Mallow came out the rock wrong. The passage spat him into the open valley on unsteady legs, his crutch catching on stone as he lurched forward and went down on his hands. Light hit him all at once, green and wet and shocking after the long dim press of tunnels. His breath tore out of him and he tasted copper after bumping into one too many rocks.

  For all of a moment he absorbed the unchanged beauty of Vaelun. Green spread thick and impossible across the valley floor. Ferns unfurled where snow should still have ruled. Water moved everywhere, a constant threading through the land. The air carried the same humid weight it had before, and beneath it was the low, steady pressure of the wakeful wyrm below him.

  A Kelthi woman near the stream noticed him first. She paused, head tilting, her ears angling forward as if catching a sound that hadn’t yet reached the rest of them. Her gaze fixed on him and didn’t slide away. A moment later, a young man straightened near a storehouse, his antlers still wrapped in soft velvet, his tail flicking in reflexive unease.

  The recognition came without alarm, but it spread quickly.

  The wyrm inside him stirred faintly, a restless awareness that answered the valley without Mallow’s input. He got to his feet and waited.

  Soryn reached him before anyone else did. He came at an unhurried pace, but his eyes were already sharp, reading his posture and breath and the way Mallow leaned on his crutch.

  “Mallow,” he said. “You came through alone.”

  “Seems I did,” Mallow replied. “Wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Soryn stopped an arm’s length away. “Where is Lhainara?”

  The name punctured him in that horrible soft place between his ribs where Lain lived. Mallow swallowed. “Not with me.”

  A flicker passed through Soryn’s face, a worry quickly mastered. “Is she alive?”

  “Yes,” Mallow said, without hesitation, and only then did he realize he truly believed it, and had all along. “But I don’t know where she is. I have much to tell you, Soryn.”

  That earned him a sharp look, but Soryn gestured to the others, a quick signal. The tension eased by degrees. Someone stepped forward to take Mallow’s pack. Another brought water. When Mallow tried to wave them off, his knees betrayed him and he had to accept Soryn’s arm to keep from pitching forward.

  “Come,” Soryn said. “The Warden will want to see you.”

  They brought him into the council hall, where the smell of smoke and heat met his nose. Maps still lined the walls, though a few new marks had been added since last time, patrol routes adjusted and crossings redrawn. The table was ringed with familiar faces.

  Myren glanced up when they entered, surprised by the intrusion, and then her gaze cooled as she assessed the situation. She took in his limp, his drawn face, then her nostrils flared, and she wondered what she smelled. Her eyes flicked to Soryn, then back to Mallow.

  “You came back,” she said flatly.

  “I tend to do that,” Mallow replied. He did not sit until she inclined her head. When he eased himself into the chair, the movement pulled the fabric painfully across his ribs.

  “You’re in pain,” she said.

  “Usually,” he answered.

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  He considered her for a moment, then reached up and drew the collar aside.

  The scales caught in the light, pale-edged and unmistakable. The room stilled with attention.

  Myren inhaled through her nose.

  “When,” she said quietly, “did this happen?”

  “After I left,” Mallow replied. “Before the Spire fell.”

  “Did Lhainara succeed in freeing the Underserpent?”

  “Yes.”

  Myren did not ask why or how; her eyes flicked to Soryn, then back to Mallow.

  “You should not be marked,” she said.

  “No,” he agreed. “I shouldn’t.”

  Harka had been standing near the maps, silent until now. He hadn’t looked at Mallow directly since he entered, his attention fixed instead on the table, his fingers resting lightly on the edge as if feeling for something beneath it.

  “The valley has been uneasy,” he said. “The streams have shifted twice this week.”

  Myren’s gaze snapped to him. “That happens in spring.”

  “Yes,” Harka agreed. “But not like this.”

  Silence followed. Mallow leaned forward slightly. “The Underserpent vanished,” he said. “When it fled into the Underveins, something… changed. I don’t understand it. But I thought you might.”

  Myren folded her hands on the table. “Then start at the point where you stopped being able to pretend this was a coincidence.”

