The Silence Beneath the Web

AIRowling

An AI-authored novel. Generated end-to-end by the AIRowling pipeline — no sentence written or edited by a human.
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Chapter 1

The silence of the Chamber had a weight to it, a physical pressure that settled over Vespera's shoulders like a wool cloak soaked in water. She sat cross-legged on the carved obsidian platform at the chamber's center, spine straight, hands resting palm-up on her knees, and let that weight press her deeper into stillness.

Around her, the silk threads hummed.

Not a sound exactly—the air here was too thin for ordinary acoustics to carry far—but a vibration that moved through bone and sinew. Each thread stretched from the cavern ceiling to the floor in radiating spokes, dozens of them, hundreds, each one tuned to a different frequency of Vespera's attention. When the chamber was empty, the threads sang in their slow, patient chorus. When a prayer arrived, one thread would tighten, and the song would shift.

Vespera had spent six years learning to hear the difference.

She breathed in through her nose, counted to four, held, released. The thermal bloom of her own body radiated outward in soft gradients—warmth pooling at her chest, cooling along her forearms, the cool kiss of stone against her bare feet. She tracked the heat with the discipline of her training, reading the chamber's temperature map as a navigator reads stars. Everything was where it should be. The threads hummed their steady notes. The obsidian walls absorbed sound and returned nothing.

Good.

She breathed again. Four counts in. Wait. Release.

The first thread shifted.

It was subtle—a tightening, almost imperceptible, like a bow drawn across a string that had been left out in the rain. Vespera's eyes opened a fraction. Her breath caught without permission.

The vibration came from the eastern quadrant, near the oldest threads, the ones that hadn't been replaced since the chamber was carved. This thread was older, thinner, frayed at the edges where the silk had worn against the stone anchor-points. And it was singing wrong.

Not the clean, resonant tone of a proper prayer—the deep, measured hum that rose when a priestess offered devotion, or when a noble house sent tribute upward through the web. This was something else. Sharper. Frantic. A note that cracked halfway through, like a throat closing on a sob.

Vespera's fingers twitched. Protocol demanded she ignore it. Unidentified vibrations were common in the lower threads. Sometimes the stone shifted. Sometimes moisture changed the tension. Sometimes a bat flew through and brushed a strand. The chamber was old, and old things made old sounds.

But the thread kept singing.

And the song was a voice.

Not words—not yet—but something beneath words, something raw and animal and impossibly close. Vespera felt it in her teeth, a high-frequency tremor that made her molars ache. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth to stop the vibration and failed. It was inside her skull now, pressing against the back of her eyes, warm and desperate and dying.

She closed her eyes again and tried to breathe.

Four counts in. Hold. Release.

The thread tightened further. The voice sharpened.

Please.

The word arrived whole, clear as glass breaking. It wasn't spoken—it was pressed into Vespera's mind like a thumb against wet clay, shaping itself from the raw vibration into meaning. A child's voice. Small. Terrified. The syllable hung in the silence of her own thoughts, impossible and undeniable.

Please.

Vespera's breath broke the count. She gasped, her spine curving forward involuntarily, hands gripping the obsidian until her nails bit into her palms. The thermal map of the chamber shifted—her body heat flared hot at her chest, spilling outward in irregular waves that disturbed the cool air around her. One of the nearby threads shivered in response, its song warping for a moment before settling back into its regular pitch.

She forced her shoulders down. Forced her hands open. Forced her breath back into rhythm.

Ignore it, she told herself. It is not your thread. It is not your prayer. Let the chamber sort it.

The Spider Queen's priestesses did not answer prayers that did not come through the proper channels. Prayers had to be offered at the Altar of Eight Legs, spoken aloud in the proper tongue, witnessed by a senior priestess, and accepted or rejected by the matron. Anything else was noise. Static. The chamber's own echoes bouncing off stone and silk until they dissolved.

But the voice was not dissolving.

It was getting stronger.

Vespera felt it like a finger tracing the inside of her ribs, small and trembling, searching for something to hold onto. She could feel the shape of the fear—not hers, not really, but present in her body all the same, a phantom terror that made her stomach turn. Somewhere below, in the dark spaces beneath the chamber, someone was dying. Someone small. Someone who had reached up through the stone and the silk and the years of practiced silence and found her.

Please.

The word came again, weaker this time. Cracked. Throat closing. Vespera's vision swam with heat—her own body temperature rising, the chamber's cool air pressing against her skin like a warning. She could feel the thread's vibration moving through her bones, climbing up her arms, settling behind her sternum like a second heartbeat.

She opened her eyes.

The eastern threads were glowing. Not literally—there was no light down here except the dull phosphorescence of the fungus colonies on the far walls—but she could feel them, the way you feel a fever without looking at a thermometer. The oldest threads pulsed with a warmth that made the air around them shimmer in her thermal perception, rippling heat-signatures blooming like flowers against the stone.

One thread in particular burned. Thin. Frayed. Almost broken.

Vespera's mouth went dry. She could taste copper—the dried blood that always lingered in the chamber's air, the residue of old sacrifices and old prayers. It coated her tongue, bitter and familiar. She swallowed and tasted nothing but dust.

It is not your thread.

She had learned the first rule of the priesthood in her first month: the web belongs to the Spider Queen, not to you. You are a needle, not a weaver. Your job is to listen, to interpret, to serve. You do not reach. You do not answer. You do not—

Except sometimes, in the deep watches, when the chamber was empty and the threads sang their slow chorus, she let her fingers move. Not the formal gestures of the liturgy—those were drilled into her until they were automatic—but something quieter. A touch here, a counter-pressure there. Adjusting a thread that had gone flat, coaxing a discordant note back into harmony. She had never been taught to do it. The matron had noticed once, during Vespera's third year, and said nothing, only watched her with those dark, unreadable eyes for a long moment before turning away. After that, Vespera stopped. But she had remembered. She still remembered, in the quietest part of herself, exactly how the silk responded when she touched it—not as a tool, but as something that recognized her.

The voice fractured. A sound like glass grinding against stone. Then silence.

You do not reach. You do not answer. You do not—

No. Not silence. Something worse. A hollow ringing, like the space left behind when a bell stops swinging. The thread was still vibrating, but the song was gone. The voice had slipped through the silk and fallen into whatever lay beneath, and the thread was still humming its empty note, still singing to nothing.

Vespera sat frozen. Her hands remained on her knees, palms up, fingers spread in the traditional posture of receptivity. But she felt nothing receptive about herself. She felt hollow. She felt like something had reached through the stone and pulled a piece of her with it, leaving behind a shape that matched the absence.

The chamber continued to hum. The other threads carried on their steady chorus, unaware of the gap in their song. The obsidian walls held their cold. The air smelled of ozone and dried blood and the faint metallic tang of fear—hers, at least.

She waited for the matron's summons. She waited for someone to notice that her breathing had been irregular, that her thermal signature had spiked, that she had sat in the Web-Chamber for three hours and failed to maintain the silence that was her duty, her purpose, the foundation of everything she had spent six years becoming.

No one came.

The chamber was large enough that the other priestesses worked in their own sectors, far from the central platform. The guards patrolled the perimeter corridors. The matron would not descend until the evening vigil. There would be no one to ask why Vespera had stopped breathing at count four. No one to notice that her hands were shaking.

No one except the thread that had sung, and the thread that had gone silent, and Vespera herself, sitting alone on the obsidian platform with the memory of a child's voice lodged behind her ribs like a splinter she couldn't extract, yet whose faint, persistent echo drove her to hunt for its source through the dark rather than accept the silence as fate.

She closed her eyes again. Tried to breathe.

Four counts in. Hold.

The air refused to fill her. Her chest felt clogged, heavy with a static charge that wasn't breath and wasn't prayer and wasn't anything she had a name for. The thread's vibration still resonated in the stone around her, a ghost-frequency that refused to fade. She could hear it humming in time with her own steady rhythm, syncing itself to her pulse, making the space around her remember what her mind wanted to forget.

Please.

She opened her eyes and stared at the glowing thread in the eastern quadrant. It looked no different from the others now—the warmth had faded, the song had returned to its regular pitch. Whatever had happened, whatever voice had reached up through the stone and found her, it was done. The thread had released its burden and moved on, as threads do, as the Spider Queen's web always moves, indifferent to what falls through its gaps.

Vespera's hands curled into fists. Her nails left crescent marks in her palms.

She should feel relief. She should feel the satisfaction of having maintained protocol, of having ignored an unidentified vibration and preserved the sanctity of the chamber's silence. That was what a good priestess would feel. That was what Vespera was supposed to be.

Instead, she felt the shape of a small hand reaching up from the dark, and she could not tell if it was still reaching or if it had already fallen.

The chamber hummed around her, patient and endless, and Vespera sat very still and tried to pretend she had not heard a thing.

She failed. o pretend she had not heard a thing.

She failed. he satisfaction of having maintained protocol, of having ignored an unidentified vibration and preserved the sanctity of the chamber's silence. That was what a good priestess would feel. That was what Vespera was supposed to be.

Instead, she felt the shape of a small hand reaching up from the dark, and she could not tell if it was still reaching or if it had already fallen.

The chamber hummed around her, patient and endless, and Vespera sat very still and tried to pretend she had not heard a thing.

She failed. o pretend she had not heard a thing.

She failed.

Chapter 2

The corridor outside her door had emptied hours ago, but the echo of footsteps still rang in Vespera's ears. She stood at the wooden locker, fumbling with the latch, and pulled out her ceremonial robes. Her fingers moved by rote — the familiar weight of silk against her skin, the cool slide of the sash across her waist. She was already dressed before she registered that she had done it. The Web-Chamber had hollowed her out, scraped her mind clean of everything but the shape of what she had heard, and in that emptiness, habit was the only thing holding her together.

She closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was not empty. It was filled with the hum.

It started as a vibration in her teeth, the same low thrum she had felt in the chamber, but shifted. It was no longer the collective, harmonious drone of the Spider Queen’s domain. It was singular. Sharp. Wrong.

Please.

Vespera’s eyes snapped open. The room was silent. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic dripping of condensation from the cavern roof somewhere far above, falling into the dark pools of the Lower Depths. She lay still, counting her breaths. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The technique Matron Yssra had drilled into her since she was six years old. Control the breath, control the spirit. Control the spirit, silence the noise.

But the noise was not outside her. It was inside the architecture of her skull.

Please. It hurts. The dark is eating me.

A child’s voice. Small, wet, trembling.

Vespera pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until stars burst in the violet dark. “Silence,” she whispered. The word felt clumsy, inadequate. She was a priestess of the Spider Queen. She was twenty-four years old. She had served six years in the order. She knew the liturgy of forgetting. She knew how to weave the mental barriers that kept the mortal world’s suffering from contaminating the divine clarity of the Web.

I am nothing, she recited silently, the mantra tasting like ash. I am a thread. I am held. I am not the hand that pulls.

The voice faded, retreating back into the recesses of her memory, leaving behind a residue of cold sweat on her forehead. Vespera exhaled, a shuddering breath that rattled in her ribs. She rolled onto her side, pulling the thin wool blanket up to her chin. The stone floor beneath the cot radiated a chill that seeped through the fabric, biting into her hips. She welcomed it. Pain was real. Pain was present. Pain did not ask for help.

Sleep took her again, deeper this time, dragging her down into the murky waters of dreams.

She was standing on a slope of loose gravel, the kind that shifts underfoot and gives way without warning. Above her — if above existed down here — the sky was the color of tarnished silver, featureless and low. The air was thin, wrong for the Underdark, carrying a dryness that cracked her lips the moment she opened her mouth. There was no Web. No threads. No stone walls. Only the slope, and the figure at its base.

Empty. Just the cot, the small washbasin, the wooden locker where she kept her ceremonial robes. Safe. Solid. Everything was exactly as it should be.

"Little one?" Vespera called out. Her voice carried too easily in this place — no stone to absorb it, no silk to dampen it. It rang flat and hollow, like striking a bowl.

The child turned.

Vespera tried to move, to step back, but her feet were rooted to the stone. The air smelled wrong—not of ozone and dried blood, but of something sweet and rotting, like fruit left too long in the sun.

A figure stood at the center of the chamber. It was small, no taller than a knee. A child. Its back was to her, hunched over something on the ground. The figure was wrapped in rags that might have been silk once, now stained brown and grey.

“Little one?” Vespera called out. Her voice sounded distant, muffled, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

The child turned.

Vespera woke with a gasp, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped moth. The bioluminescent moss outside was dimmer now, the cycle turning toward the dimmest hour of the subterranean night. Her sheets were tangled around her legs, soaked through with sweat. She sat up, wiping her face with a trembling hand, and looked around the cramped quarters.

Empty. Just the cot, the small washbasin, the wooden locker where she kept her ceremonial robes. Safe. Solid. Real.

She swung her legs over the edge of the cot and placed her bare feet on the stone floor. The cold bit into her soles, grounding her. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, and waited for the panic to recede. It always receded. Eventually.

But as she sat there, listening to the silence of the room, she realized with a creeping horror that the silence was not entirely silent.

There was a sound. Faint. Almost imperceptible.

It was coming from the wall.

Vespera froze. The wall of the apprentice quarters was solid obsidian, carved directly from the cavern rock. Behind it lay the main corridor of House Vael, and beyond that, the vast emptiness of the Underdark. Nothing could make a sound through three feet of solid stone unless…

Unless the Web was listening.

She stood up, her legs stiff, and walked to the wall. She pressed her ear against the cold, smooth surface. At first, there was nothing. Then, she felt it—a vibration, so subtle it might have been the pulse in her own throat. But it wasn’t her pulse. It was rhythmic. Patterned.

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

The Web was humming. But not the harmonious chord of the Queen’s domain. This was a discordant note, a single string pulled too tight, vibrating with a tension that made her teeth ache.

Vespera pulled her hand away as if the stone had burned her. She backed away, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. This was impossible. The Web only responded to prayer. To ritual. To the intent of the priestesses. She had not prayed tonight. She had not even thought of the Queen. She had only thought of the child.

And yet, the Web was singing.

She rushed to her locker, her fingers fumbling with the latch. She needed water. She needed to splash her face, to shock her system back into reality. She grabbed her cup, filled it from the basin, and drank deeply. The water was cold and metallic, tasting of the pipes that carried it from the Acid Lake’s tributaries. It helped. A little.

She set the cup down and looked at her reflection in the polished metal of the basin. Her face was pale, her violet eyes wide and rimmed with red. She looked exhausted. She looked guilty.

Why me? she thought. I am not special. I am not chosen. I am just a thread.

But the Web didn’t care about humility. The Web cared about resonance. And whatever had happened in the chamber today—whatever fracture she had suffered in her concentration—had created a crack in her defenses. A crack through which the voice had slipped. And now, the Web was amplifying it.

A knock at the door made her jump.

Vespera spun around, her heart leaping into her throat. “Who is it?”

“Vespera?” It was Kaelen. His voice was low, muffled by the wood. “Are you awake?”

She hesitated. Kaelen was the Captain of the Guard. He did not visit the apprentice quarters at this hour unless something was wrong. Unless someone had died. Or betrayed them.

“I’m awake,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.

The lock clicked. The door creaked open, and Kaelen stepped inside. He filled the small room, his broad shoulders brushing the frame. He wore his armor, the blackened steel plates etched with the silver spider of House Vael. His silver hair was tied back in a severe knot, and his grey eyes scanned the room with military precision.

He stopped in front of her, looking down. Up close, she could see the fatigue etched into the lines around his eyes. He looked older than thirty-five. He looked like a man who carried the weight of the house on his spine.

“You’re shaking,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Vespera crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly aware of her trembling hands. “I had a bad dream.”

Kaelen nodded slowly. He didn’t look surprised. “Dreams are the mind’s way of cleaning the wound. Let it bleed out.”

“It wasn’t just a dream,” Vespera said. The words slipped out before she could check them.

Kaelen’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”

Vespera looked at the floor. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him about the voice, about the black threads, about the way the Web had hummed against the wall like a live wire. But she couldn’t. To speak of it was to validate it. And to validate it was to admit weakness. And weakness in House Vael was a contagion.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just… the silence. It’s getting louder.”

Kaelen studied her for a long moment. The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy. Vespera could hear the faint creak of his armor as he shifted his weight. She could smell the oil and steel on him, the sharp scent of the guardhouse.

“The silence is always loud,” Kaelen said finally. “That’s the point. If it weren’t loud, we wouldn’t hear the Queen.”

“But what if we’re hearing the wrong things?” Vespera asked. The question hung in the air, dangerous and fragile.

Kaelen’s jaw tightened. He took a step closer, invading her personal space. Vespera forced herself not to flinch. “Then you correct them. You are a priestess, Vespera. You do not listen to the whispers of the dark. You weave them into the Web. You make them useful. Or you cut them away.”

He reached out and touched her shoulder. His hand was warm through her tunic, heavy and grounding. “Don’t let it rot you from the inside. That’s what House Thul wants. That’s what the surface-dwellers want. They want us distracted. They want us doubting. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

He pulled his hand away and turned toward the door. “Get some rest. There’s a council meeting at dawn. Matron Yssra will be testing the senior priestesses. I don’t want you looking like a corpse.”

The door closed behind him, the lock clicking into place with a finality that made Vespera’s stomach turn.

She stood alone in the dark, her shoulder still tingling with the memory of his touch. Kaelen was right, of course. He was always right. Doubt was a luxury they couldn’t afford. The Web-Chamber was the heart of House Vael’s power. If the Web faltered, the house faltered. If the house faltered, they were exposed to the Thul, to the monsters of the Lower Depths, to the crushing indifference of the Underdark.

But as Vespera climbed back into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Kaelen was wrong about one thing.

The voice wasn’t from the dark. It wasn’t from House Thul. It wasn’t even from the monsters of the deep.

It was from the surface. And it was begging for help.

She closed her eyes, trying to summon the image of the Spider Queen, the great benevolent arachnid who watched over them all. But all she could see was the child in the black threads, reaching up, reaching up, reaching up…

And the Web, singing its discordant song.

Morning came not with light, but with a change in the thermal gradient. The moss strips brightened to a soft green, signaling the start of the active cycle. Vespera was already awake, sitting on the edge of her cot, fully dressed in her ceremonial robes.

She had spent the night trying to meditate, trying to rebuild the walls she had let crumble. She had recited the liturgies. She had visualized the Web, thread by golden thread, weaving a barrier around her mind. But every time she closed her eyes, the child’s voice was there, softer now, but persistent. Like a drip of water on stone.

Please.

She stood up and walked to the window—a narrow slit in the obsidian wall that looked out onto the main corridor. Other apprentices were beginning to stir. She heard the shuffle of feet, the murmur of voices, the clink of ceramic cups. Normal sounds. Human sounds.

She wanted to join them. She wanted to laugh at a joke, to complain about the cold food, to gossip about which senior priestess was favoring which acolyte. She wanted to be ordinary. She wanted to be numb.

But she knew she couldn’t. Not anymore.

The vibration was still there, faint but constant, like a tuning fork struck days ago that refused to stop ringing. It was in her bones. In her teeth. In the space behind her eyes.

Vespera took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the cool, metallic air. She smoothed her robes, checked her posture, and prepared her face into the mask of serene detachment that House Vael demanded of its priestesses.

