Chapter 366: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies [1]

"Rope line!" Kane snapped, without taking his eyes off Ragnar.

"Don’t fight the whole landing—cut a path and climb!"

They ran.

Not in a clean file.

In a broken, scrambling line through a floor that was still remembering how to be bodies.

Kane cut a path with Mjoldr’s red arc: joints, skulls, the places where yellow light concentrated in empty sockets, and the two Giant escorts and three elves followed hard in the gap.

Bone-hands caught at ankles.

A ribcage without a head latched onto the quieter Giant’s calf and had to be smashed free with the butt of a hammer.

One of the elves went down hard when a drift of smaller remains tangled her boots.

Kane hauled her up by the harness without breaking stride and shoved her toward the wall under the handholds.

"Move—do not look at the faces—"

But the Giants looked.

Horror had a familiar shape here.

The hammer-Giant’s voice tore out of him as a half-assembled torso dragged itself across their path, jaw working on a name.

"Tovi—that is Tovi’s mark on the wrap—he was thrown for the border-theft, he was—"

"He is not Tovi!" the quieter one snarled, and put his hammer through the skull anyway, eyes wet and furious.

"He is the pit wearing Tovi’s bones—climb!"

Another shape rose from a drift near the pillar-line: broader, a warrior’s set to the remaining shoulder, a face the years had not quite erased.

The quieter Giant made a sound that wasn’t a word and nearly stopped.

Kane hit the thing’s spine with Mjoldr and did not ask whose brother it had been.

"Rope!" he shouted.

"First up holds the line for the next—go!"

The spear-elf hit the wall first, hands finding the oversized holds, boots scraping. The second elf followed. The third—the lean commander from Misha’s choke-line- was reaching for the stone when a cluster of bone-fingers closed on his ankle and yanked.

He slammed into the floor face-first.

Yellow light crawled over the remains, trying to climb him like a ladder.

"No—!"

Kane turned, cut the cluster apart in two strokes, and dragged the elf upright.

Blood ran from the man’s nose and from a gouge along his shin where the bones had bitten through leather.

Not a turn, not yet, but he was hurt, and the landing was still standing up around them.

"Can you climb?"

"I can climb."

The elf’s voice was tight with pain.

"I can climb—"

The quieter Giant boosted him onto the first holds. The hammer-Giant was already halfway up the sheer, roaring at something below that had tried to follow. Kane took one last look across the rise.

Ragnar had not pursued.

The Elder stood on the ruined seat among the broken warm core, engraved hammer hanging easy, yellow eyes lifted toward the climbing line.

The scream-pressure had thinned to a wet hum.

He watched them the way a mouth watches food leave the table: without panic, without hurry, with the certainty of a next sitting.

"You will come back," Ragnar’s deep voice carried under the chatter of bone. Not a shout. A fact.

"The door in your blood will bring you. The stone under this island is patient. Mouths are patient."

Kane didn’t answer.

He hooked onto the rope, put the fragment of core hard against his belt, and climbed.

Five hundred metres of throat.

The dead didn’t stop at the floor.

Some of the more complete shapes tried the lower handholds: scraping, failing, falling back in dry clatters.

Yellow light flared and dimmed in the dark below.

The rope sang under weight. The hurt elf above Kane gasped with every pull. Once his boot slipped, the quieter Giant’s hand shot out from the side and pinned him to the wall until his grip returned.

"Don’t look down," Kane said through his teeth.

Rage was still burning, a controlled waste against the pit’s pressure.

The system’s tags scrolled warnings he did not have hands free to dismiss.

"If it calls a name you know, you climb through it."

The hammer-Giant, higher up, spat into the dark.

"It already used Tovi’s face. It does not need my name."

They climbed.

The thin circle of sky grew from a coin to a mouth of colourless daylight.

Warders’ voices reached them: shouts, the scrape of more rope, the Stone-Mother’s order-carrying tone.

Kane’s shoulders burned.

The hurt elf’s blood marked the holds.

Below, the feeder’s wet hum continued, and Ragnar’s patience sat under it like a second floor.

Kane hauled over the lip into the hard white morning and rolled once to clear the edge for the next body.

The secondary mouth was a chaos of boots and weapons.

Stone-Mother’s warders held a perimeter.

The two Giant escorts dragged themselves over. The three elves: one limping hard, shin dark, collapsed to their knees on honest stone.

Kane stayed on his feet because sitting felt like an invitation the pit might still hear.

The Stone-Mother was already there.

She took in their faces in one pass: the elves’ fear, the escorts’ wet eyes, Kane’s blood and the red-black residue on Mjoldr, the way none of them looked like people who had closed a wound. Her heavier tiredness sharpened into something colder.

"It went wrong," she said.

"We found Ragnar," Kane said.

His voice came out raw.

"Seated on the warm core. Sixty-five years and not decayed. The stone was holding him. We broke the stone and took a fragment. He opened his eyes. Yellow. He screamed. The bone drifts stood up. Faces your people knew. We cut a path and climbed. He did not follow. He watched us leave."

The quieter escort’s voice broke.

"Tovi was down there. Tovi’s mark. And others. The pit is wearing our dead, Stone-Mother. Root-Binder is not a body in a chair. He is a door that learned how to speak."

The hammer-Giant wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a dark smear.

"Secondary is not sealed. We didn’t close anything. We woke it, and we ran. The land-walker has a piece of the core. The rest of the mouth is still open under our boots."

The Stone-Mother looked at the fragment at Kane’s belt, then at the hurt elf’s shin, then at the dark throat of the secondary mouth.

Warders were already shouting: something about movement on the lower holds, about yellow light climbing where light should not.

"Prepare the lip," she ordered.

"If the dead learned the floor, they may learn the wall. Hammers on the edge. No one stands alone. Prepare for battle."