Sand hissed in long, rippling sheets, whispering through the broken bones of the land. The sun was a molten wound smeared across the horizon, staining the sand with rust.

  Caldreth followed Thra-uk's broad silhouette across the Wastes. The demon's steps sank with every stride, a heavy, rhythmic crunch that marked the passing hours. Krim trailed beside him, cloak snapping in the dry gale, his undead lumbering far behind like silent, obedient shadows.

  "Careful," Thra-uk rumbled, stopping on a dime. He pointed a massive, clawed finger at a patch of ground that glowed with a bruised, violet hue. "Cinder-Moss. Do not step. It burns."

  Krim crouched, squinting at the lichen. "It's pulsing," the necromancer noted, hovering his hand over it. "Hot. It's not feeding on water, but the heat from the stone."

  Caldreth stepped around the plant with care.

  "The air out here is thick with leymotes," Krim murmured.

  "Leymotes," Caldreth said. The word tasted of iron on his tongue. He didn't know how he knew it, but looking at the shimmering gold dust suspended in the wind, the name felt absolute. Raw essence.

  "Aye," Thra-uk agreed, not looking back. "Land breathes it, land changes."

  Further out, twisted silhouettes rose against the burning sky. Rust-Spires. They were monstrosities of nature, their trunks looking less like wood and more like twisted columns of oxidized metal, growing directly out of deep, jagged fissures.

  Caldreth paused near a grove of them. The air here was dense, metallic, and charged with static.

  "Look at the canopy," Krim said, pointing upward.

  The translucent, magma-orange leaves were fluttering, though the wind had died down in the grove. They were exhaling a fine, glittering gold dust that drifted from the pores of the leaves, swirling upward into the sky.

  Krim wiped a finger across a low-hanging leaf, collecting a smear of the golden grit. He rubbed it between his fingers; it was warm.

  "It's the Spires," Krim said, looking from the tree to the sky.

  Caldreth placed his hand against the iron-hard trunk. A deep thrum traveled up through the wood and vibrated into his bones.

  "It has a heartbeat," Caldreth said, eyes widening. "It's pulling from deep down. Miles down."

  "Roots plunge into the deep crust," Thra-uk noted, watching the gold dust rise. "Into the dark."

  "Into the Anchors," Krim finished, the scholar in him taking over. "They must be tapping into the leyline anchors underground. They draw the raw energy up through the roots, filter it through the trunk, and exhale the excess as leymotes."

  He looked out at the horizon, where thousands of Rust-Spires dotted the landscape, spewing their golden dust into the sky.

  "That's why the air is so heavy here," Krim murmured. "The whole wasteland is being fumigated with pure, feral magic."

  "Lungs of the Wastes," Thra-uk called out, his voice carrying over the wind. He pointed to the horizon, where the sun began to dip. The magma-colored leaves of the Rust-Spires curled inward in moments, preserving their heat.

  "Enough gazing at weeds," the Iron-Born growled. "The light dies. Best not to move with the darkness."

  He turned his eyes back to them.

  "It moves with you. Night's hunger seeks all."

  Caldreth glanced at the last remnants of the sun before it surrendered its final rays to the night. It felt like a lifetime ago that he had woken up on that stone slab, yet it had been less than a day. By the time the sun sank below the ridges, the Infernal Wastes grew painfully dark and cold.

  He looked up at Thra-uk with a mocking smile. "You don't strike me as one to be afraid of the dark."

  "The dark? No. Only what moves in it."

  Krim chuckled under his breath. "Thra-uk has a point, Caldreth. Have you already forgotten what we fought earlier? I'd rather not run into a group of those creatures at night. We should wait until morning before moving on."

  Not long after, the trio found shelter in a cleft between two broken hills, where the wind died down, and the ground still held a trace of heat from the sun. A cluster of Ember-Fungi glowed within the cleft, providing steady, low light.

  The necromancer rummaged through the satchel one of his thralls carried, the stitched-skin pack that had belonged to Phylin. Bones clattered as he pulled free a bundle of femurs wrapped in waxed leather. Caldreth stood nearby as Krim snapped one cleanly across his knee. The air hummed.

  Violet light bled from the hollow marrow. Krim muttered a word, and the fragments caught fire. Purple flame spiraled upward, casting ghost-light across the alcove.

  Thra-uk crouched beside it, the reflection painting his blunt horns. "Strange fire," he said.

