Silence had a clock. The bone-resin on Li Tian's soles was wearing thin, every scuff and slide now a potential death sentence. The forest itself was against him.
It was not a forest. It was a back.
The ground was not ground. It was the back of a being so vast its ribs were the groves of bone-white trees, its plates the hills that tilted with a low, tectonic groan. When it shifted, dust lifted in perfect, expanding rings. The canopy of clacking branches was the chatter of its teeth. He was a flea on a slumbering leviathan.
He stood frozen, attuning his senses. Beneath the frantic beat of his own heart, he felt it—a deeper, slower rhythm. A double beat. The colossus had its own pulse, a seismic inhale and exhale that made the very air thicken and thin. He aligned his Vein Step to the trough of the exhale—the moment the "ground" was most stable—and moved. It was like walking on the back of a breathing dragon.
In a deep cleft between two "hills," he found a cluster of pale, crystalline marrow-salt nodules. He crushed one in his palm. It didn't dissolve, but turned to a fine, desiccating powder that sucked the moisture from his skin. He blew the powder into the air around him. It hung for a moment, a faint, shimmering veil that muted his scent and the dampness of his breath. A temporary cloak—a dozen breaths at most.
It bought him seconds. A hunting cell of three Scarlet-Furred Apes emerged from the fog, their movements unnervingly silent. They communicated with soft taps on bone trunks and complex drumming against their own chests, triangulating his position. They tried to herd him toward a field of dry, unstable rib cages.
He refused the funnel, leading them instead onto a vast, tilting plate. The colossus chose that moment to exhale deeply. The plate slanted, becoming a steep slope. Ribs from a nearby grove avalanched down with a sound like a mountain of pottery shattering.
One ape, agile and enraged, closed the distance, its fist a hammer aimed at his skull. Cornered against a shifting bone spur, Li Tian had no choice. He met the blow with a pinpoint devour on his forearm.
The backlash was a hook of cold fire in his muscle, a metallic tang flooding his mouth. He spiral-bled it even as he pivoted, using the ape's own momentum to shove it off-balance. The creature stumbled into the path of the sliding rib avalanche. A sharp crack, and it was buried, its signal cut off. The cost was a deep, throbbing numbness in his arm.
As he moved past the site of the skirmish, his palm brushed a massive plate covered in eroded glyphs. The ring on his finger pulsed—not a warning, but a chime of recognition. A ghost of an image flashed in his mind: stars falling, this colossal form a battlefield, a silent tomb for an ancient war. A star-era remnant. The knowledge was a weight, not an answer.
A faint crrrk pricked his ear—the distant crackle of talisman paper touching bone. Somewhere in the fog, the polite hunter was still writing the script.
His eyes, sharpened by survival, found the exit. Between two massive, breathing plates, a fissure opened with each full exhalation, revealing a glimpse of a darker, narrower passage below—a lower vein conduit. It was his way in. He calculated the rhythm, preparing to sprint and leap on the next exhale.
He committed, muscles coiling as the colossus began its mighty exhalation, the fissure starting to widen.
Then the rhythm broke.
The colossus inhaled early. The suction reversed, not pulling him down, but threatening to slam the immense plates together, crushing him into paste. His planned leap was suddenly a fight for his life on a closing, grinding stone throat.