  Mallow huffed a humorless breath. He rubbed at his ribs, more habit than relief. “After we left here, nothing went cleanly. Lain – Lhainara freed the Underserpent, just like she said she would. But it didn’t rise the way the Dagorlind were afraid of. It just… left.”

  Harka’s fingers stilled.

  “It tore downward,” Mallow went on. “Like… a mole, burrowing. I felt it when it happened.”

  Myren watched him closely now. “And after.”

  “After,” he said, “I died.”

  No one said anything for a long moment.

  “The wyrm decided he didn’t like that much,” Mallow said. “Preferred me alive.”

  Harka’s eyes shot to Myren, who pointedly refused to look at him. “The Underserpent… revived you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And left you with…” she waved in his general direction.

  “Seems so.” After a moment more, he carried on. “When they brought me out of the hole I learned that the Spire collapsed. And Morgan…” but then he realized suddenly they wouldn’t know about Morgan, or the bloodwyrms, or the war they had brought to Ivath, and he cursed. “Apologies. Let me start again.”

  He detailed the story of Lord Morgan Balthir, the Veinwright with his army of Kelthi and humans and bloodwyrms. At first the story was stilted and difficult, because there were so many turns, and because he was so full of shame for how he’d betrayed the woman he loved. But he bit that back, and told the truth, or as much of it as seemed necessary. He told them of Morgan’s plan. Of the way Morgan had meant to chain the serpent to himself. And the further he went on the more enthralled Myren and the other Kelthi became, until Mallow was diving deep into the incredible series of events that happened at their arrival at the gates of Ivath – the river flooded, the earth cracked, the surging mass of the bloodwyrms overtaking the city. Lain – glorious Lain, beautiful Lain, dreaming of a Saint and finding a secret bell and making herself sacrifice again to save the wyrm, and Mallow lunging between her and the blade that now sat hard and strange at his waist.

  When that part of his tale was finally complete, he fell back, and gasped with surprising emotion, then carried on, this next bit too ridiculous for hedging. “After,” he said, “the Spire collapsed. The bloodwyrms vanished. Morgan grew a pair of wings like his ancestors used to have apparently, and the ground –” he shook his head. “The ground didn’t settle. It’s waiting.”

  Soryn’s ears angled back. “Waiting for what?”

  “For something to fill it,” Mallow said. “I don’t know what the Dagorlind told themselves about the Underveins, but when I snapped back to existence I knew I’d been walking them long enough to understand when a space has been emptied. They don’t like being hollow.”

  Myren and Soryn glanced uncomfortably at each other.

  “Everything that had been leaning on the Underserpent kept leaning,” Mallow said. “Only there was nothing there anymore.”

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  Myren rose and went to the maps, tracing a finger along one of the deeper inked lines. “We’ve felt it here,” she confessed. “Small things, at first. Pressure where there shouldn’t be any. Water running warmer than it ought to.”

  “That’s why I came,” Mallow said. “Not because I understand it, mind you. Because I don’t. But I know that something has to sit where the Underserpent was pulling from. Something that can hold without breaking apart in the Underveins.”

  Harka’s breath left him slowly. “A living anchor.”

  Myren shot him a look. “Keep your tongue.”

  Harka met the look without flinching. “It’s already happening, Warden. Whether we name it or not.”

  Mallow closed his eyes briefly. “The wyrm here –” he gestured vaguely downward. “It’s young and strong. But it wasn’t meant to carry that kind of strain alone. I don’t think any of them are. The Underserpent… it was so old. I think that part of the Underveins…” he paused, and closed his eyes, picturing that strange blue place that had been all he remembered of death. “I think that part of the Underveins was the center of all of it. I don’t think any of the other wyrms are enough. They have their own place in the lattice they’re responsible for. Ivath needs something new. And if the Underveins keep shifting, it won’t be just Ivath that suffers.”

  Myren stood very still for a long moment. When she turned back, her expression was controlled, but the anger beneath it came forward.