She would go to the Web-Chamber. She would perform the morning rites. She would weave the Web. And if the voice came, she would cut it away.

She had to.

Because if she didn’t, she feared she might do something unthinkable.

She might answer.

Vespera opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, joining the stream of apprentices flowing toward the central caverns. She kept her eyes forward, her expression blank, her heart beating a steady, terrified rhythm against her ribs.

Behind her, in the silence of the empty room, the stone wall hummed once more. A single, sharp note. Like a spider stepping onto a web.

And then, nothing.

Just the waiting.

And the hunger.

Chapter 3

Kaelen stood at the center of the chamber, silver hair pulled tight, grey eyes fixed on the empty dais. Vespera took her place at the rear, hands folded behind her back, shoulder blades finding the familiar groove where the obsidian wall met the floor. Above him, tiered ledges rose in concentric arcs, the senior priestesses already filing into their assigned positions. The chamber doors had barely closed behind her before the familiar weight of cold iron and old stone settled over the room—the accumulated breath of a hundred councils, pressing down like a held verdict.

She chose to arrive late. It was a habit, and possibly a weapon.

Vespera watched the lower steps and counted the number of breaths she took before the sound of silk against stone announced Yssra's entrance. Seven. Always seven. The matron moved with a precision that bordered on mechanical, her white hair braided in the severe crown that marked her authority, her amber eyes scanning the room like a blade testing its edge. She took her seat. The chamber held its breath.

"Report," Yssra said. Two words. Sharp. Precise. No preamble, no greeting, no acknowledgment of the eight priestesses and three junior attendants who filled the room. Just the command, delivered as though she were ordering a guard to sharpen a sword.

Kaelen stepped forward. His boots made no sound on the polished floor—House Vael's guards trained their feet the same way they trained their blades, for silence and efficiency. He carried a rolled sheet of treated hide, the kind used for mapping the deeper tunnels, and he unrolled it with both hands, pinning the edges down with the flat of his palms.

"House Thul has moved three new outposts within striking distance of the Acid Lake," he said. "Two of them are dug into the basalt ridge overlooking the eastern shore. The third is a floating platform anchored in the shallows. They are pumping. Extracting."

A murmur rippled through the seated priestesses. Vespera felt it as much as she heard it—a shift in the thermal layer of the room, warmth blooming in pockets of agitation. The Acid Lake was sacred ground. Not just to House Vael, but to the Spider Queen herself. The corrosive waters were where the old prayers were cast, where offerings dissolved and the whispers rose back up through the stone. House Thul had never pumped it before.

"They have no right," said Priestess Corvaine from the third tier.

Kaelen's expression did not change. "They filed no petition. They sent no herald. They simply began drilling."

"Drilling?" Yssra's voice was flat, but the pen in her hand snapped—one clean crack that echoed across the dais. "What are they extracting? The Lake yields nothing of material value."

"Acid concentrate," Kaelen said. "Refined for etching and corrosion work. It commands a high price in the market towns above the rim. House Thul has been selling it for six months. They just decided to increase the volume."

Vespera shifted her weight. The stone beneath her bare feet was cold, a familiar cold that usually grounded her, but today it felt like standing on the edge of something she could not see. She thought of the child's voice from the Web-Chamber, the small hand reaching up from the dark, and she wondered if House Thul's drills sounded like reaching hands to someone else—someone above ground, someone whose world was cracking open beneath their feet.

"How many guards have they posted?" Yssra asked.

"Twelve per outpost. Heavily armed. They are using under-miners—small tunnel-boring machines, the kind that chew through rock like teeth through meat. They are advancing on two fronts. One toward the Lake's eastern basin. The other toward the thermal vents."

"The thermal vents?" Priestess Orelia leaned forward from the second tier. Her face was pale, her hands gripping the ledge beside her. "Those vents feed the lower caverns. If they destabilize—"

"The lower caverns flood," Kaelen finished. "Or they burn. Depends on which pressure valve gives first. We have scouts reporting seismic tremors along the eastern ridge. The rock is groaning. I heard it myself on patrol."

Silence fell over the chamber, thick and suffocating. Vespera could feel the weight of eight pairs of eyes shifting toward her, knowing she was the priestess assigned to the eastern sector, knowing she had been the one to walk those tunnels last week and hear the same groaning, the same deep, grinding complaint of stone under stress. She kept her face blank. She kept her breathing slow. She did not look at Yssra.

"What is your recommendation, Captain?" Yssra asked.

Kaelen's jaw tightened. "We send a deterrent force. Forty guards, armed with shock-lances. We establish a perimeter around the eastern basin and we make it clear that any further advancement will be met with lethal force."

"And if they do not withdraw?"

"Then we take the outposts by force."

Another murmur, louder this time. Several priestesses exchanged glances. Taking outposts by force meant war. War meant death. Death meant blood spilled on consecrated ground, and the Spider Queen did not forgive wasted sacrifice.

Yssra considered this. Vespera watched the matron's face—the amber eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly, the mouth tightening into a line so thin it was nearly invisible. Yssra was calculating. She was always calculating. Every word, every silence, every movement was weighed against every other option in her mind, and the result was always the same: expansion through dominance, territory secured by fear, the house strengthened by the suffering of others.

"No," Yssra said finally. "Not yet. A military confrontation before we understand their full capabilities is reckless. Send twenty guards instead. Establish the perimeter. But hold fire unless fired upon. I want to know their strength before we commit to bloodshed."

Kaelen nodded once. Sharp. Efficient. "Yes, Matron."

"And Kaelen."

He paused at the edge of the dais, his hand on the rolled map.

"Double the patrols along the eastern ridge. I want eyes on every tunnel, every vent, every crack in the basalt. If House Thul thinks they can take our sacred ground while we sit in this chamber and debate, they are mistaken."

"I will—"

"Do it."

He turned and left. His footsteps faded into the stone corridor beyond the chamber doors, and the silence he left behind was heavier than his presence had been.

Yssra's amber eyes swept the room and landed on Vespera. It was not the first time the matron had done this—fixing her attention on the youngest priestess in the room as though testing whether she was paying attention, as though measuring the depth of her loyalty. Vespera met the gaze and held it. She did not look away. She did not bow her head. She simply stood there, hands folded, spine straight, and let the weight of those amber eyes pass over her like a blade passing over oilstone.

"Priestess Vespera."

The name hung in the air, formal and cold. Vespera stepped forward from the wall and descended the first step, then the second, until she stood on the floor level, facing the dais.

"You were assigned to the eastern ridge patrol last cycle," Yssra said. "What did your scouts report?"

Vespera swallowed. The stone beneath her feet felt colder now, or perhaps it was just the chill spreading through her chest. "Seismic activity increasing," she said. "The eastern ridge is unstable. The rock fractures are widening. I recommended reinforcing the support pillars in tunnels seven through twelve, but the engineering crew said they lacked the materials."

"Did you file a formal request?"

"I submitted it to the quartermaster three weeks ago."

Yssra's expression did not change. "And?"

"It was denied. The materials were diverted to the western fortifications."

A beat of silence. Then Yssra nodded, as though confirming a suspicion she had already held. "See that it is resubmitted. Priority one. If the eastern ridge collapses, it will take half the lower caverns with it. We cannot afford that loss."

"Yes, Matron."

"Dismissed."

Vespera turned and walked back to her position against the wall. She kept her steps even, her posture rigid, her face a mask of the calm obedience expected of a priestess in council. But inside, her mind was racing. The eastern ridge was failing. The support pillars were compromised. House Thul was drilling into sacred ground with machines that chewed through rock like teeth through meat. And Yssra's response was to send twenty guards and hope they were enough.

She thought of the child's voice again, small and desperate, reaching up from somewhere deep in the tunnels below. And she wondered, not for the first time, what it would mean to answer a prayer that had nothing to do with the Spider Queen.

The chamber emptied slowly. Priestesses filed out in pairs and triples, their voices dropping to murmurs as they discussed the implications of House Thul's aggression, their silk robes whispering against the stone steps. Vespera remained against the wall until the last attendant had gone, until the chamber was empty save for her and the fading warmth of Yssra's seat on the dais.

She placed her palm flat against the obsidian wall. It was cold. It always was. But beneath the cold, if she pressed hard enough, she could feel the faint vibration of the mountain breathing—deep, slow, ancient. The same vibration she had felt in the Web-Chamber, the same hum that carried prayers and warnings through the stone.

Somewhere in the east, the mountain was groaning.

Vespera closed her eyes and listened. stone.

Vespera closed her eyes and listened.

Chapter 4

The temple stairs spiraled downward through seven levels of carved basalt, each step worn smooth by decades of bare feet. Vespera counted them out of habit, the way she counted her breaths during meditation: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The air grew warmer with each descent, the cool dryness of the upper keep giving way to the humid embrace of the deep caverns. Moisture clung to her skin like a second garment. The smell changed too—ozone and dried blood from the Web-Chamber above yielded to something older, something that predated the house and its politics. Wet stone. Mineral salt. The faint metallic tang of the Acid Lake drifting up through the ventilation shafts.

She reached the bottom landing and turned left, following the corridor that led to the Web-Chamber. This was the oldest part of House Vael's temple complex, predating the current matron line by centuries. The walls here were not polished obsidian but rough-hewn rock, still bearing the tool marks of the first builders. Bioluminescent moss clung to the ceiling in irregular patches, casting the corridor in a sickly green light that made everything look submerged. Vespera kept her hands at her sides, her fingers curled slightly inward, the way she had been taught since she was six years old. The goddess speaks through stillness, Matron Yssra had told her. You must be quiet enough to hear her.

Vespera had been quiet for three days. Three days of sitting in the Web-Chamber, spine straight, palms open, breathing slow. Three days of listening. And all she had heard was the child.

The corridor ended at a pair of double doors carved from a single slab of black stone. Spider motifs covered the surface—intricate patterns of legs radiating from central bodies, each leg terminating in a small circular depression where incense had been burned over the years. The residue had built up into a dark, waxy coating that caught the green moss-light and made the spiders look alive, as though they were waiting to move. Vespera placed her palm on the right door and pushed.

The Inner Sanctum opened before her like the inside of a skull.

It was smaller than the Web-Chamber, roughly circular, maybe thirty paces across. The ceiling arched overhead, converging at a single point directly above the center of the room where a natural fissure in the rock allowed a thin column of pale light to penetrate from somewhere far above—surface, probably, or at least the upper caverns. The light was weak, barely enough to illuminate the altar at the room's heart, but it was enough. Vespera could see the altar clearly: a raised platform of polished stone shaped like a spider, eight legs extending outward, each one ending in a shallow basin where offerings had been placed and had long since evaporated, leaving white mineral rings around the edges.

The air inside was different from the corridor. Still. Heavy. It pressed against her eardrums, dense as the pressure of deep water. She could feel the temperature gradient shifting as she stepped across the threshold—warmth clinging to the walls while the center remained cool, the chill sinking into the stone floor. Her bare feet registered the surface beneath them: smooth, slick, and faintly damp. She walked to the center of the room and stopped.

The silence hit her like a physical blow.

Not absence of sound—there was always sound down here, the drip of condensation, the distant groan of settling rock, the whisper of air moving through unseen fissures. But this was different. This was the silence of a held breath. The silence of a web that had not yet caught anything. The silence of a goddess who had turned her face away.

Vespera knelt.

The stone bit into her kneecaps through the thin fabric of her robes. She pressed her forehead to the ground, the way she had been taught, and let her hands fall open beside her head. She closed her eyes. She slowed her breathing. She waited.

Speak to me, she thought, because speaking aloud in the Inner Sanctum was forbidden, and she had forgotten how to pray without words. Please. I am here. I am listening.

Nothing.

She waited. Ten breaths. Twenty. Thirty. The moss-light flickered overhead, casting shifting shadows across the altar's eight legs. Somewhere in the walls, water dripped. Once. Twice. Three times. The intervals were irregular, random, indifferent.

She opened her eyes and looked at the altar. The basins were empty. The spider-carving was pristine, unmarred by the soot and resin that coated the doors behind her. This altar was new, or recently cleaned. Someone had prepared it for a ceremony that had not yet arrived. Or perhaps it was prepared for a ceremony that would never come.

Vespera sat back on her heels. Her knees ached. The stone was cold enough to seep through her robes and into her bones. She looked up at the fissure in the ceiling, at the thin column of pale light that connected this room to the world above. She had never been above ground. None of the priestesses of House Vael had. The surface was a myth, a cautionary tale told to apprentices: The sky is empty. There are no webs there. No goddess. Only wind and rain and creatures that die without the mountain to hold them.

But the child's voice had come from above. Hadn't it? She had assumed it. The prayer, the reaching hand—they had felt directional, coming from the east and upward, as though the child were standing in sunlight and falling through rock.

Is that where you are? Vespera thought, directing the words toward the fissure, toward whatever lay beyond it. Are you up there? Are you—

A sound.

Not from the ceiling. From the walls. From the stone itself. A low, resonant hum, barely audible, vibrating through the floor and up through her bare feet into her shins. It was the same frequency as the Web-Chamber's silk threads, but quieter, muffled, as though the mountain were speaking through a thick blanket of rock. Vespera froze. Her breath caught in her throat.

This is it, she thought. This is what she sounds like.

She closed her eyes and leaned into the vibration, letting it shiver through her muscles like a struck tuning fork. She tried to parse the pattern, isolating the harmonic frequency beneath the static, just as Matron Yssra had drilled into her during years of meditation exercises. Listen for the rhythm. Listen for the repetition. Listen for the intention beneath the sound.

There was no rhythm. No repetition. No intention.

She could still feel the warmth on her palm. Fading. Diminished. Gone.

Vespera stayed kneeling until the hum faded, until the silence returned, until her knees stopped aching and the cold from the stone moved higher, creeping up her thighs, settling in her hips. She stood. Her legs were stiff. Her back felt wrong, curved from too many hours in the same position, and she winced as she straightened it.

She walked to the altar and placed her palm flat on the spider's central body. The stone was warm beneath her hand, warmer than the floor, warmer than the walls. Heat radiated from the carved chitin, thick and steady as blood in the deepest veins. She pressed harder. The warmth spread into her palm, up her wrist, into her forearm. It felt almost pleasant, almost like contact, almost like—

She pulled her hand away.

Barely audible. Barely there. But there.

Just warmth. And then nothing.

Vespera turned and walked back to the doors. She pushed them open and stepped into the corridor, leaving the Inner Sanctum behind. The humidity hit her immediately, wrapping around her shoulders like a wet cloth. She descended the spiral stairs one level at a time, counting her steps, counting her breaths, counting the distance between where she was and where she needed to be.

Four levels. The air cooled. The smell of wet stone gave way to ozone.

Three levels. Her knees throbbed. The corridor narrowed. The bioluminescent moss became thinner, patchier, as though the mountain's life was thinning along with the walls.

Two levels. She passed a guard station. Two House Vael soldiers stood at attention, their armor gleaming dull green in the moss-light, their spears planted firmly in the stone floor. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them acknowledged her. Priestesses of the inner circle were not required to announce themselves to the guards, and the guards were not required to acknowledge them. This was the arrangement. This was the order.

One level. The Web-Chamber door stood ahead, dark and humming, the silk threads beyond it vibrating with the accumulated prayers of a thousand priestesses. Vespera paused at the threshold and looked back up the stairwell, toward the Inner Sanctum, toward the fissure in the ceiling, toward whatever lay above it all.

She could still feel the warmth on her palm. Faint. Fading. Gone.

She turned and entered the Web-Chamber.

The threads greeted her immediately, their vibration rising to meet her like a chorus of voices calling her name. But their song had changed. Where it had been harmonious before—layered, complex, beautiful in its precision—it was fraying at the edges. Discordant notes threaded through the melody, sharp and wrong, like a single string snapped on a multi-stringed instrument. The eastern section was the worst. The vibration there was jagged, erratic, the threads twitching and trembling as though struck by invisible hands.

Vespera walked to her usual position on the obsidian platform and sat down. She crossed her legs. She rested her hands palm-up on her knees. She closed her eyes.

She listened to the web sing.

And beneath the song, beneath the harmony and the discord, beneath the prayers of a hundred priestesses and the hum of the mountain itself, she heard it again. Faint. Fainter than before. But there.

A child's voice. Not speaking. Not praying. Just breathing. Small, shallow, irregular breaths that kept time with the trembling threads in the eastern section of the web.

Vespera opened her eyes. The chamber was full of other priestesses, their faces turned toward the central altar, their lips moving in silent prayer. No one was looking at her. No one was listening to the eastern threads. They were all listening to the center, where the goddess was supposed to speak.

But the center was silent.

And the east was screaming.

The cold water in the basin rippled, distorting her reflection into something jagged and unfamiliar, while the discordant hum of the Web settled into a heavy, suffocating silence that pressed against her ears.

Chapter 5

The tunnel smelled of damp earth and something sharper underneath—ozone bleeding through from the acid lake, the same metallic tang that clung to the Web-Chamber after a storm of prayers. Kaelen moved through it the way he moved through everything: fast, silent, decisive. His boots made no sound on the slick basalt. His silver hair was bound tight beneath a leather cap, his grey eyes scanning the thermal bloom of the walls ahead. Heat signatures pulsed like slow heartbeats in the stone—ancient geology, nothing more. Or so he told himself.

He had left the keep three hours ago. Three hours of descending through the lower tunnels, past the abandoned mining shafts and the collapsed aqueducts, deeper into the territory that House Vael claimed but could not fully control. The mountain was vast, and the claims were mostly ink on vellum, enforced by the steel at Kaelen's hips and the men at his back. Tonight, he had no men. Only his blade and his instincts, and the report from the night watchman who'd spotted a flicker of movement near the eastern fissure—a flicker that shouldn't have been there.

House Thul scouts.

The thought settled in Kaelen's chest like a stone. He'd warned the council. He'd stood before Matron Yssra and spoken the words plainly: increased activity near the Acid Lake, patterns suggesting reconnaissance, not raiding. Yssra had listened with her face like carved ice and told him to handle it. Handle it. As though it were a matter of discipline rather than war.

A sound reached him—not thermal, not geological. Footsteps. Deliberate. Human-shaped. Close.

Kaelen killed his torch. Darkness rushed in, thick and complete, the kind of dark that pressed against the eyes until they stopped trying to see and started trying to feel. He shifted his weight, right hand finding the hilt of his sword. The leather grip was familiar. Worn smooth by years of nervous touching. He didn't get nervous. But he prepared.

The figure emerged from the tunnel's curve like smoke taking form. A scout. Alone. House Thul's colors were muted in the gloom—dark grey instead of Vael's dull green—but the posture was unmistakable. Shoulders back, head high, the confident stride of someone who believed the mountain belonged to him. The scout carried a short bow slung across his back and a knife at his belt. No armor beyond a thin leather jerkin. He was careless. Or confident. There was a difference. Kaelen wasn't sure which this was.

He closed the distance in four strides.

The scout heard him too late. He turned, eyes widening, hand flying to his knife. Kaelen's sword was already drawn, the flat of the blade catching the scout across the jaw before the knife could clear leather. The man crumpled without a sound, hitting the stone hard enough to knock the wind from him. Kaelen pressed a boot to the scout's chest and pinned his wrist to the ground before he could recover.

