The echo of the doors crawled around the room and settled in his ribs like a second heartbeat.

  For a moment, all Matas could see was fire.

  Not metaphor. Actual, literal fire, big enough to roast a car in. It burned in a stone pit sunk into the floor at the far end of the hall, throwing up sheets of orange and dull blue that painted everything in shifting rust.

  Shapes resolved out of the glare. People. Rows of them.

  Closest to the flames, on a low rise of carved stone that might have been a step or a dais or just a place where the rock had decided to be important, sat the ones who mattered.

  Tharel was easy to pick out. He sat like he’d been set there with a plumb bob and a level. Feet planted. Shoulders square. No wasted motion. The short sword at his hip was plain, but the way his hand rested near it said this is part of the structure, not decoration.

  To his right, half in shadow, was an older man Matas didn’t know yet, with a beard cut close to his jaw and hair gone iron-gray all over. His armor was simpler than some of the hunters, but better kept. No ragged straps. No loose plates. He watched Matas the way a foreman watched a cracked beam.

  Martuk. The name had drifted past a couple of times in the tunnels, always in the tone people reserved for inspectors and priests and bosses who never touched their own tools.

  Beyond them, on lower benches or flat stretches of floor, were half a dozen more elders, a tangle of hunters and builders, and a couple of people in heavier robes whose faces were mostly shadow and glint. Everyone else leaned on spears or walls or each other. Every head had turned when the doors boomed shut.

  Every pair of eyes was on him.

  Matas took one step forward because standing with his back against the doors felt worse. The stone under his boots was smooth from years of feet. The air here was hotter than the outer tunnels, layered with smoke and sweat and something sharp and resinous that his Chicago brain filed under incense, but meaner.

  Nobody spoke.

  A man near the back made a quick motion with his fingers toward his throat—the same sign Matas had seen at the hall outside.

  He swallowed and kept walking until he hit the invisible line where it felt like getting any closer to the fire would be a bad idea. Old wood too near a space heater. Dry rafters under a fireworks display. He stopped there and let the room look.

  Tharel broke the silence first. “Stranger,” he said. His voice carried just enough to reach the walls without shouting. “You stand.”

  Less instruction than evaluation. See if he wobbled. See where he leaned.

  “Worked up to it, yes,” Matas said, and shut his mouth before anything else fell out.

  Tharel let that hang for a breath, then turned his head. “Gerath.”

  Movement along the wall. Gerath pushed off a pillar and came forward, not in a hurry. He’d had time to wash the worst of the dust from his face and change a sleeve. The bruises on his knuckles were still that comfortable old color. His spear was in his hand, of course.

  He stopped just far enough from Matas that they’d have to cross a no-man’s-land of feet and spears to get at each other. Good planning.

  Tharel didn’t look at him. “Report.”

  Gerath squared his shoulders and spoke in his own language first. The sound came in hard consonants and hitched vowels, then the dub chased it, tripping over a few words before it caught a rhythm.

  “We walked the third ridge,” he said. “Clean line. Weathered, but set. I took the point. Snake here was third.” He jerked his chin in Matas’s direction. No real insult in the tone. Just a label he’d decided fit.

  There was a mutter from the benches. A couple of hunters shifted like that explained something.

  Tharel nodded once. “And then?”

  “Bad patch,” Gerath said. His gaze stayed on some point just past Matas’s shoulder. “Grit under a bend. Second rope. The wall leans in there. He… slipped. Stone went. He went with it. Fast.”

  The word slipped sat there between them like a loose shingle somebody was pretending wasn’t a problem.

  He didn’t say hand between my shoulders. He didn’t say second shove. Just like they’d agreed.

  “We called,” Gerath went on. “Twice. Three times. The whole wall looked ready to come with him. No click points, no safe way down. He made his own way back.”

  There was a low ripple at that. Heads turned. A couple of gazes cut to Matas and away again.

  Merrik and Serh stood to his right, just inside his peripheral. Merrik had his arms folded, weight balanced over his feet like he’d been told to stand ready for anything from applause to execution. Serh’s hands were loose at her sides, but tension ran up the line of her shoulders—held-still that said holding back was taking effort.

