The terrace was louder than the vault.

  Sound came in layers as they climbed the last of the stairs: shouted headcounts, crate scrape, the dry clack of hooves on stone, the high, ragged edge of people trying very hard not to sound like they were afraid.

  The mountain hummed under all of it, same off?key note as the morning, wound a little tighter.

  Matas hit the upper landing a half step behind Tharel and had to stop anyway, one hand on the wall. The band at the base of his skull had not forgiven him for the writ exercise. It had just downgraded the emergency from spikes to an industrial?grade ache that made it hard to remember what “no pain” had ever felt like.

  The barracks dream clung where sleep had dropped it: static hiss, bad ceiling, Alea’s shoulders hunched over a bed that was and wasn’t theirs.

  Two mountains. One brain. Zero free beams.

  “Second wave!” Tharel’s voice cut through the rest without needing to be raised much. The terrace noise ducked a notch, the way it did when the wrong kind of elder spoke. “We move now. As planned.”

  As planned meant the staggered loads he’d argued them into the day before: each wave a slice of the village, not one clean cut and two scraps. Old, young, strong, weak, all mixed so any valley that made it got something that looked like a settlement instead of a pile of specialties and regrets.

  His words, unfortunately.

  His tongue remembered the burn. His throat felt like it had never quite healed from that particular metaphor.

  “Walking?” Serh asked from his left. She looked him over like she was checking harness stitching—eyes quick on his stance, his hands, then his face.

  “Mostly forward, if the mountain cooperates,” he said.

  “Cooperation’s not one of its known skills,” Merrik muttered on his right, but his eyes were on Matas too. Less joke than inventory.

  Tharel didn’t waste a question on whether Matas was fit to work. He just nodded at the down?valley path. “Same span as last time. You walk on point until the first staging bend. Serh on rear. Merrik floating. We keep the brace pattern.”

  Matas’s legs sent up a brief protest that sounded a lot like a career change. He ignored them.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if I pass out, somebody make sure I don’t roll the drop.”

  “That’s my job,” Serh said. “Not the passing out part.”

  Martuk hovered just behind Tharel, chalk already on his fingers from whatever last?second adjustment he’d been making to the wall. His ledger eye did the same pass as Serh’s, from Matas’s boots to his face.

  “You’re worse,” Martuk said. “And you’re going again.”

  “Sound math,” Matas said. “You want routes read by somebody who isn’t wired into the system, go find yourself a spare auditor.”

  Keth, leaning near a support post, tilted their head at that. “Our clearances do not include serving as your structural reader,” they said. “Much as the graphs would benefit.”

  “Yeah, well. Guess you’re stuck with the one the node already chewed on.”

  The flag in the corner of his vision ticked along on its usual four?count now, a sour, over?bright gold at the edges that never quite relaxed back to neutral.

  He could feel the overlays hovering like a storm behind his eyes, waiting for any excuse to spill.

  He didn’t give them one. Not yet.

  The second?wave line formed faster than the first had.

  Fear did that. Also practice.

  Rope?hands with coils already slung over shoulders. Goat?boys with lighter animals this time, after someone finally believed his numbers about hoofed live load on bad ledges. Mothers with kids walking instead of carried wherever possible, to trade arm strain for better balance. Elders who could still move under their own power, braced by younger arms but not ceded to the last wave.

  Some faces he knew, some he knew only as “we don’t lose that one if we can help it.”

  He walked the line once, checking packs, watching how each person shifted their weight when they heard the pitch of the stone underfoot change.

  He kept Omen dim.

  Red wanted to column up everything in sharp stress lines. Gold wanted wide, fuzzy halos around every potential failure. After the vault, full brightness felt like sticking his head under the Heart and daring it to crack.

  So he throttled it.

  He could the control now, where before it had been more like trying to squint at a sunrise. A small, mean little valve somewhere behind his eyes turned the overlays down to a smear—just enough lines to warn him when the mountain really objected, not enough to peel his skull open every step.

  The band at his neck approved in its own language: pressure up, pain steadier, less of that bolt?through?the?socket tear that had almost dropped him in the vault.

  It came with a lag, though.

  Sound and sight sliding half a beat out of sync when he shifted gaze too fast. Edges of people and stone needing that extra fraction of a second to commit to where they lived in the world.