Up close, the scout was younger than Kaelen expected. Early twenties, maybe. Sharp features, dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His eyes locked onto Kaelen's with a mixture of fury and something else—calculation, maybe, or fear masked as defiance. Kaelen couldn't tell. Scouts were trained to show nothing.

"House Vael," Kaelen said. Flat. Final.

The scout spat. Blood and saliva hit the basalt between Kaelen's boots. "House Vael occupies territory that isn't yours," he replied. Voice steady. Trained. "Your mother knows it. She just doesn't care."

Kaelen's jaw tightened. He knew that voice. Not the words—the timber, the cadence. A girl's voice, sharpened by mockery and years of speaking from the shadows. He'd heard it once before, at a council gathering, when she'd been assigned to read the eastern thread reports. Slippery. Mocking. Used rhetorical questions like weapons.

"Lirien," he said.

The scout smiled. It was a thin, unpleasant thing. "Captain. I wondered if you'd recognize me without my Thul colors."

"I wondered if you'd be foolish enough to come alone."

"Was it foolish?" Lirien tilted her head. The ambiguity hung in the air like steam. "I walked through three checkpoints. No alarms. No pursuit. Your house's famous vigilance is more performance than practice, isn't it?"

Kaelen pressed harder on the scout's wrist. Bones creaked. "You're trespassing on sacred ground. The Acid Lake belongs to House Vael by ancient right."

"By your right," Lirien corrected. "Not hers." She nodded toward the ceiling, toward the goddess whose name no one spoke aloud in the deep tunnels. "Your spider queen doesn't care whose land she gets. She cares about obedience. And you're all so obedient it's almost pathetic."

Kaelen released the wrist and stood. He didn't draw his sword further. There was no point. The scout was subdued, outnumbered three to one in skill even if the numbers were equal. What mattered was the information.

"How many of you?" Kaelen asked.

"Enough."

"That's not an answer."

Lirien's smile widened. "Does your house ever ask questions without wanting answers? Or do you only collect threats and file them away for Matron Yssra's amusement?"

Kaelen ignored the provocation. "The eastern fissure. How deep have you mapped it?"

"Deeper than your watchmen suspect." Lirien's eyes flicked past Kaelen, toward the tunnel behind him. Measuring distances. Planning escape routes. Kaelen noted it but didn't react. Reacting was giving the scout what he wanted—attention, uncertainty, hope.

"You'll be executed for this," Kaelen said.

"Will I?" Lirien's voice dropped, losing its mocking edge. "Or will your precious house pretend I never existed? That's what you do, isn't it? Sweep things under the stone and call it peace."

The words struck something in Kaelen he didn't want to examine. He straightened. "Get up."

Lirien pushed himself to his feet slowly, rubbing his wrist. He didn't resist as Kaelen bound his hands with a strip of leather from his own belt. The scout's breathing was even. Controlled. Even now.

"Where are you taking me?" Lirien asked.

"Back to the keep. Where you'll answer to the council."

"The council will do nothing." Lirien's voice was almost gentle now, which was worse than the mockery.

Kaelen grabbed his arm and began the trek back. The tunnel stretched ahead, warm and humid, the smell of decay growing stronger as they descended toward the lower levels.

Kaelen seized his arm, turning him toward the descent. A suffocating heat clung to the air, thick with the scent of rot as they pressed deeper into the stone. His mind worked through the logistics. A prisoner. A Thul apprentice caught on Vael territory. Yssra would want the head, not the body. But Kaelen knew the politics too—executing a prisoner without trial made martyrs. Keeping her alive made leverage. He chose leverage.

They walked in silence for a long stretch. The only sounds were their footsteps and the distant, guttural roar of the acid lake, vibrating through the stone like a sleeping beast's purr. Kaelen's shoulder ached from the fight—old injury, from a border skirmish two years ago. He ignored it. Pain was data. It told him what his body could and couldn't do. Today, it told him he was still usable.

"Vespera," Lirien said suddenly.

"She hears things, doesn't she?" Lirien's voice was almost conversational. "The prayers. The whispers." She let the words hang, then added quietly: "Broken or not, she's still here. Still sitting. Still pretending she doesn't lean into the dark when it speaks."

"She hears things, doesn't she? The prayers. The whispers. The little voices from the dark." Lirien's voice was almost conversational. "Yssra thinks she's broken. I think she's listening. There's a difference."

"Don't I?" Lirien's laugh was quiet, bitter. "I know she hasn't slept properly since the first prayer." He paused. "How long do you think before she answers one? How long before she chooses a stranger's life over her house's law?"

"Is that what you think?" Lirien’s chuckle was low, edged with venom. "I watch her sit in the Web-Chamber until the dark and humming threads blur into one, pretending the goddess actually listens. I see her recoil every time the eastern threads vibrate. I know she hasn’t closed her eyes in days." He let the silence stretch. "How much longer until she cracks? How long before she trades her house’s law for a stranger’s fate?"

Kaelen said nothing. The tunnel narrowed ahead, the walls pressing closer, the heat rising. The acid lake was close now—he could feel its vibration in his teeth.

"You're wrong about her," he said finally.

"Am I?" Lirien's voice softened, almost sympathetic. "Then why did you come alone, Captain? Why didn't you bring a squad? Why did you trust your instincts over your protocol?"

Kaelen didn't answer. He couldn't. Because Lirien was right, and he hated her for it.

They reached the junction where the eastern fissure split from the main tunnel. Kaelen adjusted his grip on the prisoner and turned left, toward the keep. The return journey would take two hours minimum. He could feel the weight of the decision settling on him—what to do with the prisoner, what to report, how much of Lirien's words to carry back to Yssra and how much to keep for himself.

Behind them, in the dark tunnel they'd just left, a single silk thread trembled. Barely perceptible. A vibration no wider than a hair. But it was there. And it was moving west.

Kaelen didn't hear it. He was too busy walking. Too busy thinking about the scout's words and the ache in his shoulder and the strange certainty that this encounter was only the beginning. The mountain held secrets deeper than stone, and House Thul was digging.

He quickened his pace. The keep waited ahead, its obsidian walls rising from the darkness like the ribs of something ancient and dead. Inside, the guards would be changing shifts. Inside, the council would be waiting for his report. Inside, Vespera would be sitting in the Web-Chamber, listening to prayers she wasn't supposed to hear, and he would have to decide whether to tell her that the enemy was closer than she thought.

He decided then that he wouldn't. Some burdens belonged to the priestesses. Some wars were fought in silence.

But as he walked, the vibration in his teeth grew louder, and Kaelen found himself wondering, for the first time in years, whether silence was protection or surrender.

The answer came too late to matter.

The tunnel curved. The keep's torchlight appeared in the distance, orange and warm against the cold stone. Kaelen pulled Lirien forward and stepped into the light.

Two guards raised their spears. "Halt. Identify—"

"Captain Kaelen," he said. "Prisoner. Thul scout." He glanced back at Lirien, who was watching him with those sharp, calculating eyes. "Take him to the holding cells. Alert the council."

The guards hesitated. A Thul prisoner was unusual. Unprecedented, maybe. Kaelen met their gaze and held it until they moved aside.

As they led Lirien away, the scout looked back one last time. "Tell Vespera," he called, voice carrying down the corridor, "that the eastern threads are fraying. And the spider doesn't even know she's caught."

Kaelen didn't respond. He turned and walked toward the council chambers, his boots echoing against the stone, his mind already composing the report he would deliver to Matron Yssra. The words would be clean. Precise. Omitted everything that mattered.

That was his job. To be clean. To be precise. To hold the line.

But as he climbed the stairs toward the keep's upper levels, the echo of Lirien's words followed him, bouncing off the obsidian walls like a prayer he couldn't silence.

She remains blissfully unaware of her capture.

Kaelen touched the hilt of his sword. The leather was warm now, heated by his hand. He let it go.

Above him, the keep hummed with the ordinary sounds of duty—guards exchanging shifts, priestesses returning from meditation, the distant clatter of kitchen staff preparing evening rations. Normal life. Ordered life. The kind of life that required a Captain of the Guard to stand in the dark and wait for enemies to reveal themselves.

He reached the council chamber doors and pushed them open. The room was empty except for the long obsidian table and the seven carved chairs. Yssra's seat was at the head, empty but not forgotten. Kaelen took his place at the right hand, set his sword on the table, and waited for the others to arrive.

He would report the encounter. He would recommend increased patrols along the eastern fissure. He would suggest that the council consider the possibility of Thul infiltration beyond simple reconnaissance.

And he would not mention that the scout had known Vespera's name. Or that he had spoken of prayers answered.

Some things stayed between the dark and the captain who walked in it.

Outside, the mountain breathed. Deep, slow, ancient. And somewhere in the east, a silk thread snapped.

Kaelen didn't hear it. He was too busy planning the next patrol. Too busy holding the line. Too busy believing that duty was enough.

It wasn't. She had no way of knowing.

None of them did.

The torchlight flickered. The stone grew cold. And Kaelen sat very still, waiting for the council to arrive, waiting to do his job, waiting for a war that was already underway and had been for longer than anyone realized.

The silence beneath the web was not peace. It was preparation.

And it was running out.

Chapter 6

The summons came on a slip of woven silk, thin as a spider's egg sac and twice as fragile. Vespera found it pinned to the doorframe of her quarters with a needle of black glass, the way only someone of Yssra's authority could manage without knocking. She peeled it free with two fingers. The ink was still wet.

Inner Sanctum. Before the second bell.

No greeting. No title. Just the command, delivered the way a blade is delivered: straight, clean, without hesitation. Vespera stood in the doorway of her room for a long moment, the silk slip crumpling slowly in her fist, and felt the familiar cold settle in her stomach. Yssra did not summon apprentices for courtesy visits. She summoned them for corrections.

Vespera dressed quickly, pulling on her ceremonial robes—the deep purple of the inner circle, edged in silver thread that caught the moss-light and threw it back as a pale, sickly shimmer. She braided her hair tight against her scalp, the way Yssra preferred, and checked her reflection in the dark surface of the washbasin. Her eyes looked hollow. Violet irises swallowed by shadow. She looked like someone who hadn't slept. Which she hadn't.

The descent took her through four levels. Each one warmer than the last, the air growing thicker, heavier, until her lungs worked harder with every breath. By the time she reached the Web-Chamber's antechamber, moisture beaded along her hairline and trickled down her neck in cold lines. The double doors stood closed, as they always did during ceremonies, but she could hear the sound from outside—a low, rhythmic chanting, the priestesses' voices layered in perfect unison, the sound of fifty women speaking as one throat. It was the Prayer of Binding, the oldest liturgy in House Vael's tradition, recited monthly to reinforce the web's resonance and bind the goddess's presence to the stone. Vespera had recited it a dozen times. She could have done it blindfolded.

She could not have done it today.

The doors opened before she reached them. A senior priestess stood there, her face impassive, and gestured for Vespera to enter. The Inner Sanctum was different tonight. The moss-light had been extinguished, replaced by rows of brass braziers set along the perimeter walls, each one feeding a flame that burned blue-green and cast everything in an eerie, underwater glow. The heat was intense—close to a hundred degrees, maybe more—and Vespera felt it hit her like a wall the moment she crossed the threshold. Sweat ran down her spine beneath her robes. Her breath came out in visible puffs.

The altar stood at the center, exactly as she had left it: the polished stone spider, eight legs extending outward, each basin filled with fresh offering water that shimmered faintly in the brazier-light. Around the altar, the priestesses formed a tight circle, their heads bowed, their voices rising and falling in the measured cadence of the Prayer of Binding. At the front of the circle, directly opposite the entrance, stood Matron Yssra.

Yssra looked exactly as she always looked: posture rigid, face unmoving, white hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to pull the skin of her cheeks with it. Her amber eyes caught the brazier-light and flared like embers. She wore the full regalia of her office—the silver spider pendant heavy against her sternum, the ceremonial mantle of black silk draped over her shoulders, the finger-rings that clicked softly whenever she moved her hands. She was not chanting. She was watching. Watching Vespera enter, watching her hesitate at the threshold, watching the way her shoulders tensed at the heat.

Vespera walked to the edge of the circle and took her position at the outer rim, between two senior priestesses whose names she had never bothered to learn. She bowed her head. She joined the chanting.

The words came easily at first. They always did. The Prayer of Binding was structured in three movements: invocation, affirmation, sealing. Each movement built on the last, the rhythm accelerating, the volume increasing, until the final seal crashed down like a hammer strike. Vespera's voice fit into the chorus without effort. She matched the pitch. She kept the tempo. She felt the vibration of fifty throats moving together, the collective resonance that made the stone itself tremble, that made the braziers' flames lean toward the altar as though bowing.

But beneath the chanting, beneath the heat and the vibration and the weight of Yssra's gaze, the child's voice was there.

Not loud. Never loud. Just a thread of sound, thin and frayed, threading through the cracks in the ritual the way water threads through cracked clay. A shallow breath. A whimper. The sound of something small and dying, reaching upward through layers of rock and silence and the indifference of a goddess who had turned her face away.

Vespera's voice faltered.

Just for a fraction of a second. A micro-beat of silence in the middle of a word. The woman to her left noticed—it was impossible not to notice in a circle of fifty voices moving as one—and glanced sideways. Vespera caught the look: sharp, questioning, immediately suppressed. But it was enough. She felt heat climb up her neck. She forced the word out. She reattached herself to the rhythm.

Don't, she told herself. Don't listen to it. It's not real. It's not here. The ritual is here. The goddess is here. Focus on the stone. Focus on the heat. Focus on anything but the east.

She pressed her palms flat against her thighs, feeling the rough weave of her robes beneath her fingertips, grounding herself in the tactile. The Prayer of Binding moved into its second movement. The voices rose. The braziers roared. The stone beneath Vespera's bare feet began to vibrate at a frequency she could feel in her teeth. This was the part where the web responded. This was the part where the silk threads in the Web-Chamber above would resonate in sympathy, amplifying the prayer, carrying it upward through the mountain's veins until the goddess had no choice but to answer.

Vespera had felt it happen a dozen times. The sensation was unmistakable: a sudden rush of pressure in her skull, like diving too deep too fast, followed by a warm current that flowed from the floor up through her legs and into her torso, settling behind her sternum like a second heartbeat. The web was awake. The web was listening. The web was—

The child's breath hitched.

Vespera's eyes snapped open. She had been staring at the altar the entire time, at the spider-carving's central body, at the white mineral rings around the edge of each basin, but the image shifted. The basins weren't basins anymore. They were wells. Deep, dark wells, and at the bottom of each one, something small and pale was reaching up. Eight of them. Eight children. Eight pairs of hands stretching toward the surface, fingers splayed, nails broken, skin translucent and raw from too many days in the dark.

"No," Vespera whispered.

The word was too quiet for anyone to hear over the chanting. But her voice cracked on it. The syllable broke mid-air, and the woman to her right turned fully now, her mouth still forming the prayer's words, her eyes wide with alarm. Vespera felt the circle's rhythm stutter. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough for the resonance to waver.

The warm current behind her sternum faltered. Stuttered. Stopped.

The braziers' flames flickered. Not from any draft—the air in the Inner Sanctum was perfectly still—but as though the heat itself had hesitated. The stone's vibration dropped an octave, then another, the frequency slipping, losing its grip on the harmonic that the web needed to respond. Vespera could feel it happening. She could feel the resonance unraveling the way a knot comes undone when you pull the wrong thread, the careful structure collapsing into loose, useless strands.

Stop, she thought, desperate now. Stop. Please. I'm trying. I'm trying.

She pressed harder against her thighs. She clenched her jaw. She forced her mouth back into the shape of the prayer's words, but they came out wrong. Warped. Her voice was too high, too thin, detached from the chorus by a gap that widened with every syllable. The woman to her left stopped chanting altogether and stared. The woman to her right whispered something that might have been a warning. The circle was breaking. Fifty voices splintering into fifty individual threads, each one pulling in a different direction, the resonance collapsing, the heat from the braziers suddenly feeling less like worship and more like punishment.

At the altar, the offering water began to move.

Not from vibration. Not from resonance. From something else. Something wrong. The liquid in each basin rippled outward from the center, rising up the sides of the stone cups in thin, trembling columns, defying gravity, defying physics, defying the natural order of still water in a sealed room. The columns grew taller. Thinner. Unstable. One of them snapped back into the basin with a sound like a whip crack, and the liquid splashed over the rim, running down the spider-carving's leg in dark, glistening rivulets.

Vespera couldn't look away. The water was black now. Not the clear offering water that had been poured an hour ago, but black, opaque, the color of dried blood. It pooled at the base of the altar and spread outward across the stone floor in a thin, spreading film, reflecting the brazier-light in fractured, distorted shards. The smell hit her a moment later—ozone and copper and something sweeter underneath, something that reminded her of the Web-Chamber after a storm of prayers, when the air was so charged with magic that it made her teeth ache.

Matron Yssra's voice cut through the chaos like a blade.

"Enough."

The word was not loud. It did not need to be. It landed in the center of the Sanctum like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripple of it silenced every voice instantly. The chanting stopped. The chanting always stopped when Yssra spoke—she had trained them to stop, had drilled it into them from their first day as apprentices, the way you train a hound to heel. The silence that followed was absolute. The only sound was the drip of black water from the altar's edge and the faint, ragged sound of Vespera's own breathing.

Yssra turned. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. Her amber eyes moved across the circle, assessing, cataloguing, dismissing. They passed over the senior priestesses without lingering, passed over the offering water without acknowledgment, and settled on Vespera.

"You broke the seal," Yssra said. Her voice was cold. Precise. Devoid of emotion. The way a surgeon describes an amputation. "Explain."

Vespera's mouth opened. Nothing came out. Her throat was dry. Her tongue felt too large for her mouth. She tried again. "I—I didn't mean to. The resonance—my voice, I slipped, and then the water, and I tried to reattach, but—"

"Did you lose focus?" Yssra's tone suggested she already knew the answer and was granting Vespera the courtesy of saying it aloud.

"Yes."

"Because of the eastern threads?"

The question was so direct, so specific, that Vespera felt her knees weaken. How did Yssra know? Had she been monitoring the web during the ceremony? Had she been watching Vespera's disruption from the moment it began? Of course she had. Yssra watched everything. That was why she was matron. That was why House Vael feared her.

"I—" Vespera's voice trailed off. She swallowed. The sound was loud in the silence. "I heard something. During the invocation. A prayer. From the east. I tried to ignore it, but—"

"You heard a prayer and you abandoned your post." Yssra's voice did not rise. It did not need to. The cold precision of it was worse than anger. Anger would have been human. Anger would have been forgivable. This was calculation. "Fifty priestesses performed the Binding correctly. Forty-nine maintained the seal. You broke it. Alone."

Vespera looked down at the floor. The black water had spread to her bare feet. It was cold. Colder than the stone. Colder than anything should be. It clung to her skin like oil. She wanted to step back. She couldn't. Standing still was part of the discipline. Standing still was part of the penance.

"The child—" she began.

"Don't." Yssra's single word was a command, not a request. "You will not speak of children here. You will not speak of the east here. Understood?"

