Gnash paused beside the slanted slab that bridged the gap between the plateau and the outer cliff?face wall. The broad stone formed the highest point of the heap, its far end resting against the cliff where the tunnel to the colony opened. From here, he could see the basin clearly.

  He lifted his forepaws and drew them through his whiskers, working each one with practiced strokes. Roughspun fuzz, bits of grit, and the occasional flake of chitin came free under his paws, scattering across his perch and spilling down into the heap below. Grooming was a necessity for his kind; debris left in the coat irritated the skin and could tangle whiskers, dulling a rat’s senses. But the familiar motions also calmed him. The steady pull of his paws, the soft rasp of fur, the simple order of it all eased the tension in his shoulders.

  A stubborn fragment clung near the base of a whisker, and he worked it loose with a firmer rake of his claws. As it dropped away, he wondered briefly whether the kobolds above had anything like this. Their hides were scaled, not furred. Dust likely didn’t cling to them the same way. Maybe they didn’t need such constant tending. Or maybe they had their own version of this, something suited to their dry, pebbled skin.

  He finished with a final pass of his paws and let his whiskers fan outward, senses clear again.

  The refuse heap spread out around him in a broad basin carved down over many days of work. The upper layers had long since been stripped bare, the rats pushing useless scraps outward where they formed low ridges of broken stone, tangled fibers, and rotting matter that no longer offered anything worth the effort. What remained at the center was uneven and stubborn, exposed stone broken by compacted debris and half?buried pockets the rats had returned to again and again.

  The colony moved through the basin with quiet purpose. Some rats dug into softened layers, claws scraping in short, steady bursts. Others hauled their finds toward the sorting piles: lengths of rope, hardened mushroom stalks, shaped fragments of stone, scraps of cloth that might still be worked into something useful.

  Larger pieces sat at the edges where the colony had pushed them over many days. It had taken groups working in short bursts, bracing their paws, shoving together, dragging the stone a few claw?lengths at a time. When one group tired, another took their place. Bit by bit, the stubborn pieces had been shifted to the outer ring, where they no longer blocked the basin or threatened to roll back into the worked areas. Now the heap sat quiet.

  The surface of the heap lay still, the last useful scraps already taken or buried too deep to reach. Gnash felt the absence of it, the long gaps between drops stretching wider than before. When debris did come down from the kobolds, the rats rushed for it at once, knowing how quickly the heap could swallow fresh offerings. Those moments had grown rare.

  A rat hurried past Gnash, its sling bag sagging heavily to one side. The knot holding the pouch slipped loose as it shifted its weight. The bag inverted and spilled its contents across the stone, grubs writhing among stalk fragments and small finds.

  The rat squeaked and scrambled to gather everything before it vanished into cracks. It pulled at the cloth, trying to retie the knot, but the frayed edges slid through its claws. It tried again. This time the knot held, if barely.

  Gnash lowered his head and glanced at his own sling bag. The rough fabric had thinned in places, the corners stretched from repeated tying and untying. Extra patches had been knotted on where holes had formed, leaving the whole bag uneven and mismatched but still usable. He pressed a paw along one worn edge, then let the bag settle back against his flank.

  The heap had given freely at first, but now it resisted, its offerings barely justified the time spent digging for them.

  The colony had continued to grow. He could see it in the numbers moving through the basin, in the constant motion, pulling what they could toward the sorting piles. The growth had brought strength of numbers, but it also brought more mouths, which meant ranging farther, pushing the boundaries of their territory. Gnash would lead most of these trips himself, but he couldn’t oversee everything.

  A sharp squeak drew his attention. A rat backed out of a shallow pocket, hindquarters braced as it dragged something broad and pale behind it. The flattened plates along the creature’s back scraped free of the layers where it had been wedged.

  A Fetid Spindlebug.

  The insect lay unmoving, limbs pulled tight in death. Even from above, Gnash could guess how the rat must smell. Spindlebugs always left a thick, acrid stench on anything that touched them. The rat sneezed hard, shaking its head, but its eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

  Gnash watched it go. The creature could feed several rats, even if none enjoyed the pungent meal.

  The heap shifted beneath his paws, a soft settling far below. Dust drifted from the broken stone above in thin trails. Gnash stilled, ears angled upward.

  The rats nearby froze with him.

  Nothing followed.

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  Work resumed, slower now, paws testing each patch of debris before committing weight. Gnash remained still a moment longer, the memory of the collapse replaying through his head. The sound of stone giving way, the sudden freefall as the ground fell away. He remembered little after that, only fragments of motion and pressure.

  From a tunnel mouth below, rats emerged in ones and twos, fur dusty with refuse hanging from their alert ears. They paused to listen, then shook themselves and returned to their tasks. The colony had learned. No one worked alone now. Pairs moved together, one digging while the other listened, ears tuned for the faintest warning.

  They had reinforced several of the more important tunnels with hardened mushroom stalks. Rats pressed the stalks into the walls and ceilings, wedging them tight to support sagging layers. The braces were crude and uneven, but they held.

