The cave didn't begin in darkness.
It began in dust.
Ash clung to Ivar's boots as he left the edge of Eelgrave. Behind him, the city hunched like something that had chewed its own limbs to survive. Spires crooked. Fog rust-colored. Even from a distance, it didn't shrink—it pressed.
He walked with the gait of someone already halfway gone.
The air out here had forgotten what it was supposed to carry. Not silence. Pressure. A hush that felt less like absence and more like waiting. The kind of quiet before a confession. Or a killing.
The paths weren't marked, but they pulled. Cracked stairwells. Rust-bitten bridges. Walls carved with symbols people pretended not to see.
On a stair no one used:
CLARITY DOESN'T BLEED. IT BLINDS.
He didn't stop.
But something inside him did.
Further on, half-hidden under an overturned basin:
THEY BLEED. HE WAITS.
Beneath it, old Warden glyphs had been gouged out by something crude and impatient. In their place, a newer symbol: the Emptyfang. But it had been inverted. The snout curled inward. A mouth collapsing on itself. The kind of hunger that doesn't lash out, but folds in.
The blood was still fresh. Still tacky.
Above, spiraling in broken Lowglyph, a phrase repeated as though whispered in panic:
FIND WHAT DOESN'T ROT.
Ivar stood before it longer than he meant to. He did not understand the words—but he did.
He followed—not because he believed, but because not following felt like a lie.
The city dropped behind him in fits and fragments. Smoke coils. Rooftop ruins. Eelgrave had no skyline—only a weight. And the further he walked, the more that weight trailed him like breath that wouldn't leave his throat.
The land sloped into a scar—an old quarry, or something older. Eaten by time. Not rebuilt. Not remembered.
Soot gathered in shallow drifts. Bird bones lay scattered like they'd tried to take flight after death. Ropes of wire, beads, and teeth hung between stone outcrops like crude boundaries or charms. Warning. Or invitation.
The mouth of the cave rose from the ground like a wound that refused to clot. Its lip jagged. Its throat wide. And its breath—
Stale. Not with rot, but with something preserved. Like a room sealed too long. Like memory corked in a bottle until the glass strained.
And there—
Lysa.
Barefoot. Still.
Her hair moved with the wind, but she didn't. She watched him approach without speaking. Not passive. Not hostile. Just... inevitable.
"You don't smell like grief or anger," she said.
"You smell like a locked door."
No judgment. No affection.
Just observation, as sharp and clean as the cave's edge.
He didn't answer.
Inside, the cave didn't darken.
It withdrew.
Light shrank as they passed deeper. Not eaten. Not broken. Just... absent. Fire wouldn't catch here. Heat didn't stay. The walls didn't sweat—they breathed. Dry. Hollow. Old lungs exhaling nothing.
Bones hung from the ceiling like wind chimes made by someone who'd never heard music. Hundreds. Birds—preserved and stripped. Wings sewn open with thread black as pitch. Skulls polished. Thimbles pressed into their sockets like mock crowns.
No smell of rot.
Only preparation.
He followed her without asking why. Not out of trust. Out of gravity. As if the cave had turned into a throat, and he was already past the tongue.
She stopped at a low altar built from vertebrae and knucklebones. On it: a skull. Not bird. Not beast. Not human. Something in between. The eye sockets were deeper than they should've been. The nose ridge curved inward like it wanted to hide its own face.
She turned to him.
"You saw the blood sign."
He nodded.
"And followed."
No hesitation.
"I thought maybe you'd bite the pigeon. Some do. Think it's a test."
"I knew it wasn't food."
She tilted her head, considering. "Worse. Means you read it. Means the question got inside."
From a pile of ash near the altar, she pulled a carved sliver of bone. A square with a circle nested inside.
"Do you know what this is?"
"No."
"I don't either," she said. "They molt these sometimes. The bonebirds. I think it's memory. Or maybe a false one."
She placed it beside the skull like it belonged there. Then, without looking at him:
"You move wrong."
He met her eyes.
Blank. Waiting.
"I mean that as a compliment. Most twitch when the beast comes. Pulse jumps. Breath thickens. You—" she sniffed the air, "—you're past all that. Like the thing broke through you already and left nothing to bleed."
"I didn't shift."
"You didn't need to."
She said it without reverence. Just fact.
She studied him again. Not like a person. Like a fissure. Like a structure being checked for collapse.
"You scare them."
"I don't mean to."
"That's what scares them more."
She turned and walked to the back. A linen nest tucked into the stone. She knelt beside it and pulled a shard of mirror tied to a fraying string.
"When I watched you in the pit," she said, "you didn't fight to win. You moved like someone already post-mortem. Like death wasn't a question anymore. Just a room you'd already been inside."
She offered him the mirror.
He looked.
His face—pale. Still.
But the eyes.
They didn't hold light. They refused it. Like they'd learned something too early and refused to share.
"You see it," she said.
"I see what they expect."
"They expect fire."
He turned from the mirror to the far wall. There—carved into the rock. Not with hands. With something more exact. Or more desperate.
The Emptyfang again.
But closed.
A ring of teeth turned inward.
Not screaming.
Swallowing.
"I woke to that," Lysa said.
"You draw them?"
"Not all. Some were already here. Waiting."
He stepped closer. The symbol didn't move. But something behind his eyes did. Pressure. Static. A flicker of memory he didn't own.
"This place remembers," she said.
He nodded.
"And it's remembering you."
He stayed the night.
Not because he trusted her. Not because it felt safe.
But because leaving felt like interrupting something not yet done speaking.
Lysa didn't offer comfort. She offered silence. And in this place, silence wasn't passive. It was deliberate. Sculpted.
He didn't ask for food. She didn't offer.
Hunger curled in their bellies like a third person. Unnamed. Present. Watching.
They sat near the bone chimes as the wind shifted. The birds clattered gently, not like music, but like counting.
"What are you?" she asked.
He answered without thinking. "Wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"I feel when I shouldn't. I don't when I should."
She didn't laugh. She nodded.
"I was born without a scream. Didn't cry. First time I did, I laughed instead. Broke my hand once and thought it was a joke."
"You feel pain?"
"Only when someone wants me to."
That made him look at her properly for the first time.
"You're like me," she said. "But reversed."
He thought of the closed fang again. The circle of teeth. Contained. Not tamed—restrained. A hunger aimed inward.
"You ever hear it?" he asked.
"The city?"
She nodded slowly. "In my gums. My bones. Eelgrave doesn't sing. It repeats."
"Repeats what?"
"What we don't say."
She tapped the cave floor with a single fingertip.
"It's louder here. Because this is where silence goes to rot."
When dawn came, it didn't enter the cave.
The light stopped at the threshold like it knew better.
He rose. She didn't.
Lysa sat beside the altar again, stitching something invisible into a ragged piece of cloth. Her needle: bone. Her thread—hair.
"What are you making?" he asked.
"A way out."
He blinked.
"For someone else," she added.
A beat passed.
"Maybe you."
He didn't ask how.
Not in this place.