  Not ideal on a terrace with a hundred people and too few railings.

  “You look like you’re drunk,” Merrik murmured as they moved toward the path lip.

  “Wish I’d had to earn it that way,” Matas said. “This is the cheap imitation.”

  “Define cheap,” Serh said.

  He didn’t.

  The first step onto the down?valley path was always the worst, even before the mountain started arguing about its job. The back of the village dropped away in an instant, replaced with too much air and not enough stone—just a ledge that had never been meant for the kind of traffic they were putting on it.

  His boots remembered yesterday’s grip points, the little irregularities in cut stone and natural face. His knees remembered the last dozen times he’d climbed this stretch, with and without full loads.

  His head remembered the Heart.

  Red and gold tried to flare, tide?like.

  He held them low.

  Just enough to catch where hairline cracks had lengthened overnight. Just enough to see a faint, new fan of dust under one support post that had been clean when he’d marked it. Just enough to realize that the mountain had not waited politely for them to finish.

  “Faster on the upper span,” he called back over his shoulder. “Don’t run. It’s not that bad yet. But don’t sightsee.”

  “You heard the man,” Serh’s voice came a breath later. “Move like someone you like is watching.”

  He inched them past the first high corner—the one where the wall on the uphill side leaned a little too far inward, inviting people to put a hand on it and pretend it was doing them a favor.

  “Hands down,” he snapped automatically as someone went to brace there. “That stone owes you nothing. Rails only.”

  The kid—a ropehand barely out of squeak?voiced age—jerked his palm back, cheeks flushing.

  “Sorry,” the boy said.

  “Save sorry for later,” Matas said. “Right now, stay alive.”

  The path narrowed ahead into the first real problem: the undercut ledge that sat below a bulge of cliff they all politely called an overhang instead of what it really was, which was a mass of stone waiting for an excuse to rejoin the valley floor.

  His chalk marks from yesterday ghosted the rock: a crosshatched block over the worst section, a jagged no?extra?weight sigil, a double circle on the better footing just beyond.

  That had all been drawn with Quick Sketch running hotter than it should have. His fingers remembered the ache.

  Now he had to make it work at walking speed.

  He eased the overlays up, reluctantly.

  Red sharpened, crawling across the cliff face, finding every micro?fracture, every seam. Gold widened, blooming around the line of people stacked behind him, tracing the way their combined weight rode on too few square feet.

  Nausea climbed with it. The lag vanished, but only because everything came in at once—sound, sight, the hum of the mountain, the ragged breathing lines of a hundred lungs.

  The band at his skull tightened like someone was padding the hammer for another swing.

  He rode it.

  “Single file,” he said, louder now. “Hands on rail only. One person on the crosshatched stretch at a time. No stopping. If you drop something, it’s gone. You reach for it, so are you.”

  “Who goes first?” a woman near the front called. Her voice trembled around the edges, but it held.

  “Me,” he said. “Then the ropehands. Then everyone else. If I eat it, Serh pulls me out and Merrik gets to tell me I told you so.”

  “Already planning the speech,” Merrik said.

  He stepped onto the bad section, every instinct he owned screaming about never being the first idiot to test a compromised surface.

  Omen?Step answered without needing him to name it.

  It wasn’t a glow or a line on the path so much as a series of small, insistent tugs at his ankles and knees, like someone invisible had gripped his joints and was trying to walk his weight onto very particular patches of stone.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Spots where red stress lines thinned by a hair. Where gold load halos found a slightly more honest footing. Places no sane person would think to put their foot based on simple common sense about flatness and comfort.

  He let it pull.

  The first step landed half on a protruding knob of rock he would normally have told somebody to chip off. The second went to the very outermost edge of the cut path, toes flirting with empty air, heel on the thinnest possible shelf. The third found a slightly discolored patch in the main lane that felt wrong but right when his boot hit—a dull, satisfying transfer into deeper stone instead of a hollow note.

  Vertigo tried to spin the whole world sideways. For one heartbeat, the drop looked like up. The rail under his hand wobbled like a rope. The line behind him tugged forward, impatient and unaware.

  He breathed through it, the way he did when a ladder flexed under full load.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  The flag in his vision obligingly ticked along with the count, pulse to pulse, like it approved of the math.

