too long in the dark.
“I’ll take it,” Serena says.
Everyone turns.
She’s leaning against the canyon wall with her arms crossed and her expression completely level. Serena Georgiou has the face of someone who made the decision before the conversation started and is only now letting the rest of us catch up.
“No,” Kazimierz says.
“I’m not asking.”
“You don’t know what it does to a person.”
“I know exactly what it does.” She looks at him steadily. “My grandmother carried it for eleven years. She kept it contained. She kept it from dispersing into the groundwater and poisoning the Ashfeld basin. Then she died and it passed to the Velk because there was no one willing to take it at the moment of transfer.” A pause. “That’s why the Velk exists. That’s why we’re here.”
I’d known pieces of this. Not all of it.
Lian looks at Serena with something careful in her expression. “The curse doesn’t kill the carrier. But it changes them. You know that.”
“I know.”
“It binds you to the Thornmaw. You can’t go more than a day’s walk from the canyon walls. Not ever. Not for the rest of your life.”
“I know, Lian.”
The millstone grinding sound is getting louder.
I pull the containment coil from the pack and begin running the cable. The coil is a masterwork — I say that without vanity, because vanity is for people who haven’t stress-tested their work. It’s a ring of interlocked copper and forge-steel bands, each one etched with a binding sequence I adapted from an old mine-seal design. When it closes around a target and the compression trigger fires, it locks the target in place long enough to — well. Long enough.
“How do we get it close enough?” Kazimierz asks, watching me work.
“We don’t,” I say. “We get it to come to us. Lian?”
Lian is already moving. She takes the seismic anchor from the pack, drives it into the canyon floor with three precise strikes, and activates the resonance plate at its base. The anchor begins to hum — a low, specific frequency that I calculated would match the Velk’s movement pattern based on the vibration signatures Kazimierz recorded on our approach.
The Thornmaw answers.
The grinding stops.
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