The spear did not move for a long time.

  Matas’s arms started to tremble—not from fear, he told himself, but from the hollow buzz under his skin. Level 2 jitters. The ache in his chewed arm had shifted from sharp to heavy, like someone had wrapped it in sandbags and set the whole bundle on fire.

  The hunter watched all of it. Or that was how it felt. His gaze kept returning to Matas’s face, but his eyes flicked to the arm, the blood, the rock on the alcove floor.

  He said something.

  This time there was no neat one?word dub. The sound reached Matas’s ears as hard consonants and rolled vowels—then lagged, a heartbeat late, into half?formed English.

  “…wolves… you…”

  Pain behind his left eye spiked. He hissed and squeezed the eyelid shut before he could stop himself.

  “Easy,” he muttered. “I’m trying.”

  The hunter’s brows pulled together a fraction, as if Matas had said something interesting or stupid. The spear dipped another hair. If that was meant as reassurance, it needed work.

  Behind him, the archer shifted her weight. Her bow wasn’t at full draw anymore, but the arrow stayed nocked and pointed in his general direction. She said something in the same language, short and clipped. The dub tried, stuttered, and gave him nothing but rhythm.

  Call. Answer. Confirm. Job?site cadence, wrong world.

  “Look,” Matas said. His voice scraped out of a throat that felt sandblasted, every word tasting of old blood and dust. “I don’t know if you can understand me at all, but… I’m not here to screw with your wall. Or your wolves. I’m just trying not to die.”

  The hunter glanced back at the archer. They traded a look he couldn’t parse, then the man shifted the spear to one hand and reached toward him with the other.

  Matas flinched before he could stop it. His back hit stone. The alcove had picked up three extra invisible walls since the last time he checked.

  The hunter froze. Then, very deliberately, he flattened his palm and held it up between them. Fingers spread. Empty.

  Same gesture as Matas.

  Close enough.

  “Okay,” he breathed. “Yeah. Sure. Trust?fall time.”

  He lowered his hands a little, keeping them visible. The hunter stepped in, closing the last of the distance, and hooked his fingers under Matas’s good arm just above the elbow.

  Up close, he smelled of leather, smoke, and something metallic that wasn’t only blood. He stood roughly Matas’s height, somewhere around five?ten to six foot. His auburn hair was braided tight against his skull; the archer’s had the same color, pulled back in narrower braids.

  The world tilted when the man hauled him up. Matas’s knees did a wet?cardboard impression. For a second he hung between the hunter’s grip and the wall, boots scrabbling for friction. The hollowness roared in his ears.

  The mailbox in the corner of his vision stayed quiet. No new flags, no verdict, just that faint patient presence.

  “On your feet,” he told his legs. “Think of the other unbelievable shit we did today.”

  They filed a complaint, but held.

  Once he was upright, the hunter eased the spear back into a ready grip and kept hold of his arm with the other. Not gentle. Not cruel. Efficient.

  He called over his shoulder to the archer. The dub limped along.

  “…down… watch…”

  She made a small noise that could have been agreement. The bow finally eased all the way down. She unhooked the arrow, gave it a neat one?circle spin around her finger, slid it into the quiver at her hip, and started picking her way along the slope toward them.

  The way they moved twisted something in his chest. They treated broken stone and loose scree like a job they’d done a thousand times. Weight always centered. No wasted steps. No trust given to surfaces that hadn’t earned it.

  Roofing skills in another dialect.

  As she came closer, details sharpened. Braids tight against her head, dark hair with copper threads catching the grey light. Layered leather and scaled hide sewn in overlapping plates along shoulders and thighs. A thin scar ran from the corner of her mouth toward her ear, pale against her skin.

  Her eyes swept him once, head to toe, then settled on his wrist. A tiny groove formed between her brows.

  She spoke, slower this time, like testing the sound against his face.

  “Kael… neth…?”

  The dub lagged.

  “…hurt…?”

  He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You could say that.”

  He lifted the chewed arm a few inches. Pain flared along the half-healed bite marks; the system’s new, thin band of knit skin stretched and complained.

  Her gaze darted to the blood, then back to his eyes. Something in her expression shifted by a small degree. Not sympathy. Recalculation.

