The fissure wasn't there the day before.
Riku stood at the ridge's edge, boots anchored on cracked basalt, watching faint tendrils of heat rise from a long, jagged wound in the earth. It split eastward through stone that had once been stable, dependable—a known border of the Hollow. Now it glowed faintly, like a breath held just below the surface.
He didn't speak.
Didn't have to.
Behind him, Kael adjusted the sling of his forge-pack, sweat slick on his brow despite the chill morning wind. "No quake," he said softly. "No tremor. No sign from the glass roots. And yet... here it is."
Riku's eyes narrowed. "Prepare descent."
Sira scowled but said nothing. She was already checking the ridge rope, tying off knots to anchors none of them remembered placing. The land was beginning to arrange itself differently now—not chaotically, but with purpose.
At least, that's how it felt.
The team moved quickly and carefully, four descending the narrow spine into the fissure's maw. The walls were damp with old heat, a sheen of condensation evaporating as they passed. The air thickened. Not with rot, not with gas—memory. The air felt full, and not with anything physical.
They reached the bottom.
It was not stone.
It was not soil.
The base of the fissure had a strange resilience underfoot—like walking on hardened bark, streaked with molten amber lines that pulsed softly with every breath they took. The glow came not from fire, but something older. Something remembering how to burn.
Then they heard it.
Scraping. Uneven steps. A chitter that echoed too long in the narrow space.
And from the far tunnel came the first of them.
A direcrawler.
Only… not.
It was the same breed—arched back, segmented body, glistening under a partial chitin shell. But the angles were wrong. Softer. Its limbs were too many, too fluid. Its eyes—eight of them—no longer shimmered with the violet hue of night-chase. They were glazed over, like reflections drawn in wet clay.
Kael's weapon was half-raised before Riku stopped him with a single gesture.
The beast paused. Lifted its head. Smelled them.
And then—impossibly—it knelt.
A sound like an exhale—wet, ragged—escaped it as it lowered its body into a bow, joints cracking beneath the strain.
Then it collapsed.
Not dead in battle. Just… expired.
Sira moved first, blade drawn in ritual as she approached. But Riku stepped ahead of her.
He crouched beside the body. The direcrawler's ribs were thinner here, translucent in parts where bone met flesh like cooled glass. And beneath the ribcage, something pulsed.
Riku reached carefully, his fingers brushing away membrane.
Inside, nested where a heart should have been, was a seedling.
Fire-root.
But not any he'd ever grown.
The bark bore a curl pattern—familiar. He scraped gently with his nail and unearthed a mark.
Blackridge's warband emblem.
Etched into the seed's flesh.
He stared.
The others remained still. Kael slowly stepped closer, breath caught.
"That's yours," he whispered. "Your brand. No one else would carve it like that."
"No one else has ever held it," Riku said. His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. In the fissure, words carried strange.
Another sound emerged—this one further in.
The group tensed. But no more beasts came.
Instead, the walls around them pulsed once. Just once.
And the bark beneath their feet shifted slightly, revealing more of the amber veins. They spiraled outward. One curl led deeper into the fissure, as if inviting them.
"Do we follow it?" Sira asked.
Kael looked to Riku.
But Riku didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he carefully plucked the seedling from the direcrawler's chest. It came free with no resistance. Warm. Still pulsing.
"This didn't grow," he said quietly. "It was remembered."
Sira stepped back. "What?"
"This beast," he said, standing, holding the seed, "was regrown from a death it already knew."
Silence.
And then Kael whispered, "It carried your memory."
They all turned then, slowly, toward the deeper tunnel. The vines there had begun to glow a little brighter, as if sensing the seed had been claimed.
A single whisper echoed through the fissure—not a word, not a voice, but a tone.
A resonance of something watching.
Riku turned toward the others, fingers closing around the seed. "Seal the upper entrance. No one comes here without my order."
"And us?" Kael asked.
"We return," Riku said. "For now."
The fissure would wait.
But something had changed.
Beasts don't kneel to monarchs.
Not unless they remember doing so before.
And this one had.
He stared once more into the dark, eyes narrowing.
It had died for him.
Again.