  Tharel finally looked at Matas. “You fell,” he said. “You climbed.” His tone made it sound like he’d already laid those bricks in his mind and was now just checking the fit.

  “That’s the shape of it,” Matas said.

  “Tell it,” said Martuk. His eyes had that light engineers got when they saw a new problem to catalog. “From you.”

  The whole room leaned a hair closer.

  “Fine,” Matas said. He took a breath. Words felt like stepping onto a roof one plank at a time, testing for give.

  “We were on the third ridge,” he said. “The path necks down where the wall leans over it. I felt the grit shift when I put my weight on. Bad line. Stone decided it’d had enough of us.”

  The dub did its best, lagging a little behind his English but tagging in a few of the simpler words—stone, bad, enough—to keep people following.

  Gerath stayed very still. Matas didn’t mention the hand. Didn’t mention the way Gerath had leaned on him that first second, like a guy pretending to steady you before he nudged you off balance. He let the shape of that sit inside his skull like a crack under fresh paint.

  “You did not answer when your line called,” Tharel said. Not a question.

  “Rock was loud,” Matas said. “And I was a little busy not dying.”

  A couple of people snorted. Not laughter. Just breath pushed out in a way that wasn’t entirely hostile.

  “And then?” Martuk asked. His fingers tapped a slow, thoughtful rhythm on his knee.

  “Then I hit a ledge I liked better than the bottom,” Matas said. “Rolled. Bounced. Lost track of the score. When things stopped moving, the way back up wasn’t obvious.”

  “You climbed,” Tharel repeated. “Alone.”

  “Not quite,” Matas said before his brain could stop him.

  That pulled attention like a nail through thin metal. Eyes sharpened. Even the robed ones shifted.

  “Companion?” Martuk asked.

  “I wouldn’t call them that. Friend of the slopes, maybe. Or someone who doesn’t like watching idiots fall wrong.”

  “Patchwork coat,” he went on. “Lean. Moved like gravity owed them money. Bow with no string on it. Pointed me at the lines the stone was lying about.”

  The dub chased that and tripped, trying to make friend, slopes, idiots into something these people had use for.

  “Wanderer.”

  The word came from somewhere behind Martuk, low and flat. It wasn’t translated. It didn’t have to be. The way the room reacted said enough. A few elders went very still. One of the robed figures turned their head just enough that the fire caught on a metal band at their throat. Merrik made a soft sound in his chest that could’ve been agreement or concern.

  “You saw a wanderer,” Martuk said. His gaze had narrowed, interest sharpening.

  “They saw me,” Matas corrected. “I was mostly busy bleeding on their mountain.”

  “What did they say?” Tharel asked.

  “That Samhal likes its ledgers. That it’s not fond of wanderers. That I’d survive longer if the only strange thing people here had to decide about was my eye.”

  His left eye pulsed at the word, pressure building behind the socket in a slow, grinding turn.

  Tharel’s jaw tightened a fraction. “Look at me,” he said.

  Every instinct Matas had screamed bad idea. He looked anyway.

  Tharel studied his face for a long moment, then angled his head with two fingers on his jaw until the left eye caught the firelight full on. Heat rolled against his cheek. The pain behind the eye ratcheted up another notch.

  He tipped Matas’s chin toward another of the elders. Then another. Expressions shifted minute degrees.

  A murmur rippled through the hall. A few more fingers brushed throats. One hunter spat silently into the embers at the edge of the pit.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Void-eye,” someone whispered.

  The screw inside his skull turned again.

  For a heartbeat, the fire room blurred.

  Not like normal vertigo. Not like the level-up hits. This was sharp and directional. The edges of the room drew in, lines of force snapping tight between people.

  Tharel glowed hotter than the rest—not in color but in weight—Matas’s brain insisted that if he moved, the whole load path of the room would shift. Martuk was a quieter pressure, dense and coiled. Gerath was a jagged spike off to one side, all angles and bad joins. Other faces smudged to dim shapes, like background clutter on a roof you only half cared about as long as it held.

  His breath hitched.

  A thin, clinical line cut across the top of his vision, over the mailbox, which had gone from lazy pulse to a fast, stuttering twitch.