  "Bonefire," Krim replied. "The flame feeds on memory left in marrow. It ignores the cold and the wind. Only the earth can silence it."

  Thra-uk grunted.

  Caldreth wondered if it was mercy or cruelty to burn until memory was ash. The tome pulsed in his pocket, as if it understood, purple light danced across his eyes.

  The three sat in a rough triangle around the fire, ignoring the distant shrieks from around the Wastes. For a long time, no one spoke. The only sound was the hissing of the bone-flame and the distant pelting of sand against stone.

  Krim stared into the smoke, his eyes tracking the faint faces that seemed to form and dissolve within the violet flame. Thra-uk dug his feet into the sand, enjoying the silence. Caldreth leaned back against the cold stone, closing his eyes. He didn't sleep. He just listened to the wind and the tome's constant thrum.

  Suddenly, the violet flame snapped.

  The tongues of ghost-light bent in unison toward the darkness of the ravine entrance, as if reaching for something.

  "The fire is hungry," Krim's eyes darted toward the entrance. "It smells of fuel."

  Thra-uk's ears twitched a second later. "Footsteps."

  He rose to his full height, claws glistening under the firelight. "Company."

  Hunched silhouettes appeared at the edge of the alcove, draped in rags and bones. Eyes like coals reflected the firelight. The stench of unwashed flesh rolled in with them.

  One stepped forward, a man, or what was left of one. His skin was taut against his bones, his teeth filed to points. A tattered red cloth hung from his shoulders, draped over his back. Hanging from a cord of gut around his neck were trophies. Human fingers, lizard skulls, and a cracked demon horn tip no longer than his hand, its base smoothed out where it had been snapped free.

  Thra-uk's eyes dropped to the cord around the man's neck. They stayed there. His jaw tightened, a low vibration starting in his chest that climbed into a growl before he'd made any conscious decision to produce it. He stepped forward, his full mass shifting, the ground registering every ounce of it.

  The man scrambled backward, both hands flying up, palms out. "Outcast," he said quickly, his voice pitching higher. "Outcast. Look, look at the mark."

  He yanked the horn tip free from the cord with trembling fingers and held it out, turning it so the inner face caught the thin light. Carved into the pale bone was a spiral. Beneath it, three downward slashes crossed by a single horizontal line. Not decorative. Deliberate. The mark of something severed from its kin by choice or consequence.

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  Thra-uk snatched the horn from the man's fingers. He held it up, rotating it slowly. His growl didn't stop, but it dropped an octave, shifting from threat into something more like recognition. He stared at the spiral for a long moment.

  "Vrak-ul," Thra-uk said finally, the word landing like a stone dropped into still water. No explanation. He only offered the horn back.

  The man took it back with both hands.

  "Fire," he rasped. "You share?"

  Thra-uk's voice held no place for debate. "Share the fire, share the peace."

  A low murmur rippled through the group, but they halted. The leader nodded once, a jerky motion, and gestured for his followers to sit.

  Krim leaned close to Caldreth. "Cannibals," he muttered. "They worship hunger like a god."

  Caldreth studied the wretched creatures huddled in the ash. They were filthy, shaking, their eyes wide with a pathetic, animalistic desperation. A memory surfaced from the deep dark of his mind, not a specific event, but a feeling. A hierarchy. Something in the architecture of how he thought about people arranged them automatically: above, and below.

  These were below. He acted on the reflex without examining it, the way a man steps around mud in the road without breaking his stride. There was a faint pressure at the back of his skull that he didn't investigate.

  "Keep your distance," Caldreth said, and spat at the cannibal's feet.

  The leader looked down at the dark spot in the ash. He didn't flinch. He didn't look up immediately either. When he did, something had shifted behind his eyes, not offense, not anger. Something quieter and more practiced than either. The look of a man who had learned long ago that dignity was a luxury the Wastes didn't offer, and had made his peace with it.

  He turned back to the flame. "Ravik," he said, as if the name was something he still chose to keep, even here. "It burns the dark away. Keeps the whispers quiet. But this night, the Wastes are screaming."

  Thra-uk frowned. "That is nothing new."

  "These aren't whispers." Ravik shook his head, hugging his thin frame. "The Wastes usually sing. Wind, sand-skimmers, ash-crickets. But before the sun died, we saw them." He stared into the flame rather than at any of them, his voice taking on the flat, rote quality of someone recounting a thing they'd rather not have seen. "Ash-stalkers, carrion birds, things that should be hiding or tearing each other apart, gathered. Moving northwest like a river of meat. We kept our distance."

