The patrol gate clanged open just before dusk.
The three returning scouts—Vessa, Torren, and Mahl—were expected yesterday. Now they limped through the obsidian corridor, their shadows longer than they should've been, their steps brittle. Vessa's cloak had ripped at the hem. Mahl's helmet hung from his belt by a frayed vine. Torren… Torren was sunburnt down to the bone.
They looked like they'd crossed a desert, not a ten-league ring.
Kael was the first to speak. "You were due back on the seventh," he said quietly, stepping forward with a waterskin.
Torren blinked. "What? No—we left this morning." He looked at the sky, confused. "Didn't we?"
Vessa nodded too quickly. "We looped the eastern ridge, just past the blackroot glade. Same as usual. It was overcast. We made good time."
"You're all sunburnt." Kael offered the skin to Mahl, who drank like a man hollowed out.
From the forge's central corridor, Riku stepped forward. He'd seen the scouts return through the upper tower's watchglass and had already summoned a healer. But now, up close, something felt wrong—not just fatigue. Time clung to them in the wrong places.
Their leather straps had shrunk, sun-warped and cracked. Mahl's thigh-plate had oxidized, the joints stiff with sand. Torren's left boot was tied with a length of fire-root fiber, which Blackridge hadn't used in weeks.
"You said you took the east ridge," Riku said slowly, voice even. "And never rested?"
"Didn't need to," Vessa said. "It was cool. Fog hung low." She frowned, then touched the side of her face. The skin peeled slightly. "Though… it didn't stay that way."
Riku turned to Sira, who was already unrolling the route ledger. Patrols were mapped by hand and updated nightly—Kael's insistence. Riku's only condition had been this: don't automate the trails. If the land ever changed, they had to see it.
The recorded route aligned. Time estimate: eight hours.
Sira muttered, "No breaks, no camps. If they followed this, they should've returned before midday. Something's wrong."
"I'll go look," Kael said.
"Take a heatprobe," Riku replied. "And walk their exact path. Step for step."
As Kael and two flankers set out, Riku remained behind. He sat on the ground beside Torren and gestured for the others to rest. None of the scouts asked questions. None of them complained. It was as though fatigue had sunk beneath the bone and turned them into statues waiting to crack.
"You remember passing the fireglass shelf?" Riku asked. It was a landmark—unmissable, half a mile before the ridge turned.
Vessa shook her head. "No shelf."
"Moss gorge?"
"No gorge," Mahl replied. "Just a slope. Then a short drop. Flat rock, then forest again."
That was impossible. The moss gorge had always been a deep canyon. The flat stone came after the gorge, not before.
Riku's jaw tensed.
When Kael returned two hours later, he wore no burns. No heat haze shimmered from his back. "The slope's gone," he said flatly. "There's a sharp cliff now. Fresh break. As if the slope snapped in half and dropped overnight."
"And the forest?"
"Still there—but the trees lean wrong. Not just wind-wrong. It's like they're bending toward the cliff."
He unrolled a parchment and laid it beside the previous map. The new slope was thirty meters shorter than the old one. The land had compressed.
"That's not erosion," Kael murmured. "That's rearrangement."
Riku crouched beside the new sketch. He touched the edge of the map where Kael had shaded the cliff, and his fingers came away faintly stained with soot.
"You smell it?" Kael asked.
Riku nodded. The air carried something—faintly metallic, like blood in rusted water. But subtler. As though the land exhaled between grains of stone.
That night, the scouts were placed under watch, not suspicion—just care. Healers treated the burns. Mahl remained quiet, kneeling outside the forge long after sundown.
Riku stood beside him after a while.
"You remember anything else?"
Mahl didn't speak at first. Then: "When we reached the flat rock, I saw a fire ahead. We thought it was a campsite. We ran to it." He paused. "But it wasn't fire. It was reflection. A mirror on the ground… but not glass. Like heat itself had remembered where it used to be."
Riku stiffened slightly. "And?"
"And it vanished when we stepped toward it."
A silence passed between them.
When Riku turned to leave, Mahl whispered behind him: "Did we ever leave?"
Riku turned, but Mahl had already slumped to the side, unconscious.
He caught him gently and called for Sira. As she arrived, Riku turned his eyes eastward—toward the ridge.
Maps didn't lie.
But maybe the land had learned to.