  Ocular anomaly expression exceeded ambient tolerance.

  Subject unstable.

  The words were flat and indifferent. Like a supervisor marking a note on a form he’d never signed.

  Then the line vanished. The mailbox flag slid back into its four-count, as if nothing had happened.

  Matas staggered a half-step. Tharel’s fingers tightened on his jaw and turned his head away from the fire.

  “Enough,” he said.

  The world snapped back to normal. The fire was just fire again. People were just people. His eye felt like someone had shoved a thumb behind it and left it there.

  The silence this time tasted different. Less what is he doing here, and more what have the Hills dumped on our floor now?

  “You saw that,” one of the elders said. Her hair was braided back and threaded with bits of bone; her eyes had the steady, tired weight of somebody who both worshipped and cursed the same thing every day.

  “We all saw it,” Martuk said quietly.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and really looked at Matas. Not just at his eye. At his whole shape, like he was mapping out where stress would travel if he put a load on him.

  “The Hills mark you once,” he said. “Integration. That is expected. They do it again, here, in our hall, in front of our Heart?” He shook his head once. “That is a complication.”

  “I’m right here,” Matas said. “You can say freak if you want. Saves time.”

  A few people flinched at the word, like he’d spat near a shrine.

  “And still his tongue makes jokes,” someone muttered from the benches.

  “The alternative is screaming,” he said. “I’m trying this one first.”

  A sound pushed up out of him that wanted to be a laugh and came out closer to a cough. It scraped at his throat and left it raw.

  His vision wobbled again, not from the eye this time but from sudden, sharp homesickness.

  For one heartbeat, the fire pit wasn’t the fire pit.

  It was Alea’s kitchen. Steam rolled up from a big dented pot on their stove, carrying the smell of beets and dill and beef bones she’d coaxed every last bit of flavor out of. The windows were fogged halfway up with winter, the rest a dark smear of Chicago evening.

  Their smallest dog—a mutt that looked like someone had poorly assembled three different breeds—dozed under the table, belly up, paws twitching as he chased something in a dream. The counter was a war zone of vegetable scraps and dirty bowls. Alea moved through it like she’d mapped every hazard years ago.

  She wore his oldest flannel, sleeves rolled, hair yanked up into a knot that would slide out halfway through dinner. There was a line of red across her thumb where she’d lost a fight with the knife earlier. She’d put a bandage on it, badly.

  “You’re tracking mud,” she said without looking up, tapping her spoon against the rim of the pot in that sharp little rhythm that meant she was trying not to worry.

  “Long day,” he said. “Heard your stew has a strict dress code now?”

  “Boots off,” she said. “Then stop working.”

  He made a show of toeing his boots off without using his hands, wobbling theatrically. The dog thumped his tail twice in sleepy approval.

  “If I sit,” she said, “I’ll fall asleep, and you still won’t have eaten.” Her eyes flicked up then, sharp and fond at the same time. “You look like a man who lost an argument with a chimney.”

  “You should see the chimney,” he said. “Not sure the house is OSHA-compliant anymore.”

  She sighed, that long, familiar sound that was equal parts exasperation and I love you and I can’t believe I put up with you.

  “You promised,” she’d said, back when they’d first started stacking their lives together. “No cowboy moves. No solo ladder stunts. Three points of contact, always.”

  “Always,” he’d said. And meant it. Standing there in the warm, with the dog and the stew and the noise of some terrible true crime podcast burbling from her phone, he couldn’t imagine a world where he wouldn’t keep that promise.

  The world didn’t ask him.

  Someone cleared their throat.

  The fire snapped back into focus. The smell of stew turned back into woodsmoke and something sharp and strange. The dog under the table was a bare patch of stone where ashes had been swept aside.

  Alea was gone. Had been gone since the road on a Tuesday he still couldn’t name without his chest going tight.

  He blinked hard. The left eye ached. The right wanted to cry. Neither had the moisture for it.

  “You fade,” Serh said quietly, from his right. Her voice had a different edge than in the tunnels. Not just duty. Something like concern, buried under stone.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Mostly.”

  Martuk watched the exchange with interest. “You have a bond,” he said, more to himself. “To another place. Another life.”

