The wind changed before the land did.
It slipped in sideways across the flats, thin as thread and tasting faintly of copper—an old, metallic tang that made Torian's teeth ache. Skarn slowed without being told. Every time a gust combed across his fur the beast flinched, not from fear, but from the way the air moved wrong here, as if it were flowing through cracks instead of open sky.
By noon the ground had begun to tilt, the world ahead rippling with heat, and then the first voices rose—soft at first, almost imagined, a distant choir that wasn't a choir at all. Skarn lifted his head and huffed uneasily. Torian stopped, hand on the beast's shoulder.
"Do you hear it?" he asked.
Skarn's ear flicked. He didn't need to nod.
They crested a last low ridge and the canyon opened beneath them: a vast gash in the earth that split the plateau in jagged, layered walls of honeyed stone and black-veined basalt, its depth lost to haze. Dozens—no, hundreds—of side vents riddled the cliff faces, perfectly round mouths that chewed the wind and sang. The sound wasn't one note. It was many—pipes and throats, reeds and hollows—a living instrument built by time and pressure and whatever patient river had carved the first scar and died for it. Sunlight slid over the far wall and pooled in bronze bands. Shadows lay like stacked ink in the deeper clefts. Even at this distance Torian could feel the air pulling, a tide going not toward the canyon, but into it.
Skarn planted himself and spread his stance, claws digging furrows in the gritty ledge. The Spiral in Torian's chest answered the pull with a steady, alert thrum. Not warning. Invitation with teeth.
He shrugged the pack from his shoulders and unrolled the glider: ribbed ash struts, stitched hide, spiral-etched rigging his own hands had tuned a dozen times since the first flight. The canvas snapped once in the gust, wanting sky. Torian checked each tying loop by feel—thumb on knot, breath measured—and looked at Skarn.
"Glide the line," he said. "Then we climb the rest."
Skarn's golden eyes narrowed in approval that wasn't quite approval and turned into a silent promise: if you fall, I jump.
They chose a lip where the stone curled outward like the rim of a cup and the whistling wasn't shrieking. Torian clipped in, ran two light steps, and let the canyon take him.
It did.
The air wasn't air anymore; it was muscle. It flexed and caught the glider's belly and sheeted them sideways in a long, slow slide that made Torian's stomach lift. He corrected, let the Spiral ride his pulse, and leaned. The canvas groaned, the frame complained, then settled into the organ-deep breath of the canyon's own rhythm. He skimmed past a row of vents that sang in a minor, mournful scale and felt their pull against his ribs. The glider's shadow slipped across banded stone and vanished into a throat-darker seam. Far below, the floor flashed in the gaps—patches of pale silt, a braided silver thread of water, a scatter of wind-carved pillars leaning toward one another like conspirators.
Skarn launched from the lip a breath after Torian, landing three terraces down on a natural stair no wider than a wagon. His impact sent dust in a halo that the canyon inhaled greedily. He gathered himself and leapt again, dropping a level at a time, a dark, precise thunder in a place that hated noise.
Torian followed the wind's song to where it thinned, reading the drawn-out vowels of the vents as he would the lines of old script. He bled height. The glider's canvas trembled. A last curl of lift, a short runout along a spine of rock barely wider than his boots, and he folded the wings in a few practiced motions as Skarn padded up to meet him, breathing hard, whiskers rimed with silt.
They stood a long moment, saying nothing, listening.
The canyon answered.
It wasn't welcome, exactly. But it wasn't threat.
They made their way inward along a ledge that snaked between shallow alcoves. The rock chewed Torian's boots. Twice, dust avalanched from above, a low hiss like something trying to speak with a torn throat. They descended where they could—old narrow stairs cut into stone, ropes turned to powder by decades of wind, natural chimneys that dropped them by blind, sliding feet to new shelves. Skarn climbed carefully, claws finding purchase in seams the width of knives. Torian moved with the particular patience he'd learned in ruins: never rush, test every third step, make no promises to gravity.
They reached a wide bench halfway down where the canyon wall had bulged outward then broken away ages ago. The bench didn't look natural.
It wasn't.
Stone had been worked here—smoothed, scored. Lines of gouges, faint as scars beneath a healed burn, wrapped the bench in arcs that mirrored the wind's curve. Torian touched a line. His fingertips came away gritty and cool.