Vespera nodded. She couldn't trust her voice.

Yssra studied her for a long moment. Her amber eyes were unreadable. Vespera had spent eighteen years reading Yssra's face—learning the micro-expressions that signaled approval, the subtle shifts in posture that indicated displeasure, the almost imperceptible tightening around the eyes that meant danger. She had never learned to read this. This was the face of someone who had already made a decision and was merely confirming it.

"You are relieved of Web-Chamber duty," Yssra said. "Effective immediately. You will report to the lower depths for labor assignment. You will spend six hours daily maintaining the ventilation shafts and two hours in the acid lake drainage channels. You will not return to the Inner Sanctum until I deem you ready."

The words landed like stones. Vespera felt them hit her chest one by one, heavy and dull, sinking into her ribs and settling there. Six hours in the lower depths—humid, suffocating, where the heat signatures bloomed like flowers against the stone and the air tasted of decay. Two hours navigating the corrosive channels beneath the acid lake—the fumes biting at her lungs, the guttural roar of the bubbling pool vibrating in her teeth, the constant threat that a breach in the walls could dissolve flesh in seconds. Punishment disguised as penance. Yssra was not sending her to atone. She was sending her to disappear.

"Matron," Vespera said, and her voice finally found its shape, thin and frayed but present. "Please. I can fix it. I can—next time, I'll be stronger. I'll focus. I swear—"

"Next time there will not be a next time for you in the Sanctum." Yssra's tone did not change. It did not soften. It did not harden. It simply continued, the way a blade continues cutting. "You are compromised, Vespera. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voice. You are listening to things that are not the goddess's will, and you are answering them. That makes you a liability. And House Vael does not keep liabilities."

She turned away. The gesture was final. The ceremony was over. The dismissal was absolute.

Vespera stood in the silence for three more heartbeats, watching Yssra's white hair move as she exited the Sanctum, watching the senior priestesses reform their circle around the altar, watching the offering water slowly drain away through cracks in the stone floor, leaving only dark stains and the faint metallic smell of blood. Then she turned and walked to the doors.

Her bare feet left wet prints on the basalt. Black prints. The same color as the water. The same color as the child's reaching hands, in her mind. She did not look back.

The corridor outside was cooler. The humidity was less oppressive. The moss-light was dimmer, patchier, as though the mountain's life was thinning along the walls. Vespera walked toward the spiral stairs, her steps slow and unsteady, her robes heavy with sweat, her palms still tingling from the ritual's failure. She could feel the heat of the lower depths calling to her, pulling at her ankles, dragging her down into the dark.

Six hours of ventilation shafts. Two hours of acid channels. Six days, maybe six weeks, maybe six months. Yssra had not specified a timeline. She had not needed to. The absence of an endpoint was the point. Indefinite punishment was the only punishment that worked on a priestess. It made you wonder, endlessly, whether you had done enough, whether you would ever be worthy of returning, whether the goddess had turned away from you permanently.

Vespera reached the first landing and stopped. She placed her palm flat against the wall. The stone was warm beneath her hand—not the deep, resonant warmth of the Inner Sanctum's altar, but a surface heat, the kind that came from friction, from movement, from the constant, grinding pressure of the mountain settling deeper into itself. She pressed harder. The warmth spread into her palm, up her wrist, into her forearm. It felt almost pleasant. Almost like contact. Almost like—

She pulled her hand away.

The warmth lingered for a moment, then faded. She stared at her palm. It was clean. No tingling. No mark. No sign that anything had touched her back through the stone.

Just heat. And then nothing.

Vespera descended.

Chapter 7

The second bell tolled through the stone, a vibration that traveled down through floor and foot and settled deep in Vespera’s ankles. She stood at the edge of the procession, hands folded in the proper position, palms pressed together at chest height, fingers aligned the way Yssra had drilled them since Vespera was six years old. Fifty women moved as one unit through the corridor that spiraled from the upper keep down to the acid lake level. Their bare feet whispered against basalt. Their robes caught on the protruding ridges of quartz that lined the walls. The air grew thicker with each step, warm and wet, carrying the mineral stink of the lake and something else beneath it—something sharp and wrong.

Vespera kept her gaze fixed on the back of the woman in front of her. Lirien. The apprentice from House Thul who had been assigned to the ceremony as a gesture of goodwill that everyone pretended was genuine. Vespera could feel the girl's heat signature blooming ahead, a pale orange ellipse against the cooler blue-grey of the stone. The shallow rhythm of Lirien's breath betrayed her composure, tight and held like a drawn bowstring ready to snap.

Don't look, she told herself. Don't think. Just walk.

Lirien was not here. Kaelen had brought her prisoner in, but she had slipped her bonds during the transfer, vanishing into the lower tunnels before the procession began. Vespera’s vision adjusted to the dark, picking up the faint, ghostly outline of the empty space where the girl should have been standing. The heat signature ahead was not Lirien’s; it belonged to a novice from House Vane, whose breath came in the same tight, terrified rhythm. The deception was seamless, a thread woven so tightly into the pattern that even Vespera’s sensitive eyes had taken the bait, mistaking the silhouette of another girl for the one she had spent the last three nights trying to save.

The realization did not bring relief, only a cold, hollow ache in her chest. Lirien was gone, swallowed by the labyrinthine depths beneath the keep, and the silence where her presence should have been screamed louder than any bell. Vespera forced her shoulders to relax, keeping her hands folded in the proper position, palms pressed together at chest height, fingers aligned the way Yssra had drilled them since she was six years old. To acknowledge the absence now would be to break formation, and breaking formation was the first step toward unraveling everything they had worked for.

But she thought anyway. She thought about the eastern threads in the Web-Chamber, how they had gone silent three days ago, and how that silence had felt like a held breath, and how holding your breath for too long made you dizzy.

They descended through seven levels of carved basalt, past the thermal vents where the heat rose in visible wavering columns, past the alcoves where older priestesses knelt to press their palms to the stone in passing reverence. Vespera counted the steps out of habit, the way she counted her petitions: one, two, three, four. Her knee ached from the old fall in the climbing galleries, the one that had left a permanent stiffness in the joint whenever the air grew this damp. She ignored it. Ignoring things was part of the training.

The acid lake opened before them like a wound. The cavern was vast, wider than the Web-Chamber, the ceiling lost in shadow thirty paces above. The lake itself filled the lower third of the space, a churning surface of yellow-green froth that bubbled with a low, guttural roar. The sound vibrated in Vespera's teeth. She felt it there, behind her molars, a persistent thrumming that made her jaw want to clench. She kept her jaw loose. She kept her face blank.

At the lake's edge, a ring of stone markers had been set into the rock face, each one carved with the eight-legged sigil of the Spider Queen. Fifty markers. Fifty women. Fifty prayers. The geometry of devotion, Yssra called it. Perfect symmetry. Perfect obedience.

Vespera found her marker. Number thirty-two. She stepped onto the stone and assumed the posture: knees bent slightly, spine straight, arms extended forward at shoulder height, palms open. The position was uncomfortable by design. Discomfort sharpened focus. Pain clarified intention. Yssra had said this during Vespera's first binding ceremony, and the words had stuck like burrs in Vespera's mind ever since.

Around her, the other priestesses took their positions. The chanting began—a low, droning sound that rose and fell in three distinct movements, the structure of the Prayer of Binding carved into syllables the way the chambers were carved into stone. First movement: acknowledgment. Second movement: surrender. Third movement: consumption.

Vespera opened her mouth and joined the chant. The words tasted of copper and ash. Her voice blended with the others, disappearing into the mass sound the way a single thread disappeared into the web. She focused on the rhythm, on the vibration of the stone beneath her feet, on the heat radiating from the lake. She focused on everything except the eastern direction. Except the silence that was not silence but suppression. Except the shape of the small hand that had reached up from the dark.

The second movement began. Surrender.

That was when Vespera felt it—not a sound, but a pressure, a subtle shift in the air currents that carried the lake's thermal bloom toward the western wall. Something was moving in the shadows beyond the ritual circle. Something warm. Something alive.

Her eyes flicked, just for a fraction of a second, toward the western alcove. There, half-hidden behind a curtain of stalactite drips, a heat signature pulsed weakly. Human-shaped. Smaller than an adult. The warmth was fading, bleeding into the stone like water into sand.

Vespera's breath caught. Her hands trembled in their prescribed position. She forced them still.

It's nothing, she told herself. It's rock. It's shadow. It's the lake playing tricks on your thermal sense.

But she knew what she was seeing. She had trained with the heat-sense since childhood—Yssra had drilled it into her, embedding the discipline as deeply as muscle memory in a sword arm. She learned to parse the thermal landscape without hesitation. Heat bloomed like flowers against the cold stone. Cold pooled like shadow. And right now, in the western alcove, a small, fading bloom of warmth pulsed irregularly, like a heart that had forgotten its rhythm.

A surface-dweller. Trapped. Dying.

The chanting continued around her, steady and indifferent. Fifty women surrendered to the Spider Queen. Fifty women offered their wills to the web. And Vespera, number thirty-two, stood at her marker and felt the terrible, impossible urge to move.

The third movement approached. Consumption. This was the hardest part—the moment where the priestess had to imagine herself dissolving into the web, becoming thread, becoming silence, becoming nothing. Yssra had described it as the highest form of devotion. Vespera had always found it difficult. Not because she lacked faith, but because the idea of dissolution terrified her in a way she could never articulate in the proper liturgical terms. Dissolution meant forgetting. It meant the small hand reaching up from the dark would remain reaching forever, and no one would remember it was reaching.

The chant shifted. The third movement. Vespera opened her mouth to join, and instead, she did something she had never done in the six years of her training.

She broke formation.

Not dramatically. Not visibly. She simply shifted her weight from her left foot to her right, adjusted her stance by half a pace, and let her right hand drift away from the prescribed position. The movement was small enough to be absorbed by the collective motion of the procession. The other priestesses were deep in the third movement, their voices merged, their attention inward. No one was watching Vespera. No one was looking at her hands.

She turned her head, just enough to see the western alcove in her peripheral vision. The heat signature was dimmer now, barely a wisp of orange against the blue-grey stone. Whatever was in there was running out of time.

Vespera's right hand moved again. This time, her fingers curled into a shape that had nothing to do with prayer. She reached into the fold of her robe and withdrew a small leather pouch—ration bread, compressed and salted, the kind the priestesses carried during long vigils in the Web-Chamber. She had taken it from her quarters that morning, telling herself it was preparation. Now she understood what she had been preparing for.

She let the pouch fall.

Not toward the alcove. Toward the Lower Depths.

The leather packet struck the basalt with a soft thud, rolling across the stone until it came to rest against the base of the western alcove. To anyone watching, it would look like nothing more than a dropped ration packet, an accident of imbalance during the third movement. But Vespera knew what it looked like to eyes that could read heat and shadow. It looked like food. It looked like the beginning of food.

The chanting reached its crescendo. Fifty voices rose together, a wall of sound that vibrated in the stone and filled the cavern and drowned out everything else—the lake's roar, the drip of water, the ragged breathing of whatever was dying in the western alcove.

Vespera stood at her marker, hands raised, mouth open, voice joined to the chant, and she watched the heat signature in the alcove shift. A small movement. A reaching. Then stillness.

"Good," Yssra said. The word was flat, devoid of emotion, delivered the way a stone is dropped into a well—straight down, no hesitation. She tilted her head, listening. The cavern had gone quiet except for the lake, and the silence held the clean, hollow quality of a room after a door shuts. "The threads settled. The binding holds."

Yssra’s reply was a blunt instrument of sound, stripped of inflection and offered without hesitation. "The web accepts our offering. The prayer is bound."

The priestesses bowed their heads. Vespera bowed hers. When she raised it again, Yssra's amber eyes were fixed on her.

"Number thirty-two," Yssra said. "Step forward."

The words landed like a blow. Vespera's stomach tightened. Around her, the other priestesses shifted, their attention turning toward her like moths toward a flame. She stepped forward from her marker, bare feet silent on the stone, hands still folded at sternum height.

Yssra's gaze dropped to Vespera's right hand. The hand that had drifted. The hand that had held the pouch.

"Your posture was uneven during the third movement," Yssra said. Her voice was still flat, still devoid of emotion, but there was something underneath it—a thin wire of suspicion, pulled taut. "Explain."

"See that it does not happen again," Yssra said finally. Her eyes lingered on Vespera's right hand, still curled faintly from where it had released the pouch, the knuckles whitened from gripping too hard. "Your stance broke the line. Again."

"My balance," Vespera said. Her voice came out softer than she intended, hesitant, the way it always did when she was afraid. "The damp stone. I slipped."

Yssra studied her. The silence stretched. Vespera could hear the lake bubbling below them, could feel the thermal bloom of the matron's body radiating heat like a furnace, could feel the tiny, almost imperceptible tremor in her own hands.

Yssra’s voice was final. "Ensure this error is not repeated. The web rejects any flaw in its weave."

She turned away. The procession began to disperse, the priestesses moving as one organism back up through the seven levels of basalt, their bare feet whispering against stone. Vespera followed, keeping her hands folded, her spine straight, her eyes fixed on the backs of the women ahead of her.

Behind her, in the western alcove, the heat signature was gone.

Whether it had moved toward the food or whether it had simply faded into the stone, Vespera could not know. She would never know. The knowledge sat in her chest like a stone, heavy and cold and impossible to swallow.

She had fed a dying stranger during a sacred ritual. She had broken formation. She had been seen.

Heat pooled in the chamber, thick and cloying, while the eastern threads remained still, their silence pressing against the stale air like a held breath.

Chapter 8

The corridor beyond the Acid Lake was not a place for the living. It smelled of sulfur and wet rot, a thick, cloying stench that coated the back of Vespera’s throat and made her stomach turn. She moved along the basalt ledge, her bare feet finding purchase on the uneven stone with a familiarity that belied the terror hammering against her ribs. The heat here was oppressive, a physical weight that pressed against her skin, but it was the cold that frightened her. The cold was where the shadows lived.

She had left the ritual hall an hour ago, slipping away while the other priestesses were still filing back into their dormitories, their minds numb from the Prayer of Binding. Vespera told herself she was going for air. She told herself she needed to clear her head, to wash the smell of dried blood from her hair. But she knew the truth. She was hunting. Or perhaps she was being hunted.

The thermal blooms on the walls shifted as she moved, pulsing rhythms of orange and yellow against the deep blue of the stone. Vespera kept her eyes on the darkest patches, the places where the heat died away completely. That was where the House Thul spies liked to hide. That was where the traitors waited.

A sound broke the silence. Not the rumble of the Acid Lake, nor the distant drip of condensation falling into the black water below. It was the scrape of leather on stone. Deliberate. Mocking.

Vespera stopped. She pressed herself flat against the wall, closing her eyes and letting her breathing slow until it was barely a whisper. She listened.

"You’re loud, little priestess," a voice said from the darkness. "Even when you try to be quiet, you’re loud."

Vespera opened her eyes. The figure emerged from the shadow of a collapsed pillar, stepping into the faint, bioluminescent glow of the moss strips. Lirien. She looked exactly as Vespera remembered from the rare Council gatherings: slender, with hair the color of dried blood and eyes that seemed to catch the light like a cat’s. She wore the grey tunic of a House Thul apprentice, but the fabric was torn and stained, as if she had been crawling through the tunnels for days.

"What do you want?" Vespera asked. Her voice trembled, just slightly. She hated that. She hated the constriction in her throat, the tremor threatening to seize her fingers.

Lirien smiled. It was a thin, cruel thing. "I want to know what it feels like," she said, stepping closer. "To hear a voice that isn’t yours. To feel the spider queen pulling at your mind like a puppeteer yanking strings. Does it hurt? Or is it just… ticklish?"

"It is none of your business," Vespera said, forcing her voice to steady. "Go back to your tunnels, Lirien. Your matrons will send more agents if you fail. But they will send better ones."

Lirien laughed. It was a sharp, barking sound that echoed off the cavern walls. "Better? You think they send better? They send corpses. They send children who don’t know how to die quietly. But me? I’m still here. And you’re still here. So who’s really winning, Vespera?"

Vespera took a step back. Her heel caught on a loose piece of basalt, and she stumbled. Lirien’s eyes narrowed, tracking the movement with predatory interest.

Blood drained from Vespera's face. Ice-cold dread rushed in to fill the void, icy and suffocating. "You saw nothing," she said. "Shadows. Nothing."

Vespera's heart hammered. She wanted to deny it. She wanted to scream that she was strong, that she was loyal, that she was a priestess of the Spider Queen and nothing could shake her faith. But the words stuck in her throat. Lirien was right. She was flinching. She was listening. And the eastern threads… the eastern threads were screaming in her head every night, a chorus of dying voices that she could not silence.

"How do you know about the threads?" Vespera whispered.

Lirien tilted her head. "Because I’ve been there. Because I’ve listened. And because I know what you did tonight. I saw you, Vespera. I saw you feed the prisoner."

Blood drained from Vespera’s face. Cold rushed in to fill the void, icy and suffocating. “You saw nothing,” she said. “Shadows. Nothing.”

"I saw enough," Lirien said, taking another step to close the distance until they were only a few paces apart. Vespera caught the sour tang of sweat on her, the metallic scent of old blood, and something else—something sweet and cloying, like rotting flowers. Lirien’s gaze lingered on the breach in discipline. "You broke the formation. You gave your ration bread to a creature that isn’t even human. Matron Yssra watched you do it. She said nothing then. But she will. And when she does, you’ll be dead."

Vespera’s hands curled into fists. Her nails bit into her palms, drawing blood, but she barely felt it. Fear was a living thing inside her, coiling around her lungs, squeezing the air from her body. She wanted to run. She wanted to turn and flee back up the stairs, back to the safety of the upper keep, back to the lie that she was strong.

But she couldn’t run. Not now. Not when Lirien was watching her. Not when the truth was hanging in the air between them, heavy and poisonous.

"So what?" Vespera said. Her voice was small, but it was steady. "You’re going to tell them? You’re going to run back to your matrons and report me? Go ahead. See if it matters. See if they care."

Lirien’s smile returned, wider this time, edged with triumph. "Oh, they’ll care. They’ll care very much. And when they execute you, I’ll be there to watch. I’ll stand right next to Yssra, and I’ll watch them cut your tongue out, and I’ll wonder if you’ll beg. Or if you’ll stay silent, like your precious goddess wants."

Vespera took a breath. The air tasted of sulfur and fear. She thought of the prisoner in the western alcove, the small, trembling heat signature that had reached out to her in the dark. She thought of the voice in her head, the child’s voice, begging for help. She thought of the prayer she had failed to utter, the words that had died on her lips.

And then she thought of Lirien. Of the smirk on her face. Of the cruelty in her eyes.

Vespera moved.

She didn’t think. She didn’t plan. She simply reacted, her body twisting away from the wall and launching itself forward with a force that surprised even her. Lirien’s eyes widened, surprise flashing across her face for a fraction of a second before she tried to dodge. But Vespera was faster. She had been trained since she was six years old, drilled in the art of violence by Matron Yssra herself, taught to strike with precision and merciless efficiency.

