The east stair didn’t care that I’d just spent the morning letting a system rearrange my bones.

  Stone steps dropped away into a narrow throat of their own, spiraling down around a shaft worn smooth by boots and rope over more years than anyone wanted to put a number to.

  Rope hooks studded the inner wall at intervals, iron teeth sunk deep into the rock, each one backed by wedges and patches where some past failure had torn things out of true.

  Merrik walked ahead of me, coil of line over one shoulder, harness creaking as he moved.

  Serh took the rear, eyes on my back like she expected me to throw myself off the stair just to save the mountain the trouble.

  “Hands,” she said. “Show me.”

  I lifted them, fingers splayed.

  No tremor.

  The new points in Will had taken the worst of the system’s background buzz with them; my grip felt steady in a way it hadn’t since the first log had carved itself across my vision. ?

  “Good enough,” she said. “You’ll shake later.”

  “That supposed to be comforting?”

  “It’s supposed to be true.”

  We reached the first practice anchor: three iron rings set into the stone at chest height, a spray of older weld scars around them where something had once gone very wrong.

  Merrik tapped the rings with two fingers.

  “Drill,” he said. “Hook. Weight. Trust. If you can’t do those four without Serh watching your every breath, you don’t go under.”

  “I thought we were past the tryout phase,” I said.

  “This isn’t tryout,” he said. “This is making sure you don’t take us with you when you fall.”

  Fair.

  He handed me the coil.

  The line was new—fibers stiff with fresh wax and grit, the kind of rope that still remembered being plants.

  I felt its weight, the way it wanted to twist, and the spots where it would try to kink under load. That part was familiar; roofs had taught me how much you could trust a line and how quickly that trust could vanish if you treated it lazily.

  “Hook,” he said.

  I clipped my harness in, fed the line through the first ring, set the belay on my hip.

  Merrik tugged once, hard, testing the anchor and my stance at the same time.

  “Weight.”

  I leaned into it, letting the rope take more of me than the stair.

  Muscles down my back and thighs complained, then settled when Brace snapped the whole arrangement into something the system recognized as acceptable.

  The awareness that came with Rank 3 wasn’t words; it was a quiet map of angles and strain, a sense of where my center should sit if I didn’t want gravity to win.

  “Good,” Merrik said. “Now trust.”

  He stepped past me, put his own weight on the other end of the line, and leaned out over the inner shaft until there was nothing under his boots but air.

  My hands tightened reflexively.

  “Breathe,” Serh said behind me. “If you lock your arms, you’ll lose the fine control. He’ll feel it and you’ll hear about it.”

  Merrik swung gently, boots scuffing the inner wall.

  “Not bad,” he called up. “You’re not trying to haul me back up by your teeth. That’s better than most.”

  I let some of the line slip through my fingers, testing the friction, the give.

  Brace adjusted, tiny shifts in stance and balance happening before I could consciously think them.

  We repeated the drill down the next two landings.

  Hook, weight, trust.

  By the third one, my shoulders had started to burn and my palms ached where the rope had bitten in, but nothing had slipped, nothing had screamed warning.

  “Well enough,” Serh said at last. “We’ll see if it holds when the floor drops more than three arm-spans.”

  “Reassuring as always,” I muttered.

  “That’s why they keep me,” she said.

  The stair opened out into a low antechamber carved straight from the mountain’s throat.

  Lanterns hung in iron baskets along the walls, their light making the wet stone sweat gold.

  The air smelled of oil, damp rock, and the faint, metallic tang of old fear that never quite washed out.

  A half-dozen other hill-hands were already there, checking harnesses, tightening buckles, trading spare wedges and hooks without much talk. ?

  Conversations dropped a half-step when we came in, then smoothed over us; I was a known quantity now, if not exactly a welcome one.

  At the far end of the chamber, the old throat waited.

  The opening wasn’t dramatic.

  No ornate arch, no carved warnings.

  Just a gap in the stone floor where the mountain had once decided that straight down was a good idea, and no one had yet convinced it otherwise. ?

  Ropes vanished into that dark, taut and humming with the weight of lower anchors and old history.

  My bad eye started to itch the moment I looked at it.

  Not the usual Identify-prickle, not the shard’s heat from the day of the crash, but something in between—like the air above the gap was a road the system was still deciding whether to label. ?