  “Wife. Dogs. Mortgage. The works.”

  Martuk sat back. “The Hills took that. They chose you anyway.”

  “Nice,” Matas said. “Always wanted to be a raffle prize.”

  “Enough,” Tharel snapped, and the word cracked across the room like a dropped board. “We are not here to argue theology. We are here to decide if this man is work, risk, or waste.”

  He looked around the circle of elders.

  “Gerath says he slipped,” Tharel went on. “The slopes say he climbed. The wanderers meddle. The Hills mark his eye again in our hall. We cannot pretend he is nothing.”

  “Work,” Martuk said immediately. His gaze never left Matas. “The Heart bound him. The Hills keep pushing weight through him. To discard that is waste.”

  “Risk,” said the woman with bone in her braids. Her gaze flicked to the left eye and away. “If the void in him leaks into the Heart, all our ledgers go black. Two winters from now, we’ll be counting cracks in our own ceilings.”

  “Waste,” someone else muttered. Quiet, but not quiet enough.

  Tharel let them run for a few breaths, voices overlapping. Fragments landed through the translation: void-eye, monastery, seals, Hills due.

  That last one carried particular weight. People shut up a little faster after it.

  “Hills due,” Tharel repeated, more to the room than to Matas. “You know this saying?”

  “No,” Matas said. “Sounds like back rent.”

  Tharel didn’t smile. “You fall,” he said. “The Hills decide not to finish the work. Your line comes back one short. Our patrol must answer for that, to the stone and to the elders. The wanderer meddles, takes their own share of the ledger. And now the Heart shows its teeth when it looks at your eye.”

  He spread a hand, palm-up, callus catching the firelight.

  “The Hills are owed,” he said. “Work. Risk. Something. Call it Hills due.”

  His ribs felt tight. The memory of Alea’s kitchen clung to the edges of his mind like steam on glass.

  “You want me to pay it,” Matas said.

  “Who else?” Martuk asked mildly.

  “There are options,” the bone-braid woman said. “The Hills give signs. Sometimes the safest way to keep the slopes quiet is to cut the crack out and let the gap close.”

  Stone will take care of that, if we let it. Gerath’s words from the gate echoed in Matas’s head.

  Matas’s stomach lurched.

  “We tried that,” Merrik said, speaking up for the first time. Voice tight. He jerked his chin downslope. “The Hills sent him back.”

  There was a low mutter at that. Several heads turned toward Merrik like they hadn’t expected him to volunteer.

  Serh’s jaw worked once. She didn’t add anything, but the set of her shoulders said she wasn’t eager to throw him off another edge just to see what would happen.

  Tharel drummed his fingers once against the stone arm of his seat. Then he stopped and looked at Matas.

  “Do you understand?” he asked. Slowly enough that the dub turned the words into something close to English all on its own.

  “You’re saying I owe you,” Matas said. “For not letting your mountains and your men kill me properly the first time.”

  Tharel inclined his head a millimeter. “You are here because of our walls, our fire, our watch. Not because the void likes you. Not because the wanderers care. Samhal keeps you breathing. Samhal will not do that for free.”

  “What’s the bill?” Matas asked.

  Martuk leaned in. “We have cracks,” he said. “In the old seals. In the lines that hold back things we would rather not see. The Hills are tired. The monastery…” He glanced upward, toward stone none of them could see. “It groans when we sleep.”

  “You want me to crawl around under your haunted basement and tap the joists,” Matas said.

  Martuk frowned at the dub, then huffed a quiet, humorless breath when it managed to deliver haunted and basement in a way that made a couple of hunters blink.

  “Yes,” Martuk said simply. “We want you where the stone is already wrong. Where your anomaly will either help us see the failure early, or make the collapse happen while we are watching. Not later. Not on our children.”

  There was a murmur of agreement at that. Cold comfort.

  “And if I say no?”

  The room went very still.

  “Then you walk,” Tharel said. “Out past our walls. Past our ropes. The Hills take their due without our help, or the void does. Maybe you find another wanderer. Maybe not.”

  It was almost generous, the way he said it. Not a threat. Just a forecast.