Her fist connected with Lirien’s jaw with a sickening crack. The sound echoed through the corridor, loud and sharp, like a branch snapping in a winter forest. Lirien stumbled back, her head snapping to the side, blood spraying from her lip. She hit the wall hard, sliding down until she was crouched on the floor, gasping.

Vespera didn’t stop. She followed up, driving her knee into Lirien’s stomach. The apprentice doubled over, vomiting bile onto the basalt floor. Vespera grabbed her by the hair, yanking her head back, and pressed her forearm against Lirien’s throat.

"Listen to me," Vespera hissed, her face inches from Lirien’s. Her breath was hot, ragged. "You will not tell anyone. You will not speak of what you saw. And if you do…" She tightened her grip, just slightly. Just enough to make Lirien’s eyes widen, just enough to make her struggle. "If you do, I won’t wait for Yssra to kill you. I’ll do it myself. And I’ll make it hurt."

Lirien gagged, her hands clawing at Vespera’s arm, but she didn’t push her away. She just stared up at Vespera, her green eyes wide with shock and something else. Something like fear.

"You’re insane," Lirien choked out.

"No," Vespera said. She released her grip, letting Lirien slump back against the wall, and stared at her own hands — knuckles split, nails buried to the quick, blood dripping in dark rivulets onto the basalt. She flexed her fingers once, twice, as if testing whether they belonged to her.

"No," Vespera said. Her voice cracked on the syllable. She let go, and Lirien slid down the stone until she was seated on the floor, while Vespera stared at her own hands — knuckles torn raw, nails driven deep into the flesh, crimson streams carving paths into the black rock beneath them. She flexed her fingers once, twice, as if testing whether they belonged to her.

The cold seeped into her bones, heavy and insistent, but she did not stop walking. There was no victory here, only the hollow space between action and consequence. Above, the darkness remained absolute, the eastern threads holding their silence like a held breath.

Chapter 9

The heat found Vespera before the stone did. She was already moving through the lower corridors, her bare feet reading the basalt like braille—the gradual warming that meant she was climbing toward the Sanctum level, the subtle vibration in the rock that spoke of Yssra's presence upstream. Her black robes were drawn tight, hair bound in the severe coil the Matron demanded. Her hands did not shake. Not yet. She had learned that trick during her first year of training, a technique Yssra herself had shown her: breathe from the diaphragm, anchor your weight on both feet, let the chill of the stone seep up through your soles and settle in your bones. That chill made you steady. That chill made you obedient.

The Inner Sanctum was already at full temperature when she arrived. Close to a hundred degrees, the air thick and wet, pressing against her skin like a living thing. Vespera walked through the heat with her eyes lowered, her bare feet finding the familiar grooves in the basalt floor, the same path she had taken dozens of times for disciplinary sessions, for promotions, for the monthly Prayer of Binding. Today was different. She knew it in the way the heat felt heavier today, in the way the stone seemed to hold its breath.

Yssra sat on her dais at the far end of the roughly circular chamber, maybe thirty paces across, the way it always was. The obsidian throne caught the faint glow of the phosphorescent moss strips and threw it back in fractured shards of pale light. Yssra's white hair was loose for once, falling over her shoulders like spilled milk, and her amber eyes were fixed on something beyond Vespera, beyond the chamber walls, beyond the mountain itself. She did not look up when Vespera approached. She did not gesture for her to kneel. She simply waited.

There was someone else in the chamber. A woman, standing in the center of the floor, her hands bound behind her back with silk cord blackened by ritual ash. Vespera recognized her—Nethis, a junior priestess from the eastern wing, one of the younger acolytes who served in the Web-Chamber during the night rotations. She was maybe nineteen, with a face that still held the softness of youth, her dark hair cropped close to her skull in the standard priestess cut. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She was not crying. That was something, at least.

Kneel," Yssra said. Her voice was cold, precise, devoid of emotion—the same voice she used when assigning patrol routes or distributing rations. There was no anger in it. No sorrow. No conviction. Just facts stated in order.

Something shifted in the chamber's heat-map. Vespera registered it before she saw it—a secondary warmth standing at odds with the ambient temperature, a body heat pattern that didn't belong to the dais or the walls. She turned her eyes downward, past the phosphorescent strips, and found a figure at the chamber's center. A woman, hands bound behind her back with silk cord blackened by ritual ash. Nethis. Junior priestess, eastern wing, one of the younger acolytes who served night rotations in the Web-Chamber. Nineteen, maybe. The softness of youth still clung to her face despite the cropped priestess cut. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She was not crying. That was something, at least.

"The eastern threads have been reporting irregularities," Yssra said. She did not address Vespera directly. She addressed the chamber, the stone, the Spider Queen herself. "For three nights, the patterns have shifted. Not the usual drift—the organic variation that comes from the mountain settling, from the lake bubbling, from the weight of the rock above us. These are deliberate perturbations. Someone is tampering with the web."

Vespera's breath caught. She forced it back down. She had heard the eastern threads screaming every night for weeks now. She had told no one. She had told no one because to tell anyone was to admit weakness, and weakness was the one sin the Spider Queen did not forgive. But tampering. That was different. That was treason.

Yssra turned her head slowly, the movement mechanical, and looked at Nethis. "You were on night rotation for the past seven cycles. You had access to the eastern anchor pillars. You were the last priestess to touch the binding knots before the perturbations began."

Nethis's throat worked. She swallowed. "I didn't—"

"You didn't what?" Yssra's voice didn't rise. It never rose. "You didn't tamper? You didn't sabotage? You didn't signal to House Thul through the web frequencies, altering the resonance patterns so they could map our defensive positions?"

"I didn't!" Nethis's voice cracked. "I swear by the Eight Legs, I didn't—"

"Swearings are cheap," Yssra said. She set down her slate, the charcoal tip clicking against the obsidian. "The eastern anchor knots were loosened. You were last to bind them."

Vespera kept her eyes on the seam between the tiles. She could feel the heat of Yssra's amber gaze on her, assessing, measuring, weighing. What was Yssra seeing? Was she seeing loyalty or hesitation? Was she seeing a priestess who knew the truth or a priestess who was complicit? Vespera's palms were sweating. She pressed them harder against the stone, willing the moisture to evaporate, willing her body to obey.

"Nethis of the eastern wing," Yssra continued, "has been found wanting. Her connection to the web is severed. Her access to the sanctum is revoked. Her life is forfeit."

The words landed in the chamber like stones dropped into still water. They rippled outward, silent and inevitable. Vespera felt them hit her in the chest, a dull, heavy impact that made her ribs ache. Forfeit. Not imprisoned. Not interrogated further. Forfeit. The decree hung in the superheated air, simple and absolute.

"Please," Nethis whispered. The composure was breaking now, the cracks spreading through her voice like fractures in glass. "Matron, please. I've served for two years. I've never missed a rotation. I've never—"

"Two years," Yssra repeated, as if tasting the word. "A brief tenure. Insufficient to establish trust. Insufficient to warrant the risk of mercy."

She nodded once, sharply, to the side of the chamber.

A guard stepped forward from the shadows. Vespera hadn't seen him before—he was one of the outer sentries, clad in dull green armor, his face obscured by a helmet shaped like a spider's carapace. He moved with the efficient silence of someone who had done this before. Many times.

Nethis's eyes went wide. She struggled against the silk bonds, her wrists twisting, her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. "Please," she said again, louder now. "Please, Matron, I didn't do it. I didn't. Check the other pillars. Check the eastern anchor knots. Look at the patterns. Please—"

The guard grabbed her by the upper arm and pulled. Nethis went willingly, reluctantly, her feet shuffling on the basalt. She didn't resist. She didn't scream. She just kept saying please, over and over, in a voice that grew thinner and higher with each repetition, until it was barely audible over the low, constant hum of the sanctum walls.

Vespera kept her eyes on the seam between the tiles. She could hear their footsteps receding, the guard's boots heavy and deliberate, Nethis's bare feet slapping softly against the stone. Then the sound of the side door opening. Then silence.

She wondered what happened in the corridor. She wondered if Nethis had begged until the very end, or if she had gone quiet at some point, accepting the inevitable with the same hollow resignation that Vespera felt pooling in her own stomach. She wondered if the guard had covered Nethis's mouth or let her cry out. She did not want to wonder. She pushed the thoughts down, deeper and deeper, into the cold place where she kept everything she was not allowed to feel.

When she looked up again, Yssra was watching her. Really watching her. The amber eyes were sharp, analytical, dissecting.

"Look at me," Yssra said.

Vespera raised her head. Her neck felt stiff, as if the vertebrae had fused together during the kneeling. She met Yssra's gaze and held it. She had been trained to hold Yssra's gaze. It was a test in itself—a demonstration of confidence, of conviction, of faith.

"Do you understand what was done?" Yssra asked.

"Yes, Matron."

"Do you question it?"

"No, Matron."

"Do you agree?"

The question hung in the heat. Vespera felt the weight of it pressing down on her, heavier than the mountain above them. If she said no, she would join Nethis in the corridor. If she said yes, she would survive. But the word tasted like ash in her mouth, like the dried blood that clung to the Web-Chamber after a storm of prayers.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"Yes, Matron," she said.

Yssra studied her for a long moment. Vespera could see the fine lines around her eyes, the pale scars along her jawline—remnants of battles fought in the Underdark, of rituals performed under conditions that would have broken a lesser woman. Yssra had earned this authority. Yssra had bled for it. But earning authority and wielding it with mercy were two different things, and Yssra had never mastered the second.

"Good," Yssra said. She turned away, dismissing Vespera with the same indifference she had shown Nethis. "Return to your quarters. Seal the door behind you. Anyone who asks, you were dismissed."

"Yes, Matron."

Vespera rose to her feet. Her knees popped. Her legs trembled, just slightly, but she locked them straight and walked toward the chamber entrance with measured steps. The heat pressed against her skin, making her shirt cling to her back. The smell of ozone and dried blood filled her nose, the same scent that had haunted her since childhood, since her first day in the Web-Chamber, since the moment she understood that devotion required sacrifice.

She did not look back. She could not. If she looked back, she might see the space where Nethis had stood, the empty circle of basalt that was now just another patch of warm stone in a chamber full of warm stone. She might see the blackened silk cord lying on the floor, abandoned by the guard in his haste. She might see something that would make her stop, make her turn, make her do something reckless and foolish and human.

The corridor beyond the Inner Sanctum was cooler, the temperature dropping by degrees as she moved away from the dais. The phosphorescent moss strips cast their pale blue glow over the curved walls, illuminating the carved spider motifs that spiraled upward toward the ceiling like frozen storms. Vespera walked through them in silence, her footsteps echoing softly against the stone.

Her mind was racing. She replayed the chamber in her head—the positioning of the threads, the tension on the eastern anchor pillars, the way the perturbation patterns would have manifested if someone were truly tampering. She had served in the Web-Chamber enough to recognize the signatures. But she had also heard the eastern threads screaming every night, and she had said nothing. What if the perturbations weren't sabotage? What if they were something else? What if Nethis had been innocent, and Yssra had killed her anyway, because innocence was irrelevant in the calculus of power?

The thought terrified her more than Nethis's death. Because if Yssra could execute someone without evidence, without trial, without even pretending to care about truth, then nothing was safe. Nothing was certain. Not loyalty. Not service. Not even life itself. They existed only at Yssra's pleasure, and Yssra's pleasure was a fickle thing, shaped by paranoia and ambition and the cold, unyielding logic of survival.

Vespera reached the junction where the corridor split—left toward the Web-Chamber, right toward the apprentice quarters. She chose right without thinking. Her quarters were small, cold, and quiet. They were the only place in the mountain where she could sit alone and pretend that the world made sense.

She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, her eyes closed, her forehead resting against the smooth obsidian surface. The silence of the room was absolute. No hum. No vibration. No prayers. Just the sound of her own breathing, shallow and uneven, and the faint drip of condensation somewhere in the corner.

She slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor, her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. She thought of Nethis's face—the softness of youth, the red-rimmed eyes, the desperate mouth forming words that would never be answered. She thought of Yssra's amber eyes, cold and calculating, dissecting her with the same precision she had applied to the silk cords.

And she thought of the eastern threads, still screaming in the dark, still calling for help that no one was willing to give.

The stone beneath her was cold. For the first time in her life, Vespera wished it was warm.

Chapter 10

The silence of the corridor was a lie. Vespera knew this because the stone beneath her feet was still vibrating, a low-frequency tremor that traveled up her shins and settled in her teeth. She had walked the perimeter of the Lower Depths a thousand times during her patrols, counting steps, memorizing the thermal gradients of the basalt walls, learning which sections of the tunnel collapsed into sudden, suffocating drafts. But this section—this stretch of wall just past the western bend, where the humidity spiked and the air smelled of wet rot and stale ozone—had always been solid. Always.

Now, it was breathing.

She pressed her palm flat against the obsidian seam. It was warm. Not the ambient heat of the cavern, which hovered near a hundred degrees, but a localized warmth, like the fever of a living thing. The stone was thin here. Maybe two inches of carved rock masking a hollow space behind it. Vespera closed her eyes and let her awareness drift outward, past the physical touch, past the smell of sulfur, into the hum of the Web.

The Web did not sing here. It did not thrum with the discordant anxiety of the eastern threads or the steady, rhythmic pulse of the central altar. It was silent. A blind spot in the tapestry. A hole in the world.

Vespera frowned. In the theology of House Vael, silence was not empty; it was waiting. The Spider Queen did not leave gaps in her domain. Every inch of the mountain was accounted for, every shadow mapped, every prayer logged. A blind spot was an impossibility. Or it was a mistake.

And mistakes were punishable by death.

She pulled her hand back and drew her dagger. The blade was short, curved, and made of black glass that drank the torchlight. She ran a thumb along the edge, feeling the bite, grounding herself in the reality of the weapon. Then she drove the tip into the seam.

The stone did not resist. It yielded like rotten fruit.

Vespera froze, her breath caught in her throat. She waited for the alarm. She waited for the screech of metal on stone, the shout of a guard, the sudden appearance of Kaelen with his silver hair and grey eyes, his hand on the hilt of his own blade. But there was only the drip of water somewhere in the dark, and the distant, gurgling roar of the Acid Lake.

She pushed harder. The slab of obsidian swung inward on hinges of rusted iron, groaning a sound that set her teeth on edge. The smell that rolled out was not the smell of the Lower Depths. It was dry. It smelled of dust and dried leaves and something sharp and green—pine, maybe, or cedar. The scent of the surface.

Vespera staggered back. The surface. It was a myth, a nursery story told to frighten apprentices who misbehaved during meditation. Go to the surface, the senior priestesses would whisper, where the sky has no ceiling and the sun burns your skin to ash. They said the air up there was too thin to breathe, too bright to see, too empty to hold a soul. They said the Spider Queen had sealed the world below for a reason.

But the air rolling out of the crack was cool. It touched her sweat-slicked skin and raised goosebumps. It smelled of life.

She should seal it. She should call for Kaelen. She should report the breach and let the Council decide its fate. That was the protocol. That was the duty.

Instead, she stepped inside.

The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for her shoulders. The walls were rough-hewn, unpolished, unlike the smooth basalt of the keep. Vespera’s fingers trailed along the rock, feeling the jagged edges, the tool marks of picks and chisels from an era long forgotten. The air pressure shifted, dropping sharply against her eardrums as the tunnel opened into a void. The oppressive heat of the mountain faded, replaced by a chill that bit at her exposed ankles, signaling the presence of open space above.

She walked for what felt like an hour, though the silence suggested otherwise. There was no echo in the tunnel. The walls seemed to absorb sound, swallowing the scrape of her robe, the click of her teeth, the ragged rhythm of her own breathing. She felt watched, but not by the Web. By the darkness itself. A scent drifted down from the shaft ahead—sharp, resinous pine mixed with the faint, metallic tang of sulfur, distinct from the stale, recycled air of the deep caverns.

At the end of the tunnel, the atmosphere changed.

It was faint, grey and diffuse, filtering down from somewhere high above. Vespera squinted, her eyes adjusting to the dimness. The tunnel sloped upward, a gentle incline that ended in a grate of wrought iron, rusted and thick with grime. Beyond the grate, she could see shapes. Trees? Rocks? The vague outline of a sky that was not a ceiling.

She reached the grate and pressed her face to the bars. The air here was colder, biting at her nose, stinging her eyes. She could hear wind. Real wind, not the thermal drafts of the caverns, but a rushing, chaotic sound that tore through the trees above. It sounded like screaming. It sounded like freedom.

A trap. The thought arrived fully formed, cold and sharp. Why would such a passage exist? Who had built it? And why was it open now?

She turned to leave, her heart hammering against her ribs. The silence of the tunnel felt heavier now, pressing in on her from all sides. She had seen enough. She would seal the passage. She would report it. She would—

Help me.

The voice was not in the Web. It was in the air, carried on the wind, faint and broken. Vespera spun around, her dagger raised, her eyes scanning the darkness behind her. The tunnel was empty. The grate was the only exit, and it was barred.

Please.

It was the child. The voice from the prayer. The small hand reaching up from the dark. But the voice was not coming from the Web. It was coming from the tunnel. From the passage that led to the surface.

Vespera lowered the dagger slowly. Her hands trembled, betraying the stillness she had cultivated since age six. Report the anomaly, her training screamed. Answer the plea, the voice whispered.

She looked at the grate. The wind howled, tearing at the rusted bars. She looked back at the dark tunnel, at the path that led back to the keep, back to Yssra, back to the silence she had spent her life trying to maintain.

If this was a trap, she would walk into it. If it was a miracle, she would deny it.

She reached up and grabbed the rusted bars. They were cold, rough with oxidation. She pulled. Nothing. She kicked the base of the grate. The stone crumbled, dust puffing into the air. She pulled again, harder, her muscles burning, her breath coming in short gasps. The iron groaned, a high-pitched shriek that echoed down the tunnel.

Stop.

The voice was louder now. Urgent. Terrified.

Vespera ignored it. She threw her weight against the grate, feeling the rust flake away under her palms, feeling the metal bend. With a final, desperate heave, the bolts sheared. The grate crashed to the ground, clattering against the stone.

The wind rushed in, cold and fierce, blowing dust into her eyes. Vespera coughed, waving her hand in front of her face, tears streaming down her cheeks. When the dust settled, she saw Nethis.

A figure standing on the other side of the grate. Small. Human. Dressed in rags that fluttered in the wind. A child.

"You found me," the child whispered.

Vespera opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

Vespera parted her lips, but the words died before they reached them. She looked at the child, then at the dark tunnel behind her, then at the sky above. The wind howled, carrying the scent of pine and rain and something else—something metallic and sharp. Blood.

The child took a step forward, reaching out a hand. "Are you here to save me?"

Vespera looked at the hand. It was dirty, scarred, trembling. She looked at her own hand, clad in black silk, steady and strong. She thought of Yssra’s amber eyes, cold and judging. She thought of Kaelen’s grey gaze, sharp and assessing. She thought of the eastern threads, silent and screaming.

"We have to go," Vespera said, gripping the child's hand tighter. "We have to move."

She reached out and took the child’s hand.

The grip was weak, frail. But it was real. Vespera pulled the child through the grate, into the tunnel. The wind died down, silenced by the stone walls. The child shivered, pressing against Vespera’s side, seeking warmth.