  By the time he reached the far chalk line, the red web along the overhang had brightened to a mean, hair?trigger glow. Dust whispered off the underside of the bulge and drifted down in a lazy veil.

  “Move,” he said, voice going sharper without his permission. “Next. Same steps. Watch my feet. Don’t improvise.”

  He half walked, half the first ropehand’s gaze where it needed to go, talking the boy through each placement.

  “Knob. Edge. Stain. Don’t argue.”

  The kid’s breath came out in small, frightened bursts, but his boots obeyed.

  Behind him, the line began to tick forward, each person copying the dance as best they could. Some put more weight in the wrong places than he liked, but Omen trickled hints when somebody was about to get fatally creative—a little extra heat in the ankle when they leaned in toward the wall, a stab in his own knee when someone behind him shifted too fast.

  He used it like a man with one good hand and a bad hammer. Enough to keep things from shattering in progress, not enough to call it safe.

  By the time the last elder in the wave stepped off the crosshatched stretch, his stomach was in his throat and his legs felt like they’d been borrowing someone else’s muscles for the last twenty yards.

  He slammed the overlay valve closed.

  Red and gold retreated to a sullen smear at the edges of his vision. The world lagged for half a second, then committed again. Noise roared back in.

  He caught himself on the rail and pretended it was just to check the next span.

  “Is that it?” Merrik asked quietly at his shoulder, not quite out of breath. “The walk?the?wrong?way thing?”

  “That’s the system’s idea of a favor,” Matas said, voice sandier than he liked. “Shows you where the stone wants you more than you want the stone.”

  “Costs?” Serh asked, equally low.

  “Same as everything else,” he said. “Only faster.”

  The band pulsed in agreement. The afterimage of the overhang stayed sketched across the inside of his skull like a diagram he hadn’t meant to memorize.

  He didn’t look back. The chalk on the rock would do the talking he didn’t have breath for.

  They made the first staging bend without anyone going over the edge or under a slab.

  That counted as a win in the current ledger.

  The little widening in the path that served as the bend had been cleared for rest earlier: no crates, no extra goats, just a stretch of flattish stone where the wave could pause, breathe, and rearrange loads before the next bad section.

  “Five minutes,” Matas said when they reached it. “Water, check knots, swap kids if your arms are jelly. Nobody sits where the chalk says don’t. Nobody leans on anything I haven’t leaned on first.”

  That got him a few huffs that might have been laughs, which was better than shrieks.

  He walked the perimeter once, letting his eyes skim over the chalk sigils from yesterday and the new ones he wanted to add.

  Quick Sketch tickled at his fingers again, that greased?path feeling from shoulder to hand. A suggestion that if he picked up a bit of chalk right now, his arm would happily churn out a new set of marks to account for the morning’s tremors.

  His forearm still ached from the last time.

  He did it anyway.

  Martuk had slipped a spare stub into his belt without comment before they’d left. Matas dug it out now, the little cylinder of white already wearing a faint groove where his grip liked to sit.

  The moment his fingers closed around it, that unnatural ease snapped into place.

  His hand didn’t feel like his. It felt like a tool plugged straight into whatever part of his skull the system had decided was the drafting department.

  “Short update,” he muttered, more for himself than anyone else. “Not a full map.”

  He touched chalk to rock.

  Lines came faster than his conscious thought—just small additions this time, not full route traces. A new double circle where one patch of stone had shown unexpected kindness under load. A sharper crosshatch on a support where dust now pooled in unfriendly ways. A small, jagged mark at ankle height where the edge had crumbled half a thumb’s width since yesterday.

  Pain rode along with it, catching up as soon as the stub began to shrink.

  First in the fingers, joints locking like they’d been overused for weeks instead of seconds. Then in the forearm, a rope of hot ache pulling from wrist to elbow. Up into the shoulder, hooking into muscles that had already spent the day pretending they weren’t attached to a head full of static.

  He forced himself to stop before the chalk actually snapped.

  The stub had worn down small enough to hide between two fingers. That was enough.

  He pulled his hand back and opened it with more effort than it should have taken. Knuckles crackled. A thin, bright line of blood had appeared along one crease where the chalk edge had bitten.

  “Hand,” Serh said, appearing in his personal space with a cloth like she’d been timing him.

  “You just like having an excuse to order me to sit,” he said. But he held his fingers still while she wiped grime and chalk and the small smear of red away.