  Some passages had to be abandoned entirely, the materials around the tunnels too unstable to trust. New routes curved around those sections, following paths where stone outcroppings supported the layers above, dipping lower before climbing back toward safer ground.

  Gnash watched a pair of rats emerge from the most reinforced tunnel, sling bags heavy with fresh healing bundles from the Grotto. They paused, listening for any shift in the layers above, then continued on, making their way toward the tunnel that led back to the colony.

  The stockpile of healing bundles had grown over the past days. What had once been a precious handful kept under close watch had expanded enough that nearly every rat now carried one or two in their sling bags, tucked away for emergencies. It eased some of the strain, knowing that help was never far from any worker or scout.

  Even so, Gnash had limited the trips to the Grotto. They had learned the rhythm of the dewbacks, how long it took for the creatures to replenish the beads they excreted. Several days passed between each cycle, and pushing the Grotto too often risked disturbing the creatures or exhausting the supply before it could renew. The colony had to take only what the Dewbacks could spare.

  A burst of alarmed chittering snapped Gnash’s attention to one of the excavation tunnels below. One forager scrambled out of an opening, backing away with its fur bristling. Another followed close behind, paws skidding on loose grit. A moment later, a wide pair of mandibles thrust from the tunnel mouth, snapping at the air as a plated Carapede hauled itself into the open.

  It was smaller than the one Gnash had killed a few weeks ago, barely the size of the rats it pursued. A juvenile—thinner and shorter than a mature adult. It let out a thin, squealing hiss and clacked its mandibles together in sharp, threatening bursts.

  The two rats split apart, circling in opposite directions, keeping just out of reach as they moved. Their paths curved in a way that kept the Carapede facing open ground rather than the tunnel behind it. Gnash’s muscles tensed, the urge to leap down rising fast, but he held himself still. He could intervene if needed, but a young Carapede was unlikely to inflict more harm than a healing bundle could mend.

  Two more rats rushed in, placing themselves between the creature and the tunnel it had emerged from. The Carapede thrashed its head from side to side, mandibles snapping, then shifted into a defensive curl, tucking its abdomen beneath its legs as it tried to face all of them at once.

  Gnash watched as more rats arrived, moving with practiced coordination. They pressed in from several angles, forcing the creature to divide its attention. A moment later, the group surged, claws and teeth working in quick, efficient bursts. The Carapede bucked once, twice, then stilled.

  Gnash let out a slow breath. Pride warmed him as the small crowd dispersed, returning to their tasks without ceremony. A few rats remained behind to drag the carcass toward the sorting area, where others were already preparing to section the body into pieces small enough to fit into sling bags.

  A small victory, but every bit helped the colony. They had run across a few of these encounters while clearing the heap, most ending just as this one had, though they could not rely on such creatures for food. There were too few of them, and they appeared too rarely to matter.

  Gnash lifted his gaze, following the tangle of stone and debris rising above the basin. Somewhere beyond that, the kobolds tended their fields. He still did not understand how they kept their plants alive, how they coaxed food from the same ground day after day, but he understood the idea behind it. Take only what the plants could spare, and they continued to give.

  It was the same principle he had been forced to apply to the Grotto. If the colony stripped the small cavern bare, the Dewbacks would have nothing left to replenish, and the healing bundles would vanish with them. They had to take carefully, leaving enough for the creatures to recover, or the lifeline the Grotto provided would fail.

  He would need to take some time to watch the fields himself. Maybe then he could find the pattern to their actions.

  The kobolds applied that same principle everywhere, not just to their plants. He had seen it in the way they harvested the tall mushroom stalks they used for poles, cutting only a few from each cluster and leaving the rest to grow back. Even the strange, hair?covered creatures they kept were handled with the same quiet restraint.

  During the initial contact with the kobold settlement, they hadn’t had much time to examine the details of kobold life, but Gnash had made a small trip to the lip of the plateau not long ago, hoping to gain some insight into the roughspun cloth. He hadn’t been able to get close, keeping to the rim, but from that distance the creatures in the pens looked like shifting heaps of tangled hair, their true shapes hidden beneath dense, matted coats. Their musky odor carried farther, a sourness that drifted up whenever the air shifted. Still, he had studied the way they moved, the slow roll of their bodies.

  In doing so, he finally learned their name.

  Shaggrunt.

  Only later, when he saw one partially shorn from afar, did the rest of its form resolve. Beneath the heavy coat lay a broad, many?banded body, the plates tight and close together, each seam normally hidden under the thick hair. Eight stout legs carried it with a slow, rolling gait, the creature grumbling as the kobolds worked around it.

  Gnash settled his weight on the stone bridge, whiskers fanning as he considered it. The colony had survived this long by taking whatever they could find, whenever they found it. But the kobolds had shown him something else, another way to endure.

  Maintaining what one had could continue to provide far longer than the instinctual scouring and hoarding his kind tended to practice.

  Gnash let his gaze drift back over the heap, the slow churn of movement below. There was still so much to learn, but the path forward felt clearer than it had in a long while. One careful choice at a time, that was how the colony would endure.