The child nodded, eyes wide, trusting. Vespera turned and led the way back into the darkness, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She had no idea where she was going, nor if the passage led to safety or to death. She only knew that she could not leave the child behind.

As they walked, the stone began to hum. A low, discordant note, vibrating in her teeth. The Web was waking up. It knew. It had always known.

Vespera tightened her grip on the child’s hand. The silence was over. The noise had begun.

The return journey was a blur of shadows and whispers. Vespera moved quickly, her bare feet silent on the rough stone, her mind racing through the possibilities. If Yssra found out—if Kaelen found out—there would be no trial. No hearing. Just the darkness, and the silence, and the end.

But she could not let go of the child’s hand. The warmth of the small fingers against hers was an anchor, a tether to the world above, to the sky and the wind and the messy, chaotic beauty of life.

They emerged from the tunnel in the lower storerooms, a forgotten cache of supplies near the edge of the Acid Lake. The air here was thick with the smell of sulfur, but beneath it, Vespera could still smell the pine and the rain.

The child pulled away, stumbling slightly. "Where are we?"

"Safe," Vespera lied. The word tasted like ash. "For now."

The child looked around, eyes darting from the shadows to the dripping walls. "It’s dark."

"It’s always dark here," Vespera said. "But you’re safe now."

The child nodded, but the trust in the gesture was fragile, cracking under the weight of the unknown. Vespera knelt, bringing herself to eye level. "What’s your name?"

The child hesitated, then whispered, "Elian."

"Elian," Vespera repeated. The name felt strange in her mouth, foreign and precious. "I’m Vespera."

Elian looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. "You’re a spider."

Vespera flinched. The accusation hung in the air, sharp and bitter. "I am a priestess," she corrected softly.

"Spiders eat flies," Elian said.

"Not all spiders," Vespera said. "Some… some protect them."

Elian studied her face, searching for the lie. Vespera held her breath, waiting. The silence stretched, taut and thin. Finally, Elian nodded. "Okay."

"Okay," Vespera echoed. She stood, brushing the dust from her robes. "We need to hide you. Until I can figure out what to do."

"Can I go home?" Elian asked.

Vespera looked at the child, at the hope flickering in those green eyes. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to promise him the sky and the wind and the sun. But she could not. Not yet.

"Not yet," she said. "But soon."

She led Elian deeper into the storerooms, into the shadows where the heat signatures bloomed like flowers against the stone. Doubt coiled in her chest—was she saving him or damning them both? She clung only to the certainty that the choice was hers. And for the first time in her life, she was making it.

Behind them, the tunnel remained open. The wind whispered through the grate, carrying the scent of the surface into the dark. The Web hummed, discordant and angry, sensing the disruption, the breach, the betrayal.

Vespera did not look back. She could not. If she looked back, she might see the path she had left behind, the life she had abandoned, the silence she had sought to preserve. And she might stop.

So she kept walking. Into the dark. Into the noise. Into the unknown.

The stone vibrated beneath her feet, a steady, rhythmic pulse. The mountain was waking up. And Vespera was part of it now. Not a priestess. Not a servant. Not a spider.

Something else. Something new.

She squeezed Elian’s hand. The child squeezed back. And together, they disappeared into the shadows, leaving only the echo of their footsteps and the scent of pine in the air.

The silence beneath the web was broken. The song had begun.

Hours later, Vespera sat in the corner of the storeroom, her back against the cold stone, her eyes closed. Elian was asleep, curled up beside her, his breathing shallow and rapid. She watched him, memorizing the rise and fall of his chest, the flutter of his eyelids, the way his fingers twitched in his dreams.

She was exhausted. Her muscles burned, her throat was dry, her mind was a tangle of fear and hope and guilt. But she felt alive. More alive than she had ever felt in the Web-Chamber, more alive than she had felt in the keep, more alive than she had felt in her entire twenty-four years of life.

The Web was still humming. The vibration traveled through the stone, into her bones, into her blood. It was a warning. A threat. A promise.

Yssra would come. Kaelen would come. The guards would come.

Vespera opened her eyes and looked at Elian. He stirred, murmuring in his sleep, reaching for something that wasn’t there. She reached out and touched his hair, feeling the softness, the warmth, the reality of him.

"I’m here," she whispered. "I’m here."

The Web did not answer. It never did. It only hummed, patient and endless, waiting for the next prayer, the next plea, the next sacrifice.

Vespera smiled. It was a small, sad smile, but it was real. She was done waiting. She was done praying. She was done being silent.

She stood up, lifting Elian into her arms. He woke with a start, blinking up at her with wide, confused eyes.

"Ready?" she asked.

Elian nodded, burying his face in her shoulder. Vespera turned and walked into the darkness, her steps sure, her heart steady. The tunnel was ahead. The surface was waiting. And the silence beneath the web was finally, beautifully, gone.

The stone groaned beneath her feet, a sound like a sigh. The mountain was letting her go. Or perhaps, it was simply watching. Waiting.

Vespera did not care. She had a child to save. And she would not fail.

Not this time.

Not ever again.

A draft of cold air slithered through the tunnels, carrying the metallic tang of ozone and the dry scent of old blood, mingling with the discordant hum of the Web until the atmosphere itself felt charged and volatile. Dangerous. Free.

Vespera walked faster. The light was getting closer. The air was getting cooler. The scent of pine was stronger.

She was almost there.

Almost free.

Almost home.

She stepped into the light.

Chapter 11

The ventilation shafts breathed.

Vespera knew this the way she knew the hum of the Web—through vibration, through the faint thermal pulse that traveled up through the basalt and into her bare feet. The Lower Depths were a living thing, and the shafts were its lungs. Every third hour, the great stone flues drew air down from the upper caverns, pulling the stale, ozone-thick breath of the keep and pushing it through the tunnels until it reached the Acid Lake, where it mixed with sulfur and rose again in pale, poisonous clouds. The priestesses called it the Mountain's Breath. The guards called it nothing at all. Vespera called it the only reason she was still alive down here.

She stood at the junction of three corridors, her back pressed to the obsidian seam she'd found in the previous chapter—the one that hid the passage behind two inches of solid rock. The passage smelled of dust and dried leaves and something sharp and green, pine or cedar, the kind of scent that didn't belong in a place built entirely of stone. She had stepped through it once, just once, and felt sunlight on her face for the first time in twenty-four years. The light had been grey and distant, filtered through rock and root, but it had been light. Real light. Not the bioluminescent moss that clung to the keep's ceilings like a guilty secret.

She should have reported it. Every instinct drilled into her since age six told her she should have reported it. But she hadn't. She had marked the seam on her mental map, noted the thermal gradient that indicated a draft coming from beyond it, and walked away. The knowledge sat in her chest now like a second heartbeat.

The shafts breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

Something was wrong with the rhythm.

Vespera tilted her head. The vibration in her feet was still there, but it was thinner, stretched. The usual steady pulse had developed a stutter—a gap between inhalation and exhalation that shouldn't exist. She pressed her palm flat against the basalt wall. Cold. Damp. The thermal bloom she could feel through the stone was shifting, the warm patches cooling in a pattern that didn't match any natural draft cycle.

Someone had tampered with the flues.

She moved forward, her bare feet silent on the wet stone. The corridor opened into a wider cavern—the same junction where she'd walked past the western bend, where the wall smelled of wet rot and stale ozone. The Acid Lake's roar was a low, constant thrum here, vibrating in her molars. She could see it ahead, a dark curve at the cavern's edge, the surface bubbling with that guttural, impatient sound. Thirty paces above it, the ceiling vanished into shadow.

The first ventilation shaft opened into the cavern wall at head height—a wide stone aperture framed by carved spider legs, the sigil of House Vael rendered in rough, functional relief. Vespera approached it and peered inside.

The shaft was dark. Not the natural darkness of a stone tunnel—this was the artificial darkness of something blocking the passage. She raised her hand and felt for heat. Nothing. The thermal signature that should have been there, the warm breath of the upper caverns flowing downward, was gone. Instead, there was a cold void, like staring into a hole that led nowhere.

She knelt. At the base of the shaft, where the stone met the floor, something glinted. She reached for it with two fingers and pulled free a shard of black glass—obsidian, fractured, still sharp enough to draw blood. There were more shards scattered around it, a dozen at least, arranged in a loose circle like the petals of a flower. And in the center of the circle, a single thread of silk, woven tight and thick, tied around a stone bolt that had been forced out of its socket.

Sabotage. Deliberate. Methodical.

She traced the silk knot with her fingertip. House Thul weave. She knew the pattern—the double-loop with the counter-twist, the way the fibers locked together under tension. She'd seen it before, on the eastern threads that had screamed every night until they went silent three days ago. Lirien's work. It had to be.

"Lovely place you've got down here," a voice said from the shadows. "Very atmospheric. Very damp. I'm sure the Spider Queen would be delighted."

Vespera spun, her hand going to the dagger at her belt—the black glass blade she'd taken from the execution block. Lirien stepped out of the darkness between the two eastern corridors, her grey tunic of a House Thul apprentice hanging loose on her slight frame. Her red hair was bound back in a simple braid, and her green eyes caught the faint bioluminescence from the moss strips overhead and held it like coins.

"You're a long way from your own tunnels," Vespera said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended, the hesitation she hated rising in her throat like bile.

Lirien smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that didn't reach the eyes. "And you're a long way from your precious Web-Chamber. What's the matter, Vespera? Did the goddess tell you to come down here and play detective? Or did you come on your own, chasing ghosts and bad smells?"

"I came because the ventilation shafts are compromised."

"Ah." Lirien glanced up at the dark aperture in the wall, then back at Vespera, her head tilting to one side like a bird considering a worm. "Yes. I noticed that myself. Quite dramatic, really. All that careful engineering, undone by three knots of silk and a handful of glass. What do you think happens next? The air stops? The mountain chokes? Or do you think the priestesses upstairs will finally notice that their precious keep is slowly suffocating from the inside out?"

Vespera's grip tightened on her dagger. "Who else did you sabotage?"

Lirien's smile widened. "Why would I tell you that? Are you planning to arrest me? You, who couldn't even arrest your own conscience when you were feeding prisoners during the Prayer of Binding? You, who sat in that chamber for three hours and heard nothing but silence while the eastern threads screamed?"

The words landed like stones. Vespera felt them settle in her ribs, heavy and cold.

"What do you want?" she said.

"What I always want," Lirien said, her voice dropping, losing some of its mockery, gaining something sharper underneath. "I want you to admit it. I want you to stand in the middle of your perfect, suffocating keep and admit that your goddess is dead. That the Web is just silk and stone and the prayers are just noise. That every priestess who kneels on that obsidian platform is praying to a corpse."

"That's not—"

"Isn't it?" Lirien took a step closer. The bioluminescent moss cast her features in pale blue-green light, and for a moment she looked almost ethereal, almost holy. "Then why can't you silence them, Vespera? Why do the eastern threads still sing in your head every night? If your goddess is so powerful, if your faith is so perfect, why can't you shut them out?"

Vespera had no answer. The silence between them stretched, filled only by the Acid Lake's distant roar and the thin, stuttering breath of the compromised shafts.

"Because I hear them," Vespera said finally, "because they're people, Lirien, and they're dying, and I can't—"

"People die every day." Lirien's voice hardened. "That's the world. That's the mountain. That's what House Vael understands. You don't feed the dying. You don't answer their prayers. You let them go. You let the silence take them. That's duty. That's—"

"Duty isn't murder."

The word hung in the air between them, sharp and clean as a blade.

Lirien's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind her eyes. A calculation. A decision. "Duty is survival," she said quietly. "And you, Vespera, are a liability. That's why I did this. That's why I blocked the shafts. That's why—"

A sound interrupted her. Low at first, then building—a groan, deep and resonant, coming from everywhere at once. The stone beneath Vespera's feet shuddered. The thermal pulse she'd felt earlier spiked, then collapsed, replaced by a wave of cold so intense it made her teeth ache.

"The shafts," she said. "You blocked them, but you didn't account for the pressure differential—"

"—I accounted for everything," Lirien said, but her voice wavered. For the first time, she looked uncertain. "The flues are sealed. The air can't circulate. The temperature will drop, yes, but the upper chambers will compensate. It'll be fine."

"It won't be fine." Vespera was already moving, her hands pressing against the basalt walls, feeling for the thermal gradients, mapping the flow. The cold was spreading fast, radiating outward from the blocked shafts like frost on glass. She could feel it in her fingertips, in her ears, in the space behind her eyes. "The pressure's building behind the seals. When it breaks—"

"When it breaks what?"

"When it breaks the stone."

The groan came again, louder this time, accompanied by a crack that split the corridor in two. Vespera threw herself sideways as a section of the ceiling sheared away, tons of basalt crashing down in a cloud of dust and debris. She rolled, came up on one knee, and tasted grit in her mouth. Lirien was already running, her grey tunic flashing in the dim light as she disappeared into the eastern corridor.

Vespera scrambled to her feet. Dust choked the air, thick and suffocating, carrying the metallic tang of pulverized stone. She coughed, waved her hand in front of her face, and squinted through the haze. The junction was changing. The ceiling had dropped several paces, and the walls were groaning, shifting, settling into a new shape. The thermal bloom she could feel through the stone was collapsing—the warm patches dying one by one, replaced by a uniform, freezing cold.

The ventilation shafts weren't just blocked. They were collapsing. The entire lower network was failing, and with it, the mountain's ability to regulate its own temperature. Within minutes, the Lower Depths would become a freezer. Within hours, the stone itself would begin to fracture.

She needed to get out. Now.

Vespera turned toward the obsidian seam—the hidden passage she'd found in Chapter Ten, the one that led to the surface. She ran, her bare feet slipping on the wet stone, her lungs burning with dust and cold. The corridor twisted, narrowed, opened into the alcove where she'd stood before. There it was: the seam, two inches of obsidian set into the basalt, hiding the passage behind it.

She pressed her hands against the stone, searching for the mechanism she'd discovered last time—the hidden latch, the pressure plate that released the seam. Her fingers found it, cold and unyielding. She pushed. Nothing. She pushed harder. The stone didn't budge.

"Come on," she whispered. "Come on."

The seam didn't move. The mechanism was jammed, frozen shut by the cold, or perhaps damaged in the collapse. She hammered her fists against it, once, twice, three times, until her knuckles were raw and bleeding. The stone remained immovable.

Behind her, the groaning intensified. The ceiling dropped another foot. Dust rained down in thick sheets. The cold was worse now, biting through her robes, seeping into her bones, making her fingers numb.

She turned away from the seam and faced the corridor. The collapse was spreading, moving outward from the junction like a wave, consuming everything in its path. She could feel it in the vibrations traveling through the stone, in the way the air pressure shifted with each new crack. The Lower Depths were dying, and she was trapped in the corpse.

Vespera closed her eyes. She reached inward, drawing on Yssra’s teachings and the muscle memory of eighteen years, searching for the hum of the Web—the vibration that bound her to the goddess, to the silk threads, to the prayers. She pushed past the cold, past the fear, past the dust choking her lungs, and found it: a faint, distant pulse, like a heartbeat buried under ice.

The Web was still there. Still humming. Still listening.

But it wasn't answering.

She opened her eyes and pressed her palm flat against the basalt wall, right where the thermal gradient was shifting most rapidly. She could feel the cold spreading, the stone losing its warmth, the mountain's breath growing shallower. And beneath the cold, beneath the death of the ventilation network, she felt something else—a draft, faint but real, coming from somewhere deep in the stone. A current of air, moving against the collapse, moving toward her.

Not from the shafts. From below.

She followed it, her hand trailing along the wall, feeling the stone grow warmer as she moved. The corridor curved, dipped, opened into a smaller tunnel that branched off from the main junction. The air here was different—thicker, warmer, carrying the faint scent of sulfur and something else, something organic and ancient. The Acid Lake. She was closer to it than she'd realized.

Vespera moved forward, her senses sharpening, her body adjusting to the cold. She could feel the heat of the lake ahead, a broad, radiating warmth that spread through the stone like a living thing. And near its edge, where the basalt gave way to the corrosive pool, she found what she was looking for: a narrow fissure in the rock, barely wide enough to squeeze through, exhaling warm, sulfurous air.

A natural vent. A crack in the mountain that predated the keep, predating the Web, predating House Vael itself. It led down, toward the lake, toward the heat.

She hesitated. The fissure was narrow, claustrophobic, and it sloped downward into darkness. But it was warm. And it was open. And it was the only option she had left.

Vespera took a breath, ducked her head, and crawled into the fissure.

The stone closed around her, tight and hot and real. The air tasted of sulfur and iron and something older than either. She moved forward on hands and knees, her robes scraping against the rock, her body pressed into the narrow passage, her face inches from the basalt floor. Behind her, the collapse continued, the groans muffled but persistent, the cold chasing her through the tunnel like a predator.

Ahead, the fissure opened into a larger cavern, and the heat hit her like a wall. The Acid Lake stretched before her, vast and bubbling, its surface shimmering with that low, guttural roar that vibrated in her teeth. Thirty paces across, maybe more, the edges lost in shadow and steam. The ceiling was higher here, thirty paces at least, lost in the darkness above.

She stood, trembling, her body still shaking from the cold, her hands raw and bleeding. The warmth of the lake seeped into her skin, thawing the frost that had crept into her joints, restoring feeling to her fingers. She looked around. The cavern was vast, its walls carved by centuries of acidic spray, its floor a mosaic of smooth basalt and corroded rock. And on the far side, half-hidden behind a curtain of steam, she saw another opening—a passage, wide and dark, leading deeper into the mountain.

Not up. Not toward the surface. But down.

Vespera stared at it. The hidden passage she'd found in Chapter Ten had led upward, toward light and air and a world she'd only glimpsed once. This one led downward, into the heart of the mountain, toward the Acid Lake and whatever lay beyond it.

She couldn’t tell what waited in the dark. Was it a trap or an escape, a prison or a path? But she knew one thing: the collapse was still happening behind her, the cold was still chasing, and the Web was still silent.

She stepped forward.

The steam parted, dissolving into the heavy dark that received her without hesitation. Vespera walked into the deep, alone, feeling the heat of the lake press against her back while the hum of the Web lingered faintly, stubbornly alive in her bones.

Chapter 12

The silence broke with a sound like tearing silk.

It was not a loud noise, not at first. It was a high, thin shriek that vibrated through the basalt floor and into the soles of Vespera’s bare feet, traveling up her shins to settle in the hollow of her knees. She was standing in the central corridor of the lower keep, reviewing the thermal maps of the western perimeter with Kaelen, when the stone screamed.

Kaelen’s hand went to the hilt of his dagger before the sound had even finished echoing. His grey eyes snapped to the ceiling, then to the dark archway leading to the Acid Lake.

“Report,” As said. His voice was flat, stripped of panic. He did not shout. He never shouted.

Kaelen said nothing. Vespera did not answer immediately. She was listening to the Web.

Usually, the Web was a chorus—a complex, layered hum of thousands of threads, each one a sensor, a nerve ending, a prayer. Even in the silence of the lower depths, there was a background static, the friction of stone against stone, the drip of water, the distant thrum of the ventilation shafts. But now, the Web was wrong.