A drift of sound grew behind them. Not the canyon's. Flutes and reed-pipes, high-pitched and uncertain; the hollow thud of hand-drums; voices calling not language but cadence. Skarn turned, head low. Torian raised a hand to calm him, though his own heartbeat climbed.
Figures stepped out from a cleft two shelves above: thin to the wind, wrapped in layered skins and woven strips of reed dyed rust and umber. Their hair was braided into long, flat coils that lay like ropes down their backs. Masks covered their mouths—porous bone latticework engraved with spirals that weren't Spiral, smaller, tighter, like the numerals of a meticulous god. Children no taller than Torian's waist moved among them, each carrying a wind chime of shell and glass that rang soft with every footfall.
A woman descended the goat-thin path toward them. The others fanned, made a semicircle with the canyon wall at their backs. The woman's eyes were pale as scraped bone. She lifted her reed-flute, blew four notes in the canyon's minor key, and the wind… paused.
Enough to notice.
She lowered the flute. "We heard you catch the breath," she said, voice scraped rough by a lifetime of dust.
Torian bowed—no deep courtly thing, just the acknowledgment his father taught him to give anyone whose home could kill you. "We listen as we can," he said.
The woman's gaze took Skarn in at a glance, not a flinch in it, only a minute re-measuring of distance, then returned to Torian's chest. She didn't look at his face again. The Spiral pulsed slowly beneath his shirt, felt not seen, and Torian knew it was like laying an ember on a cold hearth. It told more than he wanted.
"You are the boy who walks with a wound that makes a light," the woman said. "And the beast with iron in its claws, who does not roar at thunder. I am Sora of the Ryvane. You're a half-day late."
Torian blinked. "Late?"
"For the Crossing," she said simply, as if he had been expected since the canyon was born. "But the wind came heavy. It has chewed four of ours. So perhaps it waited for your feet."
Her people shifted uneasily. Skarn blew a slow breath through his nose. Torian glanced at the bench's faint gouges again, the way they matched the canyon's song.
"What is the Crossing?" he asked, though he already knew the answer in one shape: a place where a seal should be. A trial. A cost.
Sora's mouth worked under the mask as if deciding whether to spare him the telling. "The canyon takes what it wants," she said. "It gives back what it has forgotten. Once each seventh month, when the breath grows thick and the Throats sing in the elder key, we carry memory to the far hall and ask it to return a name. Sometimes we get it. Sometimes we get a body. Sometimes we get wind. You carry a stranger flame and a familiar weight. It is either luck for us or hunger for the canyon."
Torian felt the Spiral lift inside him, a long, slow inhale. Skarn's shoulder touched his. He said, "We came for a seal."
Sora didn't blink. "Seals are for rivers and walls," she said. "Or for beasts. But yes. There is a thing the stone holds when the breath is right. A ring of cold fire. Sometimes it wakes. Your kind like to put it on sticks."
Her eyes flicked to Torian's pack. Heat rose under his collar. How much had rumor bent itself into truth before they arrived?
"We don't take what's not owed," he said.
"You're in a place that burns debt," Sora replied. "Everything owed here is paid in breath. Come."
She turned and the Ryvane moved like schooling fish, slipping past Skarn without looking, a path opening and closing around the beast's haunches with unstudied practice. Torian fell in with them. Skarn walked just off his shoulder, massive and silent, the only thing that didn't flicker.
They entered the cleft: a slot carved narrow by water long gone, the walls slick where wind had polished them. The Ryvane had left a lace of rope bridges and pinned ladders in places where the canyon bit the path away. Children went first, bare feet precise on the rope rails, chimes ringing in gentle dissonance. Adults followed with bundles wrapped in oilcloth and bone-framed drums at their sides. Torian and Skarn moved last, the glider folded tight across Torian's back, its ribs tapping his spine with every breath like a second heartbeat.
The cleft widened into a long, cavelike hall with one open side that looked out over the canyon's center well. Sun here came in on an angle, a blade that cut the dust and turned it into shining motes. Wind flowed through the hall in organ-deep pulses. The Ryvane had built into the stone a tiered village of sorts: shelves cut for sleeping, alcoves to eat in, a dozen hanging frameworks where reeds dried in tidy bundles. Bone-wind harps groaned from hooks when the gusts were strong. The smell was tannin and dust and the faint sweetness of boiled sap.
