The Curse Walks. Someone Has to Carry It.

“Stay near the canyon. Yes.” She looks up at the walls of the Thornmaw — the sheer dark rock, the narrow strip of stars visible between the ridgelines far above. “It’s not a bad place. People live near it. There are villages.”
Lian is quiet. She’s the one who knows what the curse costs in the long run. She’s the one who told Serena, plainly and without softening it. She doesn’t say anything now. She just stands beside Serena for a moment, which seems to be the right thing.
“We’ll come back,” Kazimierz says. “Regularly.”
Serena looks at him. Something shifts in her expression — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one.
“I know you will,” she says.
We pack the gear. I coil the cable, dismantle the bolt-plates, stow the seismic anchor. The containment coil goes in last. I run my thumb along the binding sequence etched into the copper bands. It held. The machine did its job.
We walk back through the Thornmaw, four of us, toward the entrance where the canyon opens onto the Ashfeld plain. Serena walks with us to the edge.
At the threshold — the exact point where the canyon walls give way to open ground — she stops.
We keep walking a few steps before we notice. We turn back.
She’s standing at the line where stone meets earth. She’s not distressed. She’s not performing calm either. She’s just standing there, in the place where the Thornmaw ends and the world continues, with the cold shimmer settled around her shoulders like a cloak that fits.
Behind her, deep in the canyon, a single amber glow blinks out.
The Ashfeld plain stretches ahead of us, dark and wide and clean.