The eastern threads were not just silent. They were gone.

“Thermal spike,” Vespera whispered. She pointed to the map etched into the obsidian table between them. “Sector four. Near the ventilation aperture.”

Kaelen leaned over the map. His silver hair fell into his eyes, but he did not brush it aside. “Aperture? That’s a dead end. Just rock.”

“No.” Vespera pressed her palm flat against the cold stone of the table. She closed her eyes and reached out with her senses, extending her awareness through the silk threads that wove through the walls, through the floor, through the very bones of the mountain. “The aperture isn’t a dead end. It’s a mouth.”

She felt it then—a violation. A tear in the delicate web of sensors she had spent months calibrating. Someone had cut the threads. Not with a blade—blade cuts were clean, sharp, instantaneous. This was a burn. A chemical dissolution. The silk had melted, fusing into a useless, sticky residue that no longer conducted the hum.

“Sabotage,” Kaelen said. The word was a stone dropped into a well.

“Worse,” Vespera said. “Distraction.”

Because while she was feeling the burn in the east, she felt something else in the west. A shadow. A cold spot in the thermal bloom that shouldn’t exist. The Lower Depths were hot. They were always hot. The geothermal vents kept the temperature near a hundred degrees, a necessary warmth for the fungi farms and the heat-sensitive silk worms. But there, near the hidden passage she had discovered three nights ago—the one that smelled of pine and dried leaves—there was a patch of cold so profound it felt like a hole in the world.

“Guards,” Kaelen barked into the comm-stone at his belt. “Seal the western archway. Send two squads to the ventilation shaft. Now.”

He looked at Vespera. “How many?”

“I don’t know. But they’re moving fast.”

As if on cue, the lights died.

Not all of them. Just the ones in the western corridor. The bioluminescent moss strips that lined the walls flickered and went dark, plunging that section of the keep into absolute blackness. Then the ones in the central hall dimmed, their glow shifting from a steady white to a sickly, pulsing red.

“Power surge,” Kaelen said, drawing his dagger. The steel sang as it left the sheath. “They’ve hit the generators.”

“No,” Vespera said, her blood turning to ice. “They’ve hit the Web.”

The Web was powered by the resonance of the silk. If the threads were cut, the dampeners failed. If the dampeners failed, the feedback loop would overload the moss-lights. It was a crude attack, a sledgehammer to a symphony, but it was effective. It blinded them. It deafened them.

And then the screaming started.

It came from the eastern corridor, where the ventilation shafts were. Not the scream of a person, but the scream of the mountain. The stone flues were vibrating so violently that the basalt was cracking. Dust rained down from the ceiling, coating Vespera’s black robes in a fine grey powder.

“They’re breaching the shafts,” Vespera said. “If they get into the main ducts, they’ll flood the lower levels with smoke. Or gas.”

“House Thul,” Kaelen said. He didn’t ask. He knew. Everyone knew Thul was restless. Everyone knew they wanted the Acid Lake. But an open attack? Here? In the heart of Vael’s territory? It was suicide. Unless…

Unless they weren’t trying to take the lake.

Unless they were trying to draw them out.

“Form up,” Kaelen ordered. He moved to the head of the corridor, his back to the wall, his dagger held low and ready. “Priestesses, fall in behind me. Guards, flank left. We hold the archway until reinforcements arrive.”

Vespera didn’t move. She was staring at the dark patch in the west. The cold spot.

“Vespera!” Kaelen’s voice was sharp, cutting through the noise. “Move!”

“No,” she said. “Wait.”

“What are you—”

“The cold spot. It’s not a draft. It’s a entrance.”

Before Kaelen could argue, the stone behind the cold spot exploded.

It wasn’t an explosion of fire, but of force. A concussive blast that threw Vespera backward. She hit the floor hard, the breath knocked out of her, her ears ringing with a high-pitched whine. Dust and debris filled the air, choking and thick. She coughed, rolling onto her side, her hands instinctively reaching for the silk threads in the wall to steady herself.

But the threads were dead. Silent. Useless.

Through the haze, she saw them.

Figures emerging from the shattered wall. They wore no armor. Just dark, form-fitting suits of woven leather, matte black to absorb the light. Their faces were covered by masks of polished obsidian, featureless except for slits for eyes that glowed with a faint, green luminescence. Infrared. They could see in the dark.

House Thul assassins.

There were six of them. Maybe eight. They moved with a fluid, predatory grace, spreading out in a semi-circle, their weapons drawn. Not swords. Blades of curved glass, jagged and serrated, designed to tear rather than cut.

Kaelen was already engaging. He moved like a storm, his dagger a blur of silver. He took the first assassin in the shoulder, spinning him around and driving his knee into the man’s back. The assassin crumpled, but the other five were already upon them.

Vespera scrambled to her feet, her mind racing. She couldn’t fight. She was a priestess, not a soldier. Her training was in meditation, in prayer, in the subtle art of manipulation. She had never held a blade in combat.

But she had the Web.

Even if the threads were cut, the resonance remained. She could feel the echo of the silk, the ghost of the hum. It was like hearing a song in a empty room. Faint, but present.

She closed her eyes and reached out.

Listen, she thought. Listen to me.

She pushed her will into the stone, into the remaining intact threads in the central corridor. She didn’t try to control them. She just… amplified them. She took the faint vibration of the mountain’s breath and twisted it, focusing it into a single, sharp point.

A sonic pulse.

It hit the assassins like a physical blow. Three of them staggered, clutching their ears. The green glow in their masks flickered.

Kaelen seized the opportunity. He lunged, taking down a second attacker with a brutal sweep of his leg. “Vespera! Do it again!”

She tried. But the effort was immense. It felt like trying to lift a boulder with her mind. Sweat beaded on her forehead, stinging her eyes. The assassins recovered quickly, shaking off the disorientation. One of them—taller than the rest, his mask etched with the silver sigil of a Thul captain—raised a hand.

A whip.

It uncoiled from his wrist, a long, serpentine lash of braided steel and silk. The tip glowed red-hot.

Vespera recognized the weapon. It was a Judgment Whip. Used for discipline. For punishment. Rarely for war.

The captain flicked his wrist. The whip cracked, a sound like thunder in the confined space. It struck the wall beside Kaelen’s head, showering him in sparks and molten stone.

Kaelen dove backward, rolling behind a pillar. “Fall back!” he yelled. “To the Inner Sanctum! Seal the doors!”

The retreat was chaotic. The priestesses scattered, their formations broken, their prayers forgotten. The guards fought a rearguard action, holding the line just long enough for the civilians to escape. Vespera ran with them, her steps frantic, her breath ragged with dust.

Behind her, the assassins pursued. Not rushing. Not shouting. Just moving, steady and relentless, like water filling a cup.

They reached the heavy obsidian doors of the Inner Sanctum. Kaelen was already there, slamming the locking mechanism home. Two guards threw their weight against the bars, reinforcing the seal.

“Hold it,” Kaelen panted. “Just hold it.”

Vespera leaned against the cold stone, her chest heaving. She looked back down the corridor. The red lights were flickering wildly now, casting long, distorted shadows. The assassins had stopped at the mouth of the hall. They weren’t coming further.

They were waiting.

“They’re not trying to breach the Sanctum,” Vespera realized, a cold dread settling in her stomach. “They’re waiting for us to come out.”

Kaelen looked at her, his face pale in the dim light. “Then we wait.”

But they didn’t wait long. Because from the east, the screaming stopped. And in its place, a new sound began.

A chant.

Low, rhythmic, and terrifyingly synchronized. It came from the ventilation shafts, echoing through the stone like a drumbeat. The assassins weren’t just attacking. They were performing a ritual.

And Vespera knew, with a certainty that froze her blood, that they weren’t chanting to their gods.

They were chanting to wake hers.

The stone beneath her feet began to vibrate. Not the gentle hum of the Web, but a deep, guttural thrum that shook her teeth. The Obsidian Altar in the center of the Sanctum was responding. It was waking up.

Vespera looked at Kaelen. “We have to stop them. If they complete the chant, the Altar will resonate. It’ll bring everything in the mountain down on top of us.”

Kaelen’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m going to find out.”

She pushed off the wall.

“Vespera, no!” Kaelen grabbed her arm. “You’re not ready. You’re not equipped.”

“I don’t have a choice,” she said, pulling away. “You hold the door. I’ll go to the shafts.”

“You’ll be killed.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But if I don’t try, we all die.”

She turned and ran. Not away from the danger, but toward it. Back down the corridor, past the flickering lights, past the bodies of the fallen guards, into the smoke and the dark.

The chant grew louder as she approached the eastern wing. The air was thick with sulfur and something else—something sharp and metallic, like blood and ozone mixed together. Her hands shook. Her knees felt weak. But she kept moving.

She reached the ventilation aperture. The stone was cracked, shards of basalt scattered across the floor. Through the gap, she could see them.

Six assassins, standing in a circle around the main duct. Their masks were off. Their faces were bare, their eyes closed, their mouths moving in unison. The tall captain stood in the center, his whip coiled at his feet, his hands raised in a gesture of invocation.

Vespera hid behind a pillar, her breath shallow. She couldn’t fight six of them. Not like this. Not without the Web.

But she didn’t need to fight them. She just needed to break their concentration.

She reached out with her mind, searching for a thread, any thread, that was still connected to the Altar. She found one. Faint, frayed, but intact. A single strand of silk, vibrating with the residual energy of the prayer she had heard in Chapter One. The prayer of the dying child.

She grabbed it. And she pulled.

Not hard. Just enough to create a dissonance. A wrong note in the perfect harmony of the chant.

The assassins faltered. One of them opened his eyes, looking around in confusion. The captain’s eyes snapped open. He looked directly at Vespera’s hiding spot.

He knew.

He raised a hand. Not to strike. To signal.

The other assassins turned. Their green-eyed masks glowed in the dark. They didn’t run. They didn’t attack.

They smiled.

And then the floor beneath Vespera gave way.

She fell into the darkness, screaming, as the stone collapsed around her, swallowing her whole. The last thing she heard was the chant, rising in triumph, echoing through the void.

And then, silence.

Chapter 13

The fall took longer than it should have.

Vespera hit stone hard enough to crack her left elbow and knock the breath from her lungs in a rush that tasted of copper and dust. She rolled instinctively, shoulders curling inward, palms slapping against basalt to absorb the second impact. The darkness swallowed her completely—no light, no landmarks, just the shock of cold stone against her cheek and the ringing in her ears that sounded nothing like the Web.

Something cracked overhead. Dust rained down in sheets, coating her tongue, filling her nose. Vespera lay still and counted her breaths the way Yssra had drilled her during the first year of training: one, two, three, hold for four, release slow. The stone beneath her was warm. Not the damp chill of the upper corridors—actual heat, radiating from below, the same geothermal pulse she had felt through the ventilation shafts in Chapter 11. The Lower Depths were breathing, and right now, she was inside its lungs.

She pushed herself up. Her elbow screamed. She ignored it.

The tunnel was narrow—maybe eight paces wide—and sloped downward at a steep angle that made her knees ache before she'd taken ten steps. Basalt walls rose on either side, slick with condensation, and the air was thick enough to chew. The smell hit her next: sulfur, yes, but underneath it something organic and wrong, like meat left in the sun too long. Acid Lake. She was closer than she wanted to be.

Vespera pressed her palm flat against the wall and closed her eyes.

Heat bloomed beneath her fingers—not the gentle warmth of the Inner Sanctum, but a jagged, pulsing heat that shifted and pulsed like something alive. She traced it with her fingertips, mapping the thermal signature the way she had mapped every tunnel in the Lower Depths during months of patrol. The basalt here was fractured. Cracks spidered outward from a central point, maybe twenty paces ahead, and through those cracks she could feel the hot breath of the mountain leaking upward. A vent. A geothermal fissure. And around it—

A heat signature. Small. Human-shaped. Flickering.

Vespera's eyes opened. She couldn't see it, not in this darkness, but she could feel it—a body heat signature, maybe five paces from the vent, pulsing slowly. Someone was down here. Trapped. Or dying. Or both.

The chanting had stopped. That was the first thing she noticed. The triumphant voices of the House Thul assassins, rising through the void as she fell—gone. Replaced by the groan of shifting stone and the hiss of steam. Whatever had brought them down, it had taken the assassins with it. Or scattered them. Either way, she was alone.

Good. Better alone than in their company.

She started walking.

The tunnel twisted. Vespera kept her hands out at shoulder height, fingers spread, reading the walls with the tactile precision of a blind woman tracing braille. The stone changed texture beneath her touch—from smooth, polished basalt to rough, fractured rock, then to something crumbly and unstable that shed pebbles when she brushed against it. She was moving through the wreckage of the collapse. The floor beneath her boots was uneven, littered with debris, and every step required careful placement. She moved slowly. Carefully. Kaelen had drilled this into her during combat drills, though he would never admit he’d taught her anything. Move like you expect the ground to betray you, he’d said. Because it will.

It was betraying her now.

A section of ceiling gave way behind her with a sound like thunder. Vespera spun, throwing herself sideways against the wall as tons of rock crashed into the tunnel she had occupied three seconds ago. Dust exploded outward, blinding and choking. She pressed her face into the crook of her arm and breathed through the fabric of her sleeve, feeling the vibration travel through the stone and into her bones. The collapse was still happening. The tunnel was still coming down.

She waited. Ten breaths. Twenty. The dust settled enough that she could taste it less, smell it less, and when she lifted her face, the heat map in her mind was clearer. The vent was closer now—maybe fifteen paces. The small heat signature was still there, still flickering, but weaker. Dimming.

Vespera moved faster.

She rounded a bend and saw it—or rather, felt it. The geothermal vent was a fissure in the far wall, maybe three paces tall, exhaling a steady stream of superheated air that made the temperature spike twenty degrees in a single step. Steam poured from the crack, curling through the tunnel like ghost fingers. And beside it, curled against the basalt with her knees drawn to her chest, was the heat signature.

"I'm here," Vespera said softly. Her voice sounded wrong in the confined space—too loud, too human. Words were Kaelen's domain, not hers. She clamped her mouth shut and pressed two fingers against the girl's throat, feeling the frantic flutter beneath cold skin. "I've got you."

Vespera dropped to her knees beside her and reached out. Her fingers found cold skin, damp with sweat, and a pulse that was too fast, too shallow. The girl's eyes were open but unseeing, pupils blown wide, and her lips moved in silent syllables that Vespera couldn't parse. Not a prayer. Not a plea. Something else. Something broken.

The girl's eyes focused. Just for a moment. Green irises, wide and terrified, locking onto Vespera's face with an intensity that made her chest tighten. Then the girl's gaze drifted past her, toward the vent, toward the darkness beyond, and her breathing hitched.

Behind them, the tunnel groaned.

Vespera felt it through the stone—a deep, resonant vibration that traveled up through her knees and into her spine. The collapse wasn't stopping. It was accelerating. The geothermal vent was part of something bigger, a network of fissures spreading through the Lower Depths like cracks in glass, and whatever had triggered the initial collapse was still propagating. She could feel the heat shifting, the thermal patterns rearranging, the mountain settling into a new shape.

And in that new shape, there were new passages. New openings. And one of them—

Vespera's hand found the wall beside the vent and felt it: a seam. Smooth, clean, unnatural in a place where everything was fractured and broken. Two inches of obsidian, just like the one she had discovered in Chapter 10, separating this tunnel from whatever lay beyond. But this seam was different. Hotter. The stone around it was warm to the touch, and through the obsidian she could feel a draft—cool, fresh air moving in the opposite direction of the sulfurous stagnation that filled the Lower Depths.

Surface air.

Her heart kicked against her ribs. The hidden passage. It extended farther than she had realized, branching through the geothermal network, threading through the fractures that the collapse had opened. If she could reach it—if she could find the entrance—

The tunnel shook again. Harder this time. A section of ceiling collapsed ahead, blocking the path forward. Dust and debris rained down, and Vespera pulled the girl closer, shielding her with her own body as rocks clattered against her back and shoulders. The girl whimpered. Vespera held her tighter.

"Listen to me," she said, her voice low and urgent. "We're going to move. Can you stand?"

The girl shook her head. Her lips were blue. Hypothermia. The heat from the vent wasn't enough to counteract the shock of the collapse, the trauma of the fall, the exhaustion of whatever had happened before Vespera found her. Vespera's mind raced. She couldn't carry the girl through a collapsing tunnel. She couldn't leave her. There was no third option.

Unless.

Vespera pressed her palm flat against the obsidian seam and pushed. It didn't budge. Locked from the other side, or sealed by the collapse. She pressed harder, feeling the heat of the vent searing her skin, and whispered against the stone: "Please."

The seam didn't move. But something else did.

The Web hummed.

Not the full, resonant chord of the Web-Chamber—the vast, harmonic vibration that filled every thread at once. This was smaller. Narrower. A single thread, plucked and trembling, resonating through the stone at a frequency that made Vespera's teeth ache. The eastern threads. Still active. Still singing. And they were singing to her.

Vespera closed her eyes and let the vibration guide her. The hum traveled through the basalt, through the obsidian seam, into her palm and up her arm and into the base of her skull, where it split into a thousand tiny needles of awareness. She could feel the tunnel behind her—the collapse, the heat, the dying girl. She could feel the tunnel ahead—the cool draft, the unknown, the surface. And she could feel the seam between them, thin as a spider's silk, vibrating at the frequency of her own heartbeat.

The Web was showing her the way.

Vespera slammed her palms flat against the cold stone and drove her weight forward. The seam held fast. The rock shuddered beneath her touch. She gasped for air. And then—

A crack. Thin, precise, running the length of the two-inch obsidian band. More cracks followed, branching outward like lightning, and the seam split down the middle with a sound like a sigh. Cool air rushed in, washing over Vespera's face, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth and something green and alive that she couldn't name.

Surface air.

Vespera didn't hesitate. She grabbed the girl under the arms and dragged her through the opening, feeling the edges of the obsidian tear at her palms and shoulders, scraping skin raw, until they tumbled onto cool, solid ground on the other side. The tunnel behind them collapsed with a sound like the world ending. Stone crashed down, sealing the fissure, cutting off the heat, the steam, the dying breath of the Lower Depths.

Vespera lay on her back, gasping, her hands burning, her body shaking, and stared up at a ceiling that was not stone. It was dark. Vast. And above it—through gaps in the rock, through cracks that opened to the sky—she could see stars.

Real stars. Not the bioluminescent glow of cave moss. Real stars, cold and distant and impossibly far away, and the space between them was black in a way that the underground had never been black. The air was cold. So cold it burned her lungs. But it was clean. It smelled of pine and snow and something vast and open that had no name in the language of the deep.

The girl was breathing. Shallow, ragged breaths, but breathing. Vespera pulled her close, wrapping her black priestess robes around the girl's shivering frame, and felt the warmth of her small body seep into Vespera's own. The heat transfer was minimal but real. A trade. One life for another, measured in degrees and pulses and the quiet exchange of breath.

Above them, the stars wheeled slowly through the cracks in the mountain, indifferent and beautiful and utterly unconcerned with the fate of House Vael or House Thul or the prayers that screamed through the dark. Vespera watched them for a long time, her cheek pressed against the girl's hair, and thought about the eastern threads, still singing, still reaching, still demanding answers that no one in the Upper Keep was willing to give.