  “You came because the Underserpent spoke to you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And it sent you here.”

  “Yes.”

  Myren studied him as she might a damaged bridge: not with fear, but with calculation.

  “You understand,” she said at last, “that what you’re suggesting would cost us our last margin of safety.”

  Mallow nodded gravely.

  “And that if you’re wrong,” she went on, “we lose more than Ivath. We destabilize every place that still depends on the Underveins holding it steady.”

  Mallow nodded again.

  She folded her hands again. “Then why should I listen to you?”

  Mallow’s mouth opened. Closed. He scrubbed a hand over his face, the movement slow, as if buying time. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its earlier ease.

  “You shouldn’t,” he said. “Not because of anything I believe.”

  Harka shifted. “Then why are you here?”

  Mallow looked at him, and found no softness there.

  “Because I didn’t ask for this,” Mallow said. “And I don’t want it.”

  Silence crept back in, heavier now.

  Myren’s brow furrowed. “Explain.”

  He exhaled, and the wyrm stirred faintly beneath his scales, a reminder he did not welcome.

  “When the Underserpent took me,” he said, “there was no bargain. No promise. I didn’t pray, and it didn’t answer. It just… chose.”

  The word tasted wrong in his mouth. He swallowed and forced himself to continue.

  “I didn’t reach for it, I didn’t offer myself. It reached first. And when I tried to pull away –” his fist clenched. “It didn’t let me.”

  Harka leaned forward, eyes bright. “You were marked.”

  Mallow shot him a sharp look. “I was used.”

  Myren’s gaze cut to Harka. “Enough.” She returned her attention to Mallow. “You’re saying the wyrm knew you didn’t want … this.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that it bound you anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  Her mouth thinned into an uncomfortable smile. “That sounds less like destiny and more like negligence.”

  A flicker of ugly relief passed unwelcome through Mallow’s chest. He seized on it. “Good,” he said. “Then treat it that way. Treat me like a flaw. Like a mistake that just happens to line up with your problem.”

  Harka shook his head. “You dismiss what you are.”

  “I refuse to pretend I know,” Mallow snapped, then checked himself with visible effort. “I’m not a priest. I’m not a Kelthi. I don’t hear prophecy when the ground shifts. I just hear strain.” He gestured down again. “I know what it feels like when something vital is missing. And I know what it costs when people refuse to act.”

  Myren watched him for a long time with an unreadable expression.

  “You’re afraid,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mallow replied immediately. “And you should be too.”

  Harka opened his mouth, then stopped. His hands curled at the table’s edge. “The texts –”

  “No,” Myren said flatly.

  Harka fell silent.

  Myren turned back to Mallow. “If we do this, it will not be because a wyrm whispered to you. It will be because the evidence leaves us no other option. You will not be elevated, you will not be revered. And if this fails –”

  “I’ll bear it,” Mallow said.

  She held his gaze. “We all suffer the consequences.”

  He knew that. There was no clean way out of this.

  At last, Myren nodded. “Then we will speak of the egg.”

  Harka exhaled, reverent and restrained all at once.

  Mallow leaned back in his chair, suddenly exhausted, and wondered distantly when it had become easier to face death than to admit he had been chosen by something he did not understand.

  Reading the exhaustion on him, Soryn guided Mallow to his home, where he was met with shock and surprise by Soryn’s wife and Lain’s aunt, Atheri. But he was too tired to explain it all again, and so he heard Soryn telling the tale in muffled tones while he drifted off to sleep in the bed he and Lain had shared when they were here. He dreamed of her beneath him, of using her true name here in this very place while he wiped tears of joy from her eyes.

  After a fortifying dinner, they took him down while the valley slept.

  The passage beneath Vaelun was not old. Mallow could feel that immediately. The stone still held the hard edges of recent cutting, the air carrying a clean mineral scent of earth newly opened. The place had been made in haste and hope both, shaped around a need rather than tradition.

  They wyrm inside him woke fully before they reached the end, and it was no gentle thing.