  “Breathe,” Merrik said quietly near my shoulder. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Don’t let it claim more of you than it earns.”

  “‘It’ being the hole or the thing in my head?”

  “Both.”

  Serh stepped past us, voice carrying just enough to reach the other teams.

  “Standard order. Anchors checked, weights logged. No heroics. If you see something you don’t understand, you name it plain or you shut your mouth and wait for someone who does.”

  Her eyes flicked to me on that last part, then away.

  I swallowed.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The log from the stair still sat like a ghost-mark in the corner of my sight.

  Interface option unlocked: Personal Anchor.

  Future stat and skill adjustments are available without an external device.

  No slate now.

  No table.

  Just the awareness that, if things went bad enough, I could open the panel in the dark and start moving numbers around while the mountain tried to shake me loose.

  It felt less like a gift and more like being handed a knife in the middle of a fall.

  “Eyes on me,” Merrik said.

  I tore my gaze away from the gap.

  He looked different under the throat’s light.

  The bits of humor that usually softened his face were gone, ground down to something harder and older.

  Serh carried the same edge; the set of her jaw made more sense now that I knew what this place had taken from them.

  “You walk where we tell you,” he said. “You put your weight where the line says, not where your nerves scream. You see something wrong in the stone or the rope, you speak. You see something only that eye of yours sees—” he tipped his chin toward my left “—you speak faster.”

  “I thought the last part made people nervous,” I said.

  “It does,” Serh said. “Do it anyway.”

  Another team started over the lip, ropes creaking as they took weight.

  The sound cut through the chamber, dragging gooseflesh up my arms.

  The system chose that moment to speak.

  A fine line traced itself across my vision, sharp as a knife-cut.

  Environmental conditions satisfied.

  Integration commencing.

  The words came without the little anticipatory hum I’d learned to associate with logs.

  No warning chime, no easy roll from one message to the next—just a hard drop.

  Heat slammed into my left eye like someone had pressed a coal to the socket. ?

  My knees hit stone before I realized they’d buckled; the harness bit into my ribs as Brace fired in panic, locking my spine even as the rest of me tried to fold.

  “Matas.”

  Merrik’s voice, close and sharp.

  I heard him like he was talking through water.

  The chamber blurred.

  Lanterns smeared into streaks; the throat’s opening became a jagged hole chewing at the edges of my sight.

  Behind it, something older than the village’s rope-work and more patient than the mountain’s erosion watched me the way a craftsman watched a tool he wasn’t sure would hold up under load. ?

  More text burned across my vision, red-tinted this time, as if seen through blood.

  Path: Omen-Touched (Provisional) → Omen-Touched (Integrated, Stage 1).

  Source: Foreign shard.

  Effect: Hazard fore-sight (short horizon).

  Cost: Cognitive strain. Affinity echoes. Probability debt (accruing).

  Skill Unlocked: [Danger Sense] – A slight awareness of directional danger the moment actionable harm is directed toward you.

  Cold ledger entries in a language that pretended it wasn’t talking about me.

  The heat in my eye spiked, then flipped.

  For a heartbeat it felt like something inside my skull had reached forward and bit the incoming pain, redirecting it down new channels. ?

  I saw the throat twice.

  Once as it was: ropes hanging, anchors set, stone wet with old seepage.

  And once as it could be:

  —A rope frayed half-through on a hidden edge, giving way under a scream.

  —A hook popping from wet stone, the line whipping free as three bodies dropped in sequence.

  —My own boot slipping, not because I’d misstepped but because some microscopic layer of grit decided today was the day it pretended to be ice.

  Each image came with a thin, metallic taste at the back of my throat, the sense of a ledger pen scratching a new line somewhere I couldn’t see. ?

  Then they were gone, crushed back down into the single, stark reality of the chamber.

  I sucked in air.

  The cold stone under my hands steadied; Brace eased off before it cracked something.

  Merrik’s hand was on my shoulder, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.

  “What did you see?” he asked, low.

  “Too much,” I said.

  My voice sounded wrong in my own ears, like it belonged to someone standing just behind my left shoulder.

  Serh’s boots came into view.

  She crouched, tilting my chin up with two fingers so she could look straight into the bad eye.

  It was hard to focus on her face.