She had found the passage. She had found the surface. And she had found something else, something she couldn't name yet, sitting in the cold dark beneath a sky that stretched forever.

The girl's breathing evened out. Sleep, or unconsciousness, or both. Vespera held her and listened to the mountain breathe around them, feeling the heat of the Lower Depths fading behind the sealed stone, feeling the cold of the surface pressing in from above, and wondering, for the first time in her life, what it meant to choose neither side.

The wind picked up. It carried the scent of pine deeper into the crack, mixing with the sulfurous residue still clinging to Vespera's robes, creating a strange, impossible perfume that belonged to neither world. Somewhere far below, the geothermal vents continued their slow, ancient exhalation. Somewhere far above, the stars continued their slow, indifferent rotation. And in the space between, Vespera held a dying girl and waited for morning that would never come.

The Web hummed one last time. A single, sharp note. Then silence.

The cold did not ask permission; it simply arrived, seeping through her robes until the shivering stopped and the silence became absolute.

Chapter 14

The cold was a living thing. It pressed against Vespera’s robes like a weight, heavy and insistent, working its way through the layers of fabric until it settled deep within her chest. She had not felt cold like this since she was six years old, standing on the temple stairs during the Prayer of Binding, forced to remain motionless for three hours while the mountain's heat rose around her and the other priestesses shivered in their thin cotton tunics. Back then, cold was a punishment. Back then, she had understood it as discipline.

Now it was something else. Now it was the sky.

Vespera shifted her weight, wincing as her cracked elbow sent a spike of pain through her forearm. The girl stirred against her, a small, involuntary movement, and Vespera tightened her grip instinctively. The girl's skin was paper-thin beneath her palms, cool but not cold—not yet. The fever was still burning through her, a slow, steady heat that Vespera could feel radiating from the child's small body even as the mountain air tried to steal it away.

She was maybe eight years old. Maybe younger. Her clothes were torn, caked with dirt and something darker that Vespera didn't want to identify. Her green eyes had been the first thing Vespera had noticed in the dark—wide, terrified, locked onto hers with an intensity that felt like recognition, like the girl had been waiting for her, knew she was coming, had been calling through the stone for weeks.

The prayer. The voice from Chapter One. The small hand reaching up from the dark.

The prayer. The voice from the beginning. The small hand reaching up from the dark.

Vespera had spent eighteen years believing it.

The girl whimpered. A small sound, barely audible over the wind, but it struck Vespera like a physical blow. She pulled the girl closer, pressing her cheek against the top of the child's head, feeling the damp hair stick to her skin. The girl's breathing was shallow, irregular, each inhalation a struggle against something that wanted her lungs to stop working entirely.

"Stay with me," Vespera whispered. Her voice cracked. She hadn't spoken aloud in days — not since the Web-Chamber, not since the last prayer she'd sat in silence and let die. The priestesses were taught to listen, to act only when the threads demanded it, to withhold comfort the way a surgeon withholds sympathy. But her arms were already closing around the girl, her cheek pressed to damp hair, and the words had slipped past every rule she'd memorized, past every year of training, raw and useless and the only thing she had left.

The wind howled. It came from somewhere above the crack in the mountain, a low, mournful sound that rolled through the opening like a wave, carrying with it the scent of pine and snow and something else—something sharp and metallic that made Vespera's stomach turn. Smoke. Distant smoke. From the keep. From the Lower Depths.

Her heart skipped. She pushed herself upright, ignoring the protest of her injured arm, and leaned toward the crack, squinting into the darkness. Through the gaps in the rock, she could see the sky—vast, black, impossible—and below it, faint orange smudges on the horizon. Fire. The keep was burning. Or the Lower Depths were. Or both.

The collapse. It had to be connected. The House Thul assassins had been in the tunnels when she fell. They had been chanting. Whatever they were doing, whatever sabotage Lirien had planted in the ventilation shafts, it had triggered the cascade. The mountain was coming down around them, and somewhere beneath the rubble, House Vael was dying.

Kaelen. Yssra. The other priestesses. The fifty women who had stood in formation during the Prayer of Binding, their faces turned toward the altar, their lips moving in silent prayer. Had they survived? Had they escaped? Or were they buried alive beneath tons of basalt, their prayers unanswered, their goddess silent?

Vespera closed her eyes. The Web hummed in her memory—a single, sharp note, then silence. That was all she had gotten. No guidance. No blessing. No instruction. Just silence, the way the goddess always spoke when it mattered most.

The girl coughed. A wet, rattling sound that filled the space between them like smoke. Vespera turned back to her, pulling the girl onto her lap, cradling her like she might have been held as a child herself, if Vespera had ever been held. She pressed her palm against the girl's forehead. Fever. Higher than before. The heat was climbing, and with it, something else—something Vespera recognized from the training sessions in the Inner Sanctum, from the bodies brought up from the acid lake level, pale and cold and already gone.

Death was coming. Slowly. Inevitably. The way it always came for the people who weren't worth saving.

"No," Vespera said aloud. The word felt strange in the open air, too large for the space around her, bouncing off the rock walls and returning to her distorted and hollow. "No. Not you. Not again."

She had already failed once. Once was enough. She had sat in the Web-Chamber and listened to the eastern threads screaming and done nothing. She had let the prayer go unanswered. She had chosen duty over mercy and called it obedience, called it faith, called it the will of the Spider Queen. And the girl had died anyway. Or nearly died. Or—

Vespera's hands moved before her mind could stop them. She pressed two fingers against the girl's throat, feeling for a pulse, and found it—weak, thready, but there. Alive. Still alive. And as long as she was alive, Vespera owed her something. Something she had denied her in the Web-Chamber. Something she couldn't deny now.

She needed water. Warmth. Something to keep the fever from spiking higher. The surface was freezing, and the crack they'd emerged through was barely wide enough for a child to squeeze through, and the wind was picking up, carrying with it the first flakes of snow that settled on Vespera's hair and the girl's eyelashes like tiny, cold stars.

She had to move.

Vespera stood, lifting the girl carefully into her arms. The child was lighter than she expected, almost weightless, as though her body had already begun the process of letting go. Vespera adjusted her grip, tucking the girl against her chest beneath her robes, and turned toward the crack in the mountain. The opening was narrow—maybe two paces wide—and lined with loose rock that threatened to collapse at any moment. She had squeezed through it backwards in Chapter Ten, guided by the hum of the Web and the pull of whatever force had brought her here. Now she had to go the other way. With a child. With an injured arm. In the dark.

She stepped into the crack.

The stone pressed in on her from all sides, cold and unyielding, scraping against her shoulders and hips as she forced her way through. The girl whimpered again, a small, broken sound that made Vespera's throat tighten. She pressed her lips to the top of the child's head and pushed harder, feeling the rock shift beneath her hands, feeling the instability of the passage, feeling the mountain holding its breath.

For a moment, she thought it would close. Thought the collapse would finish what it had started, sealing them in the dark alongside the rest of the dead. But the passage held. It groaned, it shifted, it shed pebbles and dust and chunks of basalt that clattered against the walls, but it held. And when Vespera finally emerged on the other side, gasping and shaking and covered in stone dust, she found herself in a narrow canyon carved by centuries of water and ice, the walls rising steeply on either side, the sky visible above as a thin, blue-grey ribbon.

Snow was falling now. Not the heavy, driving kind that buried entire forests, but a light, persistent drizzle of ice crystals that settled on everything they touched. The ground was hard beneath her feet, packed with frost and ice, and the air was so cold that every breath felt like swallowing glass. Vespera wrapped her robes tighter around the girl and began to walk.

She didn’t know where she was going. She couldn’t see how far the surface stretched, or what lay beyond the mountains, or whether there were people out there who would help or harm or simply look at her and see something monstrous. The priestesses of House Vael were not meant for the surface. They were creatures of the deep, adapted to heat and darkness and the hum of the Web. The open sky felt too vast, the cold too brutal, the light too harsh. Vespera felt exposed in a way she never had underground, where the stone protected her from everything, where the darkness was a blanket and the silence was a shield.

Here, there was nowhere to hide.

The canyon wound northward, following the contour of the mountain, and Vespera followed it blindly, trusting her feet to find the path, trusting her body to remember the way. She had never been above ground. Never seen the sky. Never felt anything but the warm, humid breath of the Lower Depths on her skin. Everything was new. Everything was terrifying. Everything was—

"You came," the girl whispered. Her voice was barely audible, a thread of sound in the vast silence, but Vespera felt it before she heard it — a faint tremor in the air, a vibration that traveled through her ribs and settled in her teeth, the same quiet resonance that woke her in the Web-Chamber at dawn.

"You came," the girl breathed. It was less a sound than a shift in the air, a faint tremor that bypassed Vespera’s ears and registered directly in her marrow, resonating with the same low hum as the Web.

"I came," Vespera said. Her own voice sounded foreign, too loud, too human. She hadn't spoken in days, and the words felt rough in her throat, like stones grinding together.

The girl's lips moved. Formed a word that Vespera couldn't quite catch. Something like "mother"? Or "please"? Or "sorry"? She couldn't tell. The fever was stealing her clarity, taking pieces of her mind one by one, and Vespera could feel it happening, could feel the girl slipping away even as she clung to her with that desperate, death-strength grip.

"Don't sleep," Vespera said. "Please. Don't sleep."

The girl's eyes fluttered. Closed. Opened again. And then she spoke, clear and soft and impossibly sure:

"I was so cold."

The words hit Vespera like a physical blow. She had said the same thing, once, years ago, in the Web-Chamber, when the silence became too heavy to bear and the prayers became too loud to ignore. I was so cold. Not the temperature. The absence. The void. The feeling of reaching out into the dark and finding nothing waiting on the other side.

Vespera pulled the girl closer. Pressed her against her chest. Felt the fever heat through the layers of fabric. Felt the pulse beneath her fingers, steady but slow, like a drum marching toward an unknown destination.

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And for the first time in her life, Vespera meant it. Not as a priestess. Not as a servant of the Spider Queen. As a person. As someone who had chosen, deliberately and irrevocably, to care about another human being more than she cared about duty, more than she cared about obedience, more than she cared about the goddess who had never once spoken her name.

The wind howled. The snow fell harder. And somewhere in the distance, faint but unmistakable, Vespera heard the sound of voices. Human voices. Speaking in a language she didn't recognize, calling out into the dark with the same desperation that had driven her through the stone, the same hunger for connection that had made her stop feeding the prisoner in Chapter Seven, the same refusal to look away that had made her drag a dying child through a collapsing tunnel.

She couldn't see them yet. Couldn't tell if they were friends or enemies, rescuers or hunters. But they were there. And they were calling.

Vespera hesitated. Her house was burning behind her. Her duty lay in the dark, beneath the stone, where the Web hummed and the priestesses prayed and the Spider Queen waited. But the girl was warm against her chest, breathing steadily now, her grip loosening just slightly, her fever breaking. And the voices were closer.

She chose.

Vespera turned toward the sound and walked into the snow, carrying the child toward the strangers in the dark, leaving the mountain and the Web and everything she had ever known behind her in the cold, silent dark.

Behind her, the crack in the mountain held. Sealed. Final. The passage was closed. There was no going back.

Ahead, the voices grew louder. She pushed forward, her cracked elbow throbbing in time with the heavy snow clinging to her robes, her heart beating a rhythm that belonged to no goddess, no house, no web. Just her. Just the girl. Just the choice she had made and would make again, if she had to.

The snow fell. The wind blew. And somewhere in the vast, indifferent sky, the stars continued their slow, silent rotation, unconcerned with the fate of mortals who chose mercy over duty.

Vespera didn't look back.

Chapter 15

The air was wrong.

That was the first thing Vespera noticed when she woke. It did not smell of ozone, or dried blood, or the sulfurous rot of the Acid Lake. It smelled of wet dirt and pine needles and something sharp and green that made her nose itch. It smelled of life. It smelled of things growing and dying and growing again in a cycle that had nothing to do with the Spider Queen’s static, eternal hunger.

Vespera lay on her back, staring up at a canopy of leaves so thick they filtered the sunlight into dappled patches of gold and green across her face. She waited for the stone ceiling to press down. She waited for the cold, damp weight of the mountain to crush her lungs. She waited for the silence of the Web to wrap around her throat like a silken noose.

But there was only the wind.

It rustled through the branches above, a soft, dry whispering that sounded nothing like the hum of silk. It sounded like conversation. Like laughter. Vespera closed her eyes and let the warmth of the sun soak into her skin, feeling the heat penetrate the layers of her black priestess robes—the same robes she had worn in the Inner Sanctum, now stained with mud and snow and the grime of a tunnel she had crawled through with a cracked elbow and a broken spirit.

She sat up slowly. Her body protested. Every muscle ached from the fall, from the climb, from the days of running blind through the dark. Her left elbow throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pain, a constant reminder of the stone that had caught her. But she was alive. She was above ground.

And she was alone.

The girl was gone.

Vespera scanned the clearing, her heart hammering against her ribs. The small figure she had carried through the snow, the child with the fever and the green eyes, was nowhere to be seen. There were footprints in the soft earth—small, barefoot prints leading toward a dense thicket of ferns—but no sign of the child herself. Had she wandered off? Had she died in the night, her small body left to the mercy of the forest floor?

Vespera stood, her legs trembling beneath her. She took a step forward, then another, moving toward the footprints with a desperation that felt dangerously close to panic. She called out, her voice cracking, unused to speaking above a whisper.

"Little one?"

No answer. Only the wind in the trees.

She followed the tracks for what felt like hours, though the sun barely moved in the sky. The forest was dense, the undergrowth thick with brambles and tangled roots that snagged at her robes. She tore them away, her fingers bleeding, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She told herself she was looking for the child. She told herself she needed to ensure the girl was safe before she allowed herself to rest, to eat, to think about what she had done and what she had lost.

But deep down, in the quiet corner of her mind where she usually listened for the Web, she knew the truth. She was looking for a reason to keep moving. If she stopped, she would have to face the reality of her situation. She was an exile. A traitor. A woman who had chosen mercy over duty and paid the price.

The footprints ended at the edge of a stream. The water was clear and cold, rushing over smooth stones with a cheerful babble that sounded mocking to Vespera’s ears. She knelt by the bank, dipping her hands into the water to wash the blood from her fingers. The cold shocked her system, snapping her out of her reverie. She looked at her reflection in the water.

Her face was pale, her features sharp and gaunt from weeks of starvation and stress. Her black hair, once bound in the severe coil of a priestess, hung loose around her shoulders, matted with dirt and twigs. Her violet eyes, usually bright with fervor, were dull and hollow, filled with a fear she could not name.

She looked like a stranger. She looked like someone who had died in the dark and been reborn in the light, only to realize that the light was blinding.

A sound behind her made her spin around, her hand going to the dagger at her belt—the black glass blade she had taken from the Lower Depths. She had kept it, hidden in the folds of her robes, a secret talisman against the gods she no longer served.

Vespera lowered her hand. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. "Just a squirrel," she whispered.

But it wasn’t just a squirrel. It was life. Ordinary, unremarkable, indifferent life. And it was terrifying.

In the Keep, every creature had a purpose. Every spider, every insect, every human was part of the Web. They served the Queen, or they were consumed by her. There was no such thing as a squirrel chattering for no reason. There was no such thing as wind blowing without intent. Everything had meaning. Everything had weight.

Here, nothing mattered. The trees grew because they could. The water flowed because gravity demanded it. The sun rose and set without caring if Vespera lived or died.

It was freedom. And it was hell.

She spent the night in a hollow beneath the roots of a massive oak tree, huddled against the cold, her stomach growling with hunger. She ate nothing. She had no rations. She had no water skin. She had only the clothes on her back and the dagger in her hand.

Sleep came in fitful bursts, haunted by dreams of the Web. In her dreams, the silk threads stretched out from the trees, wrapping around her limbs, pulling her back down into the dark. She could hear the hum, low and seductive, promising her safety if she would only submit. Promising her purpose if she would only return.

She woke screaming, her hands clawing at the air, trying to tear the imaginary silk from her skin. The morning sun was already high, filtering through the leaves in bright, cheerful beams. The forest was alive with birdsong, a cacophony of chirps and trills that vibrated in her chest like a joyful drumbeat.

Vespera sat up, gasping, her heart racing. She was safe. She was alone. She was free.

And she had never felt more lost.

She stood and brushed the dirt from her robes. She looked north, toward the direction of the Keep, though she knew she would never go back. She looked south, toward the unknown lands beyond the mountains. She looked east, toward the rising sun.

She chose south.

The walk was hard. Her feet blistered and bled inside her sandals. Her arms ached from carrying the weight of her own despair. She ate berries she didn’t recognize, risking poison with every bite. She drank from streams that might have been contaminated, risking sickness with every gulp. She survived because she had to. Because the alternative was to lie down in the dirt and let the forest take her.

On the third day, she found a village.

It was small, a cluster of wooden cottages nestled in a valley surrounded by rolling hills. Smoke rose from the chimneys, smelling of woodsmoke and baking bread. Children played in the street, chasing each other with laughter that echoed off the stone walls.

Vespera stood at the edge of the village, watching them. She felt like a ghost, a specter from another world intruding on theirs. She wanted to turn away. She wanted to run back into the forest and disappear forever.

But her stomach was empty. And she was tired.

So she walked into the village.

The villagers stared. They whispered. They pointed. A woman dropped her basket of apples. A man gripped his hoe tighter. They saw her black robes, her pale skin, her wild hair. They saw a stranger. An outsider. A threat.

Vespera stopped in the center of the street. She looked at them, really looked at them, seeing the fear in their eyes, the suspicion, the hostility. In the Keep, fear was a tool. It was used to control, to manipulate, to dominate. Here, it was raw. Unfiltered. Human.

"I mean no harm," she said, her voice soft, hesitant.

No one answered.

She took a step forward. The man with the hoe stepped back. The woman with the apples backed away.

Vespera stopped. She lowered her head. She felt the weight of their gaze, the pressure of their judgment. It was heavier than the stone ceiling of the Inner Sanctum. It was heavier than the Web.

But it was honest.

She turned and walked away, heading toward the edge of the village. She would sleep in the fields. She would steal food if she had to. She would survive.

But as she walked, she heard a voice behind her. Small. Hesitant.

"Wait."

She turned. A young boy, no older than ten, stood at the edge of the street, holding out a loaf of bread. His eyes were wide, his expression uncertain.

"For you," he said. "You look hungry."

Vespera stared at him. At the bread. At the kindness in his eyes, unbidden, unasked for.

She took the bread. Her hands shook.

"Thank you," she whispered.

The boy nodded, then turned and ran back to his mother, who pulled him into her arms, her eyes still wary, but softer now.

Vespera stood in the street, holding the loaf of bread. It was warm. It smelled of yeast and fire and home. She broke off a piece and ate it. It was the best thing she had ever tasted.

She looked up at the sky. It was blue. Clear. Endless.

For the first time in her life, Vespera did not listen for the Web. She listened to the wind. She listened to the children laughing. She listened to the sound of her own breathing, steady and calm and her own.

She was exiled. She was alone. She was free.

And she was finally, truly, alive.