Sora led them to the hall's far end, where a wide throat opened in the wall: an almost-perfect circle big enough for Skarn to shoulder through sideways. It breathed, a low, inward draw that never exhaled, tugging at hair and cloth in a steady, patient pull.
"The Many-Throated keep the oldest breath," Sora said quietly. "We build our words along it. We keep our dead in it, so their names don't blow away. The Crossing is through it. You'll go with us. Or you will not leave at all. Those are the canyon's two doors."
Torian looked at the opening. The Spiral beat once, heavy, and then steadied. He nodded.
Skarn huffed and pressed his head into Torian's shoulder so hard it almost knocked him off balance. Torian scratched the beast's cheek, then palmed his jaw and leaned his forehead to Skarn's for a breath. "Stay close," he whispered. "But if the wind takes me, don't fight it."
Skarn pulled back and gave him a look that said you're a fool and I love you and also no.
Sora didn't pretend not to see. She lifted a hand, and two Ryvane boys ran up, carrying a coil of woven reed rope flecked with iron rings. "Belt-lines," she said. "Tie in. If you think the rope is keeping you safe, you will die. The line is for the body, not the mind."
Torian took one end. The rope felt alive in his hands, the reed fibers humming with the canyon's breath. He looped it around his waist twice, quick and firm, and buckled on the iron ring. The second line went around Skarn's chest, threaded between his forelegs and under his wings, a harness he accepted with resignation and a growl like a curse.
The Ryvane tied themselves in pairs and threes. Children went between elders. Sora tied the end of her line to the ring at Torian's waist. He stared. She met his eyes calmly. "I don't trust your footing," she said. "I trust your stubbornness."
He didn't argue.
They stepped into the throat.
At once the world narrowed: sound tunneled, light thinned. The air was not empty space; it was a slow river dragging at them, pulling in, always in. The throat's walls were a palimpsest of carven lines and shallow cups, old handholds worn to silk. The floor sloped gently, then more, then became steps cut with a mason's patience. The breath at their backs grew stronger. Torian set his boots to the rhythm of it: inhale, step, brace—exhale (that wasn't there), wait, inhale—step. Sora's weight on the line was steady, the confidence of someone who'd done this walk more times than she'd had winters. Skarn moved crabwise, pressed to one wall, claws finding seams, breath slow, golden eyes slitted against grit that wanted to sting. Children's chimes rang behind, discordant and brave.
They reached the throat's bend, where the circle kinked ten degrees like a spine with a healed break, and the sound changed—deeper, older, a note you couldn't hear so much as shoulder. Torian felt the Spiral answer. A coolness spread from his breastbone like fingers splaying across a hot plate, and the canyon's pull—not weaker—made sense for a moment. Not hunger. Function. A vast thing breathing the world.
Beyond the bend the throat nearly closed. A thin silt lay on the floor in patterns of ridged crescents, each one delicate as a fossil, carved by wind and settled like the skin of cooling milk. Sora raised her hand. Everyone froze. She blew a single, rich note on her reed flute. The silt trembled and lifted in a rippling sheet, the patterns erasing themselves soundlessly and reforming a few feet farther down as if they'd simply decided they lived there now.
"Listen," Sora said softly. "It is unmaking and making."
They moved, boots placed between crescents, breath matched to the throat's. Torian found himself less in a place than in a creature. Even Skarn began to move to the rhythm, shoulders rolling, claws set when the throat drew hardest. The rope hummed constantly at their waists, the iron rings clicking quietly like teeth.
The throat ended in a hall. It wasn't carved; it had been polished by centuries of wind and the backs of knees and palms. The ceiling bellied. The far wall, a long arc, was marked with circles—hundreds, maybe thousands—like coins set into stone, each one inscribed with a tight spiral and lines of script Sora read with her fingertips, murmuring names as she passed. Torian felt each name like a pressure change in his ears. Skarn turned his head away.
"The Hall of Kept Breath," Sora said. "We hang no bodies here. Only what the wind gave back. Names. Ours. Unbroken."
Torian touched a circle. The stone under his fingers was cool, then warm, then nothing at all. The Spiral in his chest fluttered once. He felt a woman's laughter, a dry, bright sound. He withdrew his hand.