  He glanced toward the darkness beyond the firelight.

  "When the light failed, the noise changed. Wet sounds. Moving in the dark." He paused, his fingers tightening on his rags. "Then we saw your fire."

  "Something calls to them," he added, almost to himself.

  Thra-uk nodded, a sharp, satisfied motion. The tension in his massive shoulders loosened, if only by a fraction.

  "Good," the demon rumbled. "Ironclaw is east. The tide flows away. A problem for tomorrow, if one arises."

  Thra-uk stopped. His ears swiveled toward the canyon rim high above them.

  A pebble skittered down the ravine wall, bouncing off the stone floor with a sharp clack. Then another. Then a cascade of dust.

  "Quiet," Thra-uk hissed.

  For a heartbeat, there was only the wind. Then, the vibration started, a chaotic pounding that traveled across the dunes. A scream tore through the night above them, a wet, gargling shriek that sounded like a throat tearing open.

  "Down!" Krim dragged Caldreth into the shadow of an overhang.

  The herd thundered past on the ridge above. It was a cacophony of madness. The heavy thud of large beasts mixed with the frantic skittering of smaller creatures. There were no growls of territorial disputes, no sounds of predation. Just the wet slap of mutating flesh against stone and the unified, driving stomp of hundreds of feet moving in perfect, mindless unison.

  Dust rained down on their small camp, coating the fire and dimming its light. The canyon echoed with the unholy chorus of the infected, a sound of weeping sores and snapping bone. Ravik curled into a ball, pressing his hands over his ears, whimpering into the dirt.

  The stampede lasted for a full minute, a river of monsters flowing northwest in the dark. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the thunder faded into the distance, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.

  Thra-uk looked up at the ridge where the dust still swirled and looked back at the small, flickering campfire.

  "We stay. But we do not shine."

  Without waiting for a consensus, Thra-uk kicked a spray of ash and sand over the flames. The fire let out a low, mournful howl, the sound of trapped memories being snuffed out as the spirit-bones were extinguished. The warmth vanished, leaving the ravine bathed only in the bruised, sickly light of the Wastes' night sky.

  A collective whimper rose from the huddled cannibals. Ravik scrambled forward in the gloom, his hands grasping at the warm earth where the fire had been.

  "The cold," Ravik pleaded, his voice trembling. "You promised to share the fire. The night... it bites."

  Caldreth didn't even look at them. He turned his back, staring out into the dark, refusing to address creatures he viewed as livestock.

  Krim, however, sighed. He stepped forward, adjusting his pack as he looked down at the shivering scavenger.

  "My apologies," Krim said, though his tone lacked any real sympathy. "We cannot share the warmth. Not if we want to keep our skin attached to our bones."

  He gestured to the massive, armored silhouette of Thra-uk standing guard at the mouth of the overhang.

  "But you are welcome to share the idea of safety," Krim offered with a dry smirk. "Stay close to the Iron-Born. It is cold comfort, I know. But it is better than being warm in a belly."

  Ravik stared at the cold bones, then at the monster standing watch. He pulled his rags tighter, shivering, and crawled back to his pack.

  "Safety," the cannibal whispered, as if testing the flavor of the word. "We share the safety."

  Krim tilted his head. "And the badge pinned to your cloak, Ravik. Where did that come from?"

  Ravik's hand drifted to the thick disc of blackened iron at his sternum, a slow, complicated motion, part reverence, part unease. It was embossed with a stylized black sun pierced by a vertical sword, a crown of flame above the hilt. The craft was heavy and deliberate. Unmistakably foreign.

  "A wanderer," Ravik said. "Near the salt flats. Half-dead from thirst. Wore the cloak like it was armor." He picked at a loose thread on the hem. "It didn't save him. We recycled him."

  "His people," Krim pressed. "Who are they?"

  Ravik's jaw moved as though he were tasting the name before letting it out. "Cindercrest." He said it carefully, like the word had edges. "Empire of the Great Flame, the wanderer called them, before he stopped talking." He looked toward the ridge above. "They are building. A fort, not far south of here. Fort Magnus, he said it was called. Stone walls. They don't just pass through the Wastes, they plant themselves in it. Burn the outer camps to clear the ground."

  Thra-uk let out a low vibrating growl that made the canyon floor tremble. "Humans," the Iron-Born spat. "Bold. Or desperate."