  For a second, her outline doubled: one Serh as she was, one with a rope-burn scar across her jaw that she didn’t have yet.

  I blinked, and the second version vanished.

  “Pupil’s wrong,” she said flatly. “Vertical.” ?

  “Is that… new?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Merrik’s grip tightened.

  “Is this going to get us killed?”

  I swallowed, tried to sort the flaring afterimages into something that counted as an answer.

  “The system thinks I’m… Omen-touched,” I said. “Whatever that means. It’s showing me ways things can go wrong. Short bits. Like bad lines, but… in time. I think theyre possibilities?”

  “Can you turn it off?” Serh asked. Eyes darting around to see who else was paying attention. She relaxed realizing it was just them. “Keep the affinity to yourself, None should know of this. The elders treat it as corruption. I dont. Others have seen these signs before, and they leave to wander.”

  The system, helpful as always, offered nothing.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It feels… tied to something i saw when I arrived here. To danger. It flared when I looked at the throat.” ?

  “Of course it did,” she muttered.

  Merrik was quiet for a long moment.

  I could feel the weight of his attention on me, the way I felt rope tension: steady, measuring.

  “Can you walk?” he asked at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell the difference between what’s happening and what might?”

  “I think so.”

  The words tasted like a lie and an aspiration at once.

  “That’ll have to be enough,” he said.

  Serh’s brows drew together.

  “Merrik—”

  “If it wanted him dead, it had easier chances than this,” he said. “We’re already committed. Rope’s set, teams are formed, and the storm’s too close to waste a day walking him back up over a headache.”

  He looked back at me.

  “Listen close, hill-hand. If that eye of yours shows you something specific—hook, rope, step, stone—you say it. I don’t care if it makes you sound mad. You say it plain. If it starts whispering in ways you can’t tell apart from your own thoughts, you tell Serh or me immediately.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  Serh didn’t look happy, but she nodded once.

  “We watch him,” she said. “If he starts looking at empty air like it owes him money, we cut the line and haul him back before it can cash in its debt.”

  “Comforting,” I said weakly.

  “You wanted honesty,” she replied.

  The bad eye still burned, but the pain had settled into something I could hold: a constant, narrow pressure, as if someone had drawn a vertical line through the pupil and was keeping it stretched. ?

  More quietly, like the system was embarrassed to be overheard, another notation slid into the corner of my sight.

  Omen-Touched (Stage 1) active.

  Passive: [Glance the Fall] – low-horizon hazard previews under acute threat.

  Usage automatically incurs Probability Debt. ?

  “Great,” I muttered. “Another thing I owe.”

  “What?” Merrik asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just talking to myself.”

  “You keep doing that, people will stop talking to you altogether,” Serh said.

  The other teams had finished their checks.

  One by one, they moved to the lip, clipped in, and vanished over, voices dropping to rope-signals and echoes.

  Our turn.

  Merrik stepped up first, boots on the very edge, line running clean from his harness to the primary anchor.

  He looked back at me once, expression flat.

  “Last chance to decide you’d rather stay topside and haul gear,” he said.

  I glanced at the gap.

  For a heartbeat, the world split again: one version where the hook under his line flexed just enough to pop free, another where Serh’s backup anchor caught the load without so much as a groan.

  Both possibilities flickered, then collapsed back into the single, solid ring bolted into stone.

  “No,” I said. “If I stay topside, the thing in my head’s still going to be down there. Might as well see what it wants.”

  Merrik’s mouth twitched—something too grim to be a smile.

  “Spoken like a true fool,” he said. “Welcome to the line.”

  He stepped off and went over the edge, weight sinking into the rope in a smooth, practiced arc.

  Serh jerked her head toward the gap.

  “After him,” she said. “And remember—if you feel the ground trying to rewrite your story, you tell us before it finishes the sentence.”

  I clipped my line in, checked the carabiner twice, then a third time for the part of me that still didn’t trust metal that had to hold more than its own weight.

  The throat’s dark waited below, threaded through with ropes that suddenly looked less like tools and more like the lines of a diagram I hadn’t been given the key to read.

  The system’s last word from the stair thrummed at the back of my thoughts:

  Probability Debt (accruing).

  Whatever the Omen path had just integrated, it wasn’t done counting.

  I stepped up to the edge and let the mountain take me.