  “Hurt,” she echoed. The word landed with a slightly wrong shape, like something picked up once and rarely used.

  That did not help his imagination.

  The hunter at his side gave his elbow a brisk squeeze and tilted his head upslope. No translation needed.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Right,” Matas said. “Field trip it is.”

  They started to move.

  The first step out of the alcove felt like stepping off a roof edge on purpose. His center of gravity tried to remember how to handle angles that weren’t flat, failed, and left it to boots and muscle memory.

  The hunter adjusted with him, compensating without looking like he was compensating. He had probably hauled enough drunk cousins or green recruits off this wall to make it reflex.

  Stone shifted underfoot. The slope that had treated the wolves like home barely tolerated him. His breath came in shallow pulls.

  “Slow,” he muttered. “Slow and steady. No ERs in haunted?monastery country.”

  The archer took point, picking a line down and across the broken face. She shouted something up toward the terrace. Her voice carried like someone who yelled on walls for a living.

  A faint answer came from above, lost in distance. The dub didn’t bother. His eye had enough to complain about.

  They angled across the slope instead of heading straight to the main gate. That was fine. The carved arch and the crackling tension under it could stay a future problem.

  Closer up, the wall’s construction was even worse for his nerves. Massive blocks fitted tight, iron bands driven deep and now furred with rust. One band near them had sheared off at some point, leaving a jagged scar.

  “Not up to code,” he muttered.

  The hunter made a small questioning sound.

  “Talking to myself,” Matas said. “It’s a thing.”

  The man didn’t push. They reached a spot where the wall met a natural outcrop, and the archer stopped. A narrow stair had been cut there, half into the hill’s stone, half into added blocks. It was more a series of notches than steps, just wide enough for one person.

  She gestured with two fingers, then at him, then down.

  “First,” she said. Then a string of words the dub bent into something like “…watch… follow…”

  “First,” he echoed. “Sure. Human canary.”

  The hunter squeezed his elbow again and shifted behind him, slightly upslope. If Matas slipped, he would hit him first.

  Comforting or efficient. Hard to say.

  One notch at a time.

  The cuts were uneven, some worn deeper than others. His bad wrist throbbed as he braced with the good hand. Halfway down, his boot skidded on loose grit. His stomach lurched.

  A hand clamped on the back of his jacket and yanked him against the wall before gravity could finish its thought.

  “Careful,” the hunter said.

  No dub this time. Just the word, clean and quiet, with enough weight in the middle to make it his.

  “Working on it,” Matas said through his teeth.

  “Care?ful,” the man repeated, the corner of his mouth twitching like it wasn’t sure if it was allowed to be a smile.

  So the spear?guy had at least one word of English and a sense of humor, trying to slip past his job.

  At the bottom of the cut, the slope eased into a narrow ledge running along the wall toward the main terrace. Beyond that, the way widened into what might once have been a proper walkway. Time and weather had chewed chunks out of it, but someone had cleared a path along the inside edge. Boot scuffs marked the dust.

  The archer led them along that strip. Over the edge, forest fell away into shadow. Treetops moved in a wind he still couldn’t feel.

  The hollowness in his chest shifted now and then, like something big and patient rolled over in its sleep.

  “Anytime you want to tell me what that is,” he murmured to the quiet mailbox flag, “feel free.”

  It stayed still.

  The terrace came up faster than he expected. One moment they were hugging the wall; the next, they stepped out onto a broad, flattened platform cut into the mountain, big enough to park a couple of semis side by side.

  People waited.

  Not a crowd. Half a dozen, maybe. Most wore the same mix of leather, cloth, and scale, in different cuts and colors. A few carried spears; one held a staff ringed with metal bands. Only one had nothing visible in hand, which probably meant he was the most dangerous.

  He stood near the center, feet set like they belonged there. Older than Matas’s escorts by a couple of decades, iron?gray at the temples, deep lines around mouth and eyes. His armor was simpler but better kept: no loose straps, no mismatched plates. A plain short sword hung at his hip, very well maintained.

  His gaze locked on Matas the instant he stepped into view.

  If the wolves had weighed him like meat, this man weighed him like a problem.

