The cave bent inward.
Not downward, not deep in any way the mind could track. It folded like breath withheld too long. Hungrier, not wider.
The stone did not allow a path. It tolerated one.
Ivar moved as he had not since the day his silence began: hunched, crawling, then sliding sideways, chest scraping the stone so narrow it crushed the rhythm from his lungs. Ash wept from his back. The rock remembered him. Slowly. Without kindness.
No echo. Only hush.
Then—release.
A space opened ahead. Not carved. Not built. Born.
It exhaled once. Not with sound, but with weight.
No wind stirred. No flame burned.
Yet there was light—thin, bruised light, leaking from damp seams in the stone. It bled from patches of fungi that pulsed like forgotten wounds. The color of curdled milk. The memory of wrong healing.
It was not enough to see.
But enough to feel watched.
She moved ahead of him. No words, no signal, no call to follow. Just motion. Bare feet on stone, steady as the beat between two silences.
She did not belong to the place.
The place belonged to her.
Or perhaps—they were made of the same hunger.
At first, Ivar thought the figures ahead were roots, or debris pulled in by wind long dead. But the air had never moved here.
The first one lay still.
A rat—or what remained of one. Its ribs spread wide, lungs replaced with hollow coils wound from reeds and softened horn. A thin light flickered within, too slow to be alive. Yet it sang. A whispering, flute-like sound, neither welcome nor mournful.
It did not live.
But it remembered how.
He froze.
The girl—if she was still just a girl—knelt beside it. Her hand passed lightly over its twisted cage.
"I gave breath to a rat with no lungs," she said. "It sang until it rotted."
He stared—not with fear.
With violation.
"That isn't creation," he said. "That's cruelty."
She didn't flinch. Didn't defend.
"It's Ravelyn," she said.
The word slipped from her lips as though it didn't belong to her. A name older than language. Not a place. Not quite. A wound, perhaps.
More moved in the dark.
Things just beyond where the stone seemed to breathe. Twitching softly, almost flinching at the idea of being seen.
He stepped closer.
Assemblages.
A ribcage filled with crow skulls. A child's outline stitched from moth wings and black sinew, its eye-sockets mirror-sharp and empty. A fox with two heads—one real, the other whittled from bark, fused at the throat.
None breathed.
But they pulsed. Slowly. As if sleep had been taught to remember life.
The girl rose. Her eyes caught no gleam. Only focus.
"They think I mend," she said. Her voice sounded like it had always been part of the cave. "That I patch and bind. Fix what's broken. Give them back what they lost."
She stopped beside a stone basin, barely higher than her knees. A femur rested atop it, hollowed and coiled with tarnished metal thread. A bird's beak had been tied into the curve, fastened by gut, set into a socket of old bone.
"But I don't fix."
She rolled the bone toward him. It landed upright.
Didn't fall.
"I change. I ask the wrong thing if it wants to become something else."
"What are they?" he asked.
"Reminders," she said. "Of what once was. Of what could be."
He remained still.
She looked at him now. Not searching. Seeing.
"You think I'm like you," she said.
"I think you don't know what you are."
She blinked. Not hurt. Not angry.
Like a branch deciding whether to bloom or bleed.
"I'm not strength-bound. Not mirror-eyed. I don't burn."
She turned toward the wall.
A thing hung there. Deer-shaped, maybe. Its legs were gone, its spine bent like a question too old to answer. Where a heart should've been, a clear vessel pulsed with cloudy liquid. Something inside twitched.
"I made that when I was twelve. It came here dying. I gave it another reason."
"What reason?"
"It feeds on ash. Breathes it in. Swallows. Doesn't dream. Doesn't stop. But it helps."
He stepped closer. Still no fear.
Only reverence.
The reverence given to things too strange to look at without being looked back.
"They call this place the Crooked Seam," she said.
Her words belonged to the stone.
A sound—barely sound. A rustle. A scrape.
One of the made-things turned. Just a twitch. Just enough to be noticed.
"You're afraid," he said.
"Of what I'm becoming," she answered.
"Good."
She laughed once. A dry snap.
"You think fear makes me real?"
"No. But it means you still know what shouldn't be done."
She looked at him. In the mosslight, she did not look young. Or damaged. Or wild.
She looked like something the city had once dreamt—and tried hard to forget.
They went deeper.
The next chamber opened like a mouth held shut too long. Its walls were painted in soot and blood, in ash and something darker. Shapes writhed—veins, roots, spines. Not drawings.
Warnings.
Not maps to places.
Maps to meanings.
One curled like a fetus. Another like a face. One—twisting—was Eelgrave. Bent, misremembered.
"It's not real," he whispered.
"It's not yet," she replied.
He felt the pull of the air behind them—not wind, not draft.
Just the idea of leaving.
He looked over his shoulder. Toward the tunnel that had scraped his breath raw.
He did not move.
"They'll call you heretic," he murmured.
"They already call me worse."
He faced the wall again. The lines. The movement.
"What happens if you make something that never should be?"
She didn't answer.
Didn't need to.
The rat's tune sharpened. One of the stitched things groaned. A hand clenched and released.
Ivar sat down.
The cave was alive.
It pulsed.
Then held its breath.
She sat nearby, cross-legged in the glow of the moss, threading shards of bone onto wire. Shaping a curled hand.
"What is it for?"
"A hand," she said. "For someone. I don't know who yet. But they'll know when they find it."
He watched her.
"You don't give them back what they lost."
"No."
"You give them what fits."
She nodded.
"Something true. Even if it hurts."
A pause. The cave flexed, as though listening.
"Do you believe in gods?" he asked.
"No."
"You sound like one."
"I sound like a mistake that lived too long."
He studied her in silence.
"What if the city asks you to make something too large? Too terrible?"
"I will."
"Even if it eats you?"
"Yes."
He nodded once.
"That's not clarity."
She looked up.
"That's sacrifice."
This time, she didn't laugh.
Only kept stitching.
And somewhere behind her, a thing made of ribs and teeth began to hum.
Above them, the stone did not shift.
And far below, from Eelgrave's forgotten throat, a voice crawled up the spine of the world:
She remembers you wrong.
If you find her—And she offers you a shape—Don't ask what it cost.
Don't ever look at the ones that twitch.