Chapter 4 THE DEPT OF BLOOD AND STONE

Chaos. The valley was now a prison, its walls shifting, new crevasses splitting the ground with the mountain's furious contractions. Jaspar was screaming, blaming Kaelen for destroying his destiny. Renn was desperately trying to find a way out, her Pathfinder's knowledge strained to its limit. Borin was on his knees, not in prayer, but taking frantic seismic readings with a backup device.

"The structural integrity is collapsing! The Pulse is going chaotic! We have minutes before this whole basin implodes!"

Kaelen was numb, his ears ringing with the fading echo of the Scream. He had silenced the Song. To save it? To doom them all? His hands were cut from the shattered stone, his debt now joined by a deeper, more terrible burden.

Then, through the screaming Pulse, he felt it. A new pattern. Not the Song, not the Scream, but a directive. A single, clear, urgent rhythm pushing into his mind from the very stone beneath his feet. It was a path. Not out, but deeper in.

"This way!" he roared, a authority in his voice he didn't recognize.

He didn't wait for consensus. He ran, not with a climber's grace, but with the desperate certainty of a man following a lifeline only he could hear. The others, with no better option, followed.

He led them to a seemingly solid wall at the valley's edge. The Pulse here was a frantic knocking.

"Borin! Now!" Kaelen yelled.

The Gear-Granny didn't hesitate. He slapped a small, pancake-shaped device against the rock and twisted it. There was a low thump, not an explosion, but a precise concussive charge. The rock face sheared away, not into rubble, but along a hidden fissure, revealing a dark, descending tunnel that exhaled air warmer than the outside.

They plunged into the darkness. The tunnel was smooth, too smooth to be natural, but worn by ages of... something. The Pulse here was different. Subdued. Guiding. It led them down, down, through the gut of the Leviathan.

They ran until their lungs burned, the sounds of the dying valley fading behind them. Finally, they stumbled into a cavern. Light bloomed-not from outside, but from thousands of gentle bioluminescent fungi clinging to the walls. In the center lay an underground lake, its water perfectly still and black as obsidian.

They were safe. For now.

Jaspar collapsed, his empire of dreams reduced to ragged breaths in a fungal glow. Renn checked everyone for injuries, her gaze lingering on Kaelen with a mix of awe and wariness. Borin immediately began taking samples of the fungi, muttering about "chemlight alternatives."

Kaelen walked to the edge of the black lake. In its perfect reflection, he didn't see a disgraced scribe or a debt-slave. He saw a man who had broken a mountain's song and was then shown a secret path by the mountain itself.

The Pulse here was a soft, steady hum. A question.

He looked at his bleeding hands, then back at the sealed tunnel behind them. The Leviathan Range had not spared them out of mercy. It had saved them for a purpose. Their old quest-Jaspar's road, the Guild's map, his own debt-was finished, buried under megatons of angry stone.

A new one had just begun, whispered in the rhythm of stone and blood. He owed the mountain a debt far greater than the Guild's. And the only way to repay it was to listen, truly listen, to what it wanted to say.

He dipped his hand in the black water, breaking the reflection. The ripples spread out, touching every shore.