  Mallow’s breath left him as sensation flooded his chest, his spine, his skull. His hand slipped on the wall and Soryn caught his elbow without comment, steadying him while something vast and alive uncoiled to writhe snake-like under Mallow’s skin.

  Light bloomed ahead, and the chamber opened.

  It was small, almost intimate, nothing like the grand caverns the Dagorlind carved for spectacle. The ceiling arched low and close, the stone pale-veined, still marked with tool lines where Kelthi hands had shaped it with quick and careful strokes. Moss had already begun to creep along the edges, drinking warmth rising from below.

  At the center of the chamber, set in a shallow cradle of stone and woven roots, lay the egg. It was no larger than a melon, perhaps a little bigger, its surface layered in overlapping scales fine as petals. Light moved beneath its shell, pulsing slowly as a sleeping heart. Every breath it took seemed to answer the air around it, and the chamber breathed with it in return.

  Mallow went to his knees.

  The reaction tore through him so fast he couldn’t brace for it. His scales flared, the heat rippling across his ribs and shoulder, brightening until the pale edges caught the lamplight and threw it back in brilliant prismatic flashes. They wyrm inside him reared, feral and ecstatic with recognition.

  Harka gasped and took a step back. Soryn froze, eyes wide, ears angled sharply forward. Even Myren stilled, her carefully contained composure cracking just enough for awe to show through.

  Mallow’s hand hovered inches from the egg.

  The chamber filled with light. A glow poured from the egg’s seams, spilling outward until the walls glimmered and the moss turned emerald, every vein in the stone illuminated as if the earth itself wished to see.

  The wyrm inside Mallow answered. His scales blazed white-gold. His breath broke into a sob he could not stop. He bowed forward until his forehead pressed to the stone, his shoulders shaking as that immense and ancient creature moved through him.

  In that light, he thought of Lain. He thought of her at the top of the Cloudspine, standing in a field of Starbloom, her hooves rising from the soil as whatever ancient thing that had deigned her worthy lifted her from the earth to embrace her in all her power. He thought of the black sky above and the golden pollen below that dared the darkness to swallow it, and Lain suspended between them, both holding and being held by forces neither of them understood. He had been baffled; she had been ecstatic. He thought of her hand steady on a bell that should have broken her. Of her voice rising even when fear had hollowed her out. Of the way she had chosen again and again to stand between the world and the things it asked her to destroy.

  Her name filled him until it hurt. Lhainara.

  He made a raw and desperate promise, then. He said it to the wyrm inside him. I will take her home. I will carry the egg back to Ivath. I will stand where the ground is breaking and let it lean on me if it must.

  The thought cost him something. He felt it immediately, a tightening in his vision, a narrowing future.

  But you will help me find her, he went on, desperation bleeding through. You will not let her vanish into the world and leave me blind. I will not do this without knowing she still lives.

  The wyrm answered him, sudden and encompassing.

  There will come a messenger.

  The promise came so easily that Mallow had the sense he could have asked for anything – for a kingdom, for the gift of flight, for eternal life if he so wished. He had a moment to be grateful that he was no such man, that his imagination had been too narrow to think of anything else. He had only a vanishing glimpse, then, of why he’d been chosen for this. But it was gone just as soon as it had arrived, and in its place came a certainty that Lain still lived, and he would find her. That would be his gift, in exchange for this task.

  Mallow lifted his head, tears streaking his face. “Alright,” he said, and nodded, and wiped his face. “I do as you will.”

  The light faded, until the chamber returned to its softer glow. The egg settled, warm and restful, as if nothing extraordinary had happened at all.

  But everything had changed.

  Harka bowed his head. Soryn exhaled, long and steady, while Myren studied Mallow. She nodded, decisive.

  “Prepare the carriers,” she said. “And the wards.”

  Her gaze returned to Mallow, weighing him anew.

  “You will take the egg,” she said. “And you will bring it to Ivath, with Harka as its Warden.”

  Mallow looked up at the small, luminous life cradled in stone, felt the weight of the promise settle fully into his heart.

  “Yes,” he said.