At the hall's center the floor fell away into a shaft the width of a house, its sides smoothed to mirror sheen. From it came the canyon's deepest note, the one Torian had felt in his bones on the ledge above. The Ryvane stood around it at a careful distance. Children set their chimes down on the floor. Elders unwrapped the bundles: woven reed spindles, river-polished stones etched with script, a small, carefully sealed jar of ash. Sora set her flute aside and looked at Torian.
"You walk with us until the middle," she said. "Then the canyon will ask for you. You give it what you carry. If it accepts, it will give something back. If it refuses—" she glanced into the shaft "—you will not be the first."
Torian untied the Spiral rod from his pack. Three rings burned faint and steady along its length; the fourth space remained a dull, patient gray, a bruise that hadn't yet bloomed. He held the rod at his side, not offering it, simply not hiding it. The Ryvane didn't flinch. Whatever they believed him, it wasn't the first time they had stood in a room with a thing that wanted to be a god.
Sora stepped to the shaft's lip and blew three low notes. The hall's note answered, a harmonic that made the air shimmer. The Ryvane spoke then, in a language of rising and falling syllables that matched the canyon's breath. Torian didn't understand the words, but he understood the purpose: names, offered and remembered in order. Skarn lay down, chin on paws, but his eyes never left Torian's hands.
The wind in the shaft deepened. Sora lifted her palm.
"Now."
Torian stepped forward. He felt the Spiral divide and align, as if it had laid a clean edge across itself. In the shaft something turned. Not a mechanism. A choice.
He held the rod before him, not over the shaft, not away. He thought of Kaelgor's voice on the ash ridge—too dangerous to kill now—and packed that memory like a rock into a pocket and let it be a weight but not a chain.
"I don't take for myself," he said into the wind. "I don't take for anyone who wants a crown. I take to keep a promise my father laid in my hands: that fire guards what can't guard itself."
The canyon listened with stone. The wind rose. Dust lifted in streamers and braided itself into ropes that hung in the shaft without falling. The first rope touched the rod and hissed, a sound like water on iron. Torian nearly drew back. He didn't.
"Skarn," he said softly, not looking.
The beast huffed and stood. The Ryvane leaned away. Sora did not.
Torian reached out with his other hand. The Spiral burned in his palm, a soft, steady heat. He put his hand into the rope of wind.
It took.
Not skin. Not blood. Heat. It pulled a thread of fire from the Spiral, and Torian bit down hard enough on his tongue to taste copper. Sora's flute moved—not to play, but to be ready—but she didn't lift it.
The rope wound around the rod's empty place. It sank slowly into the wood, not cutting, not searing; it sank like cold into bone. The rod rang once, a clear, bell-bright note that cut through every other sound in the hall. Ryvane children startled and then laughed because they were afraid and pretended not to be. Skarn's ears flicked back, then forward.
The rope withdrew. The canyon exhaled a fraction. The fourth ring on the rod glowed a deep, stormy blue—no fire color Torian had seen before—and then brightened to clean silver. He flexed his hand. His palm was unmarked. His chest ached, but not with loss. A line had been added to a circle.
Sora lowered her flute. Her pale eyes softened. Someone behind her—one of the boys who carried the rope—let out a whoop before an elder smacked him lightly on the head.
"You took it without stealing it," Sora said. "That is not what we expected."
"You kept your names," Torian answered.
The hall's wind eased to its constant murmur. The Ryvane began to move again—children retying chimes, elders packing the bundles that had become lighter in small, secret ways. Torian stood a last moment at the shaft and let the canyon's breath wash over him. Somewhere in the deep a lower note answered, a tone so low it wasn't a tone, only a memory of one. The Spiral in his chest matched it for a breath.
When they turned back, the Ryvane were waiting by the throat's mouth. Sora stood apart, reed flute at her side. She looked at Skarn as if she'd decided something and didn't like it but would do it anyway.
"You can stay until the evening breath cools," she said. "We will feed you reed bread and thorn-berry syrup. We will set your beast where he can watch the canyon and not chew the children. Then you will go."
"We don't overstay," Torian said.
Sora stepped closer. The wind lifted a strand of her hair and laid it across her mask. "The breath spoke once, when the canyon first learned words," she said. "It said there would be a time when a fire walked with a beast and a stranger from a people who eat thought—" her eyes glazed a little, as if watching something Torian couldn't "—and the breath would learn a new name somewhere between them. You have two. You will have the third."
"Karnis," Torian murmured without meaning to, the name a stone in his mouth and a warm weight in his chest.