  “What happens if you keep going?” she asked, not looking up.

  “Best case? Arm stops listening when I need it later. Worst case, it does listen, but only to the wrong overlord.”

  “System or dragon?” Merrik asked.

  “Pick your god,” Matas said. “They both like load tests.”

  He flexed his hand experimentally. Still attached. Control still his, inasmuch as any of it ever was.

  The band at his skull twitched in…approval? Disapproval? Some ledger note he wasn’t invited to read.

  “Five minutes are up,” Tharel called from the center of the little bend. He stood with the writ box’s weight still in his hands, like he didn’t trust it to stay put anywhere else. “Second half of the span. Then we send you the third wave.”

  “Lucky them,” Matas said under his breath.

  He handed the chalk stub to Martuk without comment. The elder’s fingers closed around it with a care that bordered on reverence.

  “Still don’t understand how you see this,” Martuk said softly.

  “Neither do I,” Matas said. “I just know what happens when I ignore it.”

  They left the staging bend and the mountain decided it had been patient enough.

  The tremor came in sideways, not as a neat up?and?down bounce but as a long, low roll that made the path feel like a plank floating on water.

  The hum under everything jumped half an octave.

  Red wanted to flare.

  He fought the reflex to slam it to full.

  For one sick instant, he held the overlays low.

  Stone under his boots sounded wrong—hollow, ringing in a way his roofing bones had learned to hate—but the visual lines that usually shouted stayed dim, more like a memory than a warning.

  Behind him, someone yelped. A pack thudded into rock. Hoofbeats clattered too fast on stone, too close to the outer edge.

  He’d gambled on saving his own skull from another overlay spike and instead bought himself blindness at the worst possible breath.

  “Up,” he snarled at himself, and shoved the internal valve the other way.

  Red surged, furious at being muzzled.

  Stress lines spidered across the path ahead, revealing a hairline crack he’d marked yesterday as hairline no longer. The tremor had opened it another fraction, just enough to break the path’s argument with gravity.

  He saw it not just as it was but as it wanted to be in the next two heartbeats: a jagged seam turning into a hinge.

  Gold followed slower, heavy and sluggish, mapping where the wave’s combined mass would pivot if that hinge went.

  He didn’t have time to be delicate.

  “Omen—” he started, then swallowed the rest of the word because naming it felt like inviting it to move in permanently.

  He just .

  Three fast, ugly steps sideways onto what looked like worse footing but as a better load path, putting his own weight where the break wanted to start so it would have to argue with him first.

  His right leg tried to go one way, his left the other. For a half?second he was a badly set brace, all the wrong muscles firing in the wrong order, balance trying to go over the edge.

  The band in his skull lit like someone had wired it straight into the shifting stone. Pain shot down his spine in a white, tooth?aching flash. His vision doubled and then tripled again, same as it had on the terrace when the level hit—three slightly misaligned versions of the path fighting for priority.

  He rode the worst of it out by grabbing the outer rail with both hands and letting his knees take the insult.

  The crack under him flexed.

  Didn’t quite open.

  Didn’t quite hold, either.

  A shallow shelf flaked off and went clattering down the slope, taking a small drift of loose gravel with it. Enough to make every person in earshot suck in breath; not enough to take any of them with it.

  “Do stop,” he shouted through teeth that wanted to chatter. “Step the crack. Don’t jump it. Gentle, like you’re walking on someone’s ribs.”

  The analogy made at least three people flinch. Good. Fear that moved carefully was better than bravado.

  The overlays stayed high until the last goat’s hooves had cleared the bad section.

  By then he was shaking hard enough that his fingers threatened to slip on the rail.

  He forced the valve down again, this time not all the way.

  A compromise setting. Enough map to keep them from walking blind, not so much that his skull would actually split.

  It felt exactly like bracing a sagging beam with scrap—never meant to last, just buying time before everything settled somewhere worse.

  “How many more of those you got?” Merrik asked quietly when the path widened again.

  “In me?” Matas said. “Or in the mountain?”

  “Either,” Merrik said.

  “Less than we need,” Matas said.

  They handed the second wave off at the agreed valley staging ground just before midday, to a scatter of low campfires and an even lower buzz of voices.

  Flat land still felt wrong under his boots.