  Matas thought of the slab he’d woken up on, alone under a sky the wrong color. The wolves. The feel of teeth scraping bone. The way his own body had turned against him when the system rang him like a bell.

  He thought of Alea’s kitchen again, of steam and warmth and a dog under his hand, and the promise he’d made about no cowboy moves.

  Seemed he was going to break that one either way.

  “What’s behind Door Number Three?” he asked. “Keep hauling rocks and patching leaks until I die of something boring?”

  Nobody laughed.

  “No,” Martuk said. “There is work, and there is waste. We do not have room for a third.”

  His wrist ached. His left eye felt like it had a live coal behind it. The mailbox flag ticked along that steady four-count, as if it were logging each second he took to answer.

  He looked at Merrik. Merrik met his gaze, jaw tight, eyes saying don’t be an idiot but also don’t make me watch you walk out alone.

  Serh’s stare was flatter, but there was something under it. Not sympathy. Something closer to respect wrapped in worry.

  He thought of Alea telling him to stop working when the mud on his boots hit the linoleum. Of the way she’d looked at him when he came home from a twelve-hour day with a new bruise, and how she’d said you can’t keep paying your body out like this and expect it to last.

  Apparently he still hadn’t learned.

  He looked back at Tharel and Martuk.

  “I’ll work,” he said. Voice rough. “You show me your bad lines, I’ll tell you when they’re going to fail. You send me where the Hills groan, I’ll listen. But I’m not doing it blind.”

  Martuk’s brows rose a fraction. “What payment do you think you can ask?”

  “Answers,” Matas said. “You have elders. Stories. Whatever that crystal thing under your feet is. I want a shot at understanding what dragged me here. How it ties to your monastery. Whether there’s any way to send a man back the way he came.”

  A rustle ran around the room. The robed figures stiffened. Tharel’s hand finally moved to rest on the hilt of his sword, not in threat, but like he’d just remembered it was there.

  “You ask for gods’ business,” the bone-braid woman said.

  “I’m a roofer,” Matas said. “I ask what holds the roof up. You want me to work on it, I deserve to know whether the whole building is supposed to be here.”

  Martuk weighed that. You could almost see the math running behind his eyes—risk of giving him scraps of truth vs. risk of having him walk around under their seals with nothing but guesses.

  He nodded once. “Some answers,” he said. “In time. If you live long enough to make them worth the cost.”

  Not the deal he’d wanted. But it was the only one on the table.

  Tharel looked around the hall one last time. “Work, risk, or waste?”

  Voices answered, overlapping. Work. Risk. Work. Waste came from somewhere at the back and died quickly under the glare it earned.

  “So,” Tharel said softly. “The Hills due is work.”

  He stood. The room shifted when he did, the way a structure shifted when you moved its central column.

  “By will of the elders, Matas of No-House is bound to Samhal as hill-hand. He will walk the bad lines. He will stand where the stone is wrong. He will answer to Tharel of the Gates and to Martuk of the Heart for what he sees.”

  Bound landed in his ears like nailed, not hugged.

  The mailbox flickered. For a heartbeat, a thin line of text edged into being.

  Contracted risk-for-shelter conditions updated.

  Then it was gone. No chime. No fanfare. Just a notation he hadn’t agreed to in writing.

  The room exhaled.

  Two hunters stepped forward. Not Gerath. Not Merrik or Serh. Strangers with spears and faces that said they’d rather be anywhere else.

  Merrik got there first anyway, slipping in at his right elbow like he belonged there. “Hill-hand,” he said under his breath. “Congratulations or condolences. I haven’t decided.”

  Serh took his other side. Her grip on his jacket was light, but there. Duty in the bones.

  They turned him toward the doors. Behind them, the fire hissed and cracked, and somewhere underneath its noise, Matas caught it again—the faint, deep hum of the mountain, the same one he’d felt through his bunk and through his boots on the slopes. Only now it sounded different. Less like something large adjusting its weight in the dark, and more like something waiting to see what he’d do next.

  Martuk’s words followed him through the opening doors like smoke: We want you where the stone is already wrong.

  He was starting to think the stone wasn’t the only thing here that qualified.