Sora tilted her head. "That is the thought-eater's name," she said calmly. "He is walking to meet you. Don't make him walk farther than he must."
Torian swallowed. "We won't."
They ate with the Ryvane at low tables carved into the stone, fraying reed mats under their legs. Skarn received a whole dried river fish and chewed it bones and all, the crunching so loud a toddler stared and then tried to copy, earning an exasperated scold and a laugh from five places at once. A girl no more than seven pressed her wind chime into Torian's hands, solemn as a priest. He shook it once, gently. It rang a perfect fifth. She nodded, satisfied, and reclaimed it.
Sora walked with Torian to the hall's mouth when the light had slid down to the canyon floor and gone copper again.
"You'll climb at night?" she asked.
"We'll sleep up a level and take first light," Torian said. "The glider doesn't love heat."
Sora eyed the folded canvas. "It loves something," she said. "It wants to be a bird even though it is a coat. Make sure it remembers it is a coat."
He smiled despite himself. "I will."
She touched his shoulder with two fingers—light, like confirming he was real—and stepped back. "Your flame is not like the ones who came before," she said. "Theirs walked ahead of them and expected the world to move. Yours walks beside you and expects you to move."
"That's because mine answers to a name," Torian said. "Not a throne."
"Good," Sora said, and turned away before praise could make a fool of either of them.
They bedded on the bench shelf where they'd first met the Ryvane, under an overhang that cupped the wind and let it hum them toward sleep. Torian lay on his side with his hand on Skarn's ribs and felt the beast's breath, long and even, the canyon's note woven inside it now like a thread. He thought of Kaelgor's crack in his helm, of the cold promise in his voice, of the silver ring on the rod that was not a crown and not a chain and not forgiveness. He thought of Karnis walking somewhere north, stride steady, tail like a metronome, eyes on a horizon Torian hadn't learned to see.
He slept.
They climbed in blue light, when the canyon's breath was slow and almost gentle. Sora's people watched from the hall's mouth, masks lifted to drink the morning. Torian set the glider and rode two wide, lazy circles to climb a terrace where the wind rose clean. Skarn leapt the stairs, claws biting, hindquarters coiling, tail balancing as if it had always belonged to a cliff-born cat. Twice Torian braced the belt-line and took Skarn's weight at a bad angle, rope burning his palms, the beast snarling in pain the canyon swallowed whole. They reached the upper benches by the time the bronze lay heavy on the far wall again. The last runout was narrow and cruel. The glider thumped once, hard, and then they were on solid ground, the canyon a song behind them that would never leave their ears.
On the rim the world opened, not different, just wider. The flats lay east, heat mirage dancing, and beyond them a line of darker hills like stitches. Torian folded the glider carefully, set it behind Skarn's withers, and hooked it twice and a third time for luck. He took the rod from his pack and looked at the four lights along its length—gold, ember, dusk-blue, and now silver-white—each one steady in its place, not jostling, not arguing, simply there. A bar of light fell along his forearm and the Spiral under his skin glowed in answer, then eased.
Skarn nudged his hip. Torian scratched him without looking. "Four," he said quietly. "Two more."
The wind at his back shifted, colder for a breath. Not canyon wind. River wind from no river. Torian glanced over his shoulder without meaning to, toward the way they'd come.
He didn't see Kaelgor.
But he felt the absence of a presence, like a pressure you don't notice until it lifts.
"Let the world believe in you," the ash-ridge voice whispered out of memory. "I'll be waiting at the end."
"Then wait," Torian said aloud, not defiant, simply tired and sure. "We'll be there."
Skarn huffed and swung his head toward the east. Torian followed his gaze. A dot moved along the horizon, not bird, not wind devil. It flickered once with violet, then steadied. Torian's mouth went dry in a way that wasn't fear.
"Karnis," he said.
The beast rumbled, low and pleased.
Torian shouldered his pack, checked each strap by habit he couldn't break now if he wanted to, and set his palm briefly on the silver ring on the rod. It hummed through bone and into the Spiral, a note he recognized now as the canyon's own: not a gift, not a weapon, a kept breath given name.
He started walking.
Skarn fell in beside him.
Behind them, far below, the Ryvane's flutes lifted four notes into the wind, and the canyon answered, a long, satisfied sigh that sounded, for once, like thanks.