  The valley here wasn’t by any stretch—new camp, unfamiliar slopes—but compared to the mountain’s immediate spite it might as well have been a padded floor.

  Hand?offs blurred together: water skins passed, quick words about which children would need more watching on the next leg, where the first decent water source likely was.

  He let Serh and Merrik do most of the talking.

  His head had gone from acute hurt to a thick, buzzing pressure that made every syllable feel like hauling rope uphill.

  Little ghost?images from the writ branches kept trying to overlay the here?and?now—flashes of what this valley looked like if the Heart failed too early, too late, or not at all.

  None of the versions had everyone standing.

  He shoved them back down the same mental hole Vaultic Memory crawled out of. He’d already paid for that projection once. He didn’t have change to spare.

  “Sit,” Serh said, shoving a crate under him without respecting the territorial rights of whoever had put it there.

  “You’re very pushy for someone who allegedly outranks me,” he said, but he let gravity have him.

  His legs hummed with that high, unpleasant tremor again, like the muscles had gotten used to other hands on the control panel and resented being asked to act normal.

  Somewhere under the fatigue and the ache and the lingering static from the dream, the thin line that was Dimensional Link tugged.

  Not hard. Not like an invitation. More like a reminder that the channel existed now, a hiss at the edge of hearing whenever his eyes drifted away from bare rock and onto anything that could be mistaken for drywall, electric light, the seam of a bed.

  He kept his gaze on goat hooves and rope knots until it eased.

  “Third wave?” Tharel asked when the last second?wave elder had been handed off and the path back up yawned in front of them again.

  The writ box was still in his hands. It might as well have been fused there.

  Matas looked back up the way they’d come.

  He could feel the mountain from here as a pressure at the back of his teeth, like weather rolling in behind a closed door. The tremors were closer together now. Smaller, but more frequent. Like something had decided tapping was more useful than punching.

  “How long until dark?” he asked.

  Tharel squinted at the sun’s angle over the peaks. “Eight hours, if the weather holds,” he said. “Six, if those clouds mean anything.”

  “So, four in system math,” Matas said.

  Tharel’s mouth twitched. “You told me ‘by sundown,’” he said. “I intend to keep that. But I will not speak the writ with half a village still on those ledges, unless you tell me there is no branch left where waiting helps.”

  “Right now there is,” Matas said. “By the time we get back up there, we’ll see.”

  Serh’s jaw tightened. “You’re going straight up and straight back down again,” she said. “No bunk. No actual rest.”

  “Bunk’s on the wrong side of the problem,” he said. “Besides, every time I lie down lately, the system decides it’s time for another bonus channel.”

  She heard the capital letters he didn’t say.

  “Alea?” she asked, so low he almost pretended not to hear.

  Static hissed at the edge of his perception at the name alone.

  “Not a conversation for a ledge,” he said. “Later. If we have a later.”

  Her hand flexed where it rested on her bow. “Then we make one,” she said.

  He didn’t answer that.

  Martuk had been uncharacteristically quiet through the hand?off. Now he cleared his throat.

  “Third wave is…uglier,” he said. “More people who argued their way into staying. More who couldn’t decide. Fewer strong backs left to put under them.”

  “Twistier brace,” Matas said. “Makes sense.”

  “You sure you can read them another path?” Martuk asked. For once, it wasn’t a challenge. Just a man who counted things asking if his numbers were about to go bad.

  “No,” Matas said. “But I know what happens if we send them out blind.”

  Tharel nodded once, the way a man did when he’d checked all the boxes he could and still didn’t like the total.

  “Then we go,” he said. “One more time.”

  “One more for today,” Keth said from where they stood, a little apart, gaze turned up toward the unseen Heart as if they could see through every layer of stone. “Your node’s tolerance is approaching its endpoint.”

  “Yeah,” Matas said. “Join the club.”

  He pushed himself off the crate. His legs took his weight with only the usual amount of complaint. His head lagged a half?beat behind when he turned, but the world caught up eventually.

  It would have to be enough.

  He did a quick, ugly mental tally.

  Level spike. Barbed words. Quick lines. Vault dives. Dream static. Two full ledges walked at something like Omen’s idea of “safer.”

  The load on his own frame wasn’t pretty.

  But the one on the mountain was worse.

  He started back up the path.