  The hunter at his side spoke briskly. The dub scraped together fragments.

  “…wolves… gate… fight… hurt…”

  The older man’s eyes tracked to Matas’s wrist, then his face, then the spot on the slope where the bodies had vanished.

  His jaw tightened a notch. He answered with a low run of words that carried both question and order.

  The dub produced one thin piece.

  “…why…”

  “Buddy,” Matas muttered, “if you figure that out, tell me.”

  The man took a step forward.

  Up close, more details emerged: a nick missing from one ear; a narrow band of metal worked into the leather at his throat; a sigil stamped over his heart, dulled and partly obscured by dried blood that probably wasn’t his.

  He spoke directly to Matas.

  The dub tried, failed, tried again. Fragments bubbled up and burst.

  “…name… from… alone… why here…”

  Pressure behind his eye climbed with each attempt, slow and grinding.

  “Matas,” he said. “My name is Matas.”

  He tapped his chest twice with his good hand.

  “Matas.”

  The man’s gaze followed the motion, then returned to his face.

  “Matas,” he repeated. The name came out like a piece of stone being set into a wall. Fixed. Measured.

  He tapped his own chest with two knuckles.

  “Tharel,” he said.

  No dub. Just the name.

  “Tharel,” Matas echoed.

  Something eased in the older man’s expression, barely. Not trust. The sense that they’d cleared step one on a checklist Matas couldn’t see.

  Tharel looked past him to the escorts and snapped out two short names wrapped in a longer sentence.

  “…Merrik… Serh…”

  So: spear?guy with the almost?smile was Merrik. Archer with the scar and wall?voice was Serh.

  Merrik’s grip tightened for a second, then eased as he answered. Serh dipped her chin once, eyes not leaving Matas for long.

  Tharel gestured toward the inner end of the terrace with two fingers, then at Matas. The shape of it was clear enough: take him inside.

  Matas’s stomach sank.

  “Hey,” he said, because words were what he had. “Tharel. Merrik. Serh. I’m not—”

  He caught himself before saying threat. Two dead wolves and two retreating said otherwise.

  “—I’m not here for your gate,” he finished. “I didn’t even know it existed until today.”

  They watched him talk like he was working a problem on a whiteboard none of them could read.

  Tharel answered. The dub scraped out one line.

  “…talk… later…”

  Then his gaze sharpened, and another word came through clean, like the dub had finally found traction.

  “Inside.”

  His legs had opinions about that. None mattered.

  Merrik and Serh took positions at his elbows again. Serh’s fingers were lighter on his jacket than Merrik’s, but there was no doubt that if he tried to run, she’d put him on the stone inside three steps.

  They moved.

  The gates loomed ahead, carved arch above them swallowing light. Every step closer felt like walking under more weight. The air pressed down, thick and expectant.

  If he’d been alone, he would have stopped ten feet out and called it good. Let some future, better?rested version of himself figure out how to get past the bad?idea alarm screaming in every cell.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Boots scuffed stone behind him. Eyes burned between his shoulder blades. The mailbox flag pulsed in its slow, indifferent four?count.

  Logging.

  “Just for the record,” he muttered, “if this kills me, I’m blaming all of you.”

  Merrik made a low sound that might have been a laugh if he’d let it.

  Serh’s mouth twitched at one corner, then flattened again so fast he might have imagined it.

  Tharel stepped ahead and laid his palm flat against an iron band crossing the right?hand gate. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then a deep, grinding shudder ran through the stone under Matas’s boots.

  The hair on his arms stood up.

  The gates did not swing wide. They shifted a fraction of an inch, just enough for a darker seam to appear between them. Dust drifted from the arch, fine as flour. Somewhere deep in the mountain, metal complained.

  Every instinct he had screamed no.

  His boots kept moving.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, mostly to himself. “Definitely not out of danger.”

  Merrik’s hand tightened on his arm as they crossed the threshold.

  The air on the other side was thicker, colder, with a faint taste of iron and something older. Outside light died faster than it should, swallowed by stone.

  The mailbox flag pulsed once, a little brighter, then settled.

  Whatever came next, the System was watching.

  For the first time since the void, he was not sure whether that felt like safety or a second set of teeth.