  "Desperate," Ravik agreed. "They scout more than they used to. But their walls won't hold what's coming." He looked northwest, where the horde had vanished.

  Krim's eyes moved to Caldreth's, his expression asking a quiet question. Caldreth said nothing. He filed the name. Cindercrest. Stone buildings. A fort to the south. He didn't know yet what it meant to him, only that it landed somewhere that didn't feel neutral.

  The silence stretched long enough that Ravik seemed to take it as an invitation to let his guard down. He settled back, the desperate tension in his shoulders easing by a fraction. Around him, the rest of his group stopped watching the exits.

  That was when Caldreth noticed the shift.

  It started with the eyes. Not Ravik's, the ones at the edges of the group, the ones that had been watching for any stragglers of the recent stampede. They were looking at Caldreth now, moving in the slow, patient way of things that were used to waiting.

  Ravik's nostrils flared. He turned slowly, his head tilting as he found Caldreth in the shadows.

  "The quiet one," Ravik murmured, his voice dropping to something softer and more dangerous than his earlier desperation. "You smell warm." He licked his cracked lips. "The dead pale one smells of old ash and bitter cold. The Iron-Born smells of stone and iron." His gaze fixed. "But you. You bleed like us."

  Caldreth kept his breathing shallow.

  Ravik didn't move immediately. He sat with it for a moment, turning the thought over. The others had gone very still, not aggressive yet, just coiled. Waiting to see which way this fell.

  "Plenty of warmth," Ravik said quietly, "if you are willing to offer."

  He wasn't asking.

  At the entrance, Thra-uk shifted, stepping forward. But Krim shot an arm out, barring the demon's path with a fragile-looking limb. Thra-uk looked down, confused, but the necromancer didn't look at the demon. Krim was watching Caldreth. His expression was unreadable in the dark, but the intent was clear.

  What will you do, boy?

  Ravik lunged, his dirty hands grasping from the dark. "Share the heat!"

  Caldreth stepped forward.

  His right arm shot out with the speed of a striking cobra. His fingers closed around Ravik's windpipe, digging into the soft cartilage of the trachea. The cannibal's momentum died instantly, choked off into a wet, strangled gag. With a surge of unnatural strength, Caldreth twisted his grip and forced the man down. Ravik's knees hit the stone with a brutal crack, leaving him kneeling at Caldreth's mercy, clawing uselessly at the wrist that pinned him.

  "You mistake me," Caldreth said.

  The thin red rings in his eyes had bled wider, rivers of crimson spreading through the grey like cracks in stone.

  "I am not prey."

  Ravik's eyes bulged. He let out a desperate, high-pitched sound driven more by soul-deep terror than a lack of oxygen. His left hand shot out behind him, not calling for help. Warning them back.

  Caldreth held him there for a beat longer. Then, with a sneer, he shoved.

  Ravik collapsed backward into the dirt, scrambling away on hands and feet. He clutched his bruised throat and looked up at Caldreth with a superstitious terror that bypassed thought entirely.

  "Cursed," Ravik hissed, spitting bloody saliva. "You are a cursed thing."

  There was no shame in his voice. Only the flat, certain recognition of a man who had learned to identify dangerous things from a safe distance and had misjudged the distance this time. He had done it to himself. He seemed to know that.

  Thra-uk stepped past Krim, his heavy footfalls shaking the ground.

  "Enough," the Iron-Born said. He looked at the cannibals. Then at Caldreth. "Safety means sit. Both."

  The moment passed, but the silence after was sharper. Krim smirked at Caldreth.

  Caldreth sat back down. The rest of the night passed in uneasy peace. The cannibals huddled near the edge of the ravine, gnawing on dried strips of meat they had pulled from their rags. The sound of their chewing was wet and desperate.

  Not long after, Thra-uk was asleep against the wall, his chest rising and falling. Krim sat cross-legged, eyes open, staring into the dark. He didn't sleep. He just waited.

  Caldreth leaned back against the cold stone, closing his eyes. He didn't sleep. He listened to the wind and the distant sounds of things moving in the dark, and somewhere beneath both, the tome's pulse settled against his ribs like a second heartbeat, slow, patient, and entirely certain.

  Shatterdeep.

  Not a suggestion. A direction. The same cold insistence as the door at the end of the corridor he kept almost walking down, pressing from the same place he couldn't get to, as though the mission and whatever was sealed behind that wall were part of the same thing.

  He didn't sleep. He just lay there and let it pull.