Serh’s shoulders tightened a hair at the footsteps echoing up the corridor—multiple sets, heavy and deliberate, like men who’d never had to wonder who they were. The drip somewhere below counted seconds like a slow fuse burning toward something irrevocable.

  The door filled with Tharel, flanked by two elders. They were older than him, faces carved by wind and hearth-scar, hands blackened as if they gripped live coals daily. No robes, no staffs—just wool and leather worn soft by years. They were the ones who got to sit closest to the flame; that was authority enough. Lantern light threw their shadows long across the stone, and the room seemed to press in around them.

  “Matas stands,” Tharel said. Flat command, no request.

  Matas pushed off the cot. His left wrist ground with a dull twist of fire. Ribs hummed protest, shoulder tight, legs heavy as unpaid debt. Serh watched him like he might bolt for the slit window. There was nowhere to run. Not anymore.

  The fire room widened only slightly off the cell corridor: a low hall with a central pit of banked coals glowing sullen red. Smoke crawled up through a narrow cut in the ceiling, dragging the heat with it. The elders took stone benches ringing the pit, close enough to feel that heat. Tharel gestured to a bare patch of floor at the edge of the circle. Not a seat at their level. The message landed clean and hard.

  “Words first,” the left elder said, voice dry gravel. “Tell me—does the ice sing late, stranger?”

  The proverb hit fast, too fast. For a heartbeat all Matas heard was sound—familiar vowels and consonants—but the new channel tripped on the binding between them. Then the meaning slammed in like someone had shoved a card into a slot. Pain stabbed behind his left eye, chalk dragged across bone.

  “I hear it,” he managed. “Just late. It…catches up.”

  The right elder leaned forward, firelight picking out old scars like tally marks around his eyes and along his jaw. Whatever had cut him had done it more than once. “Your eyes went wrong when the void took you,” he said. “They bled red at the edge. Speak clearly—where did it throw you from?”

  “The void pulled,” Matas said. “Really, it broke me. Dropped me on your mountain. I don’t have any more information than you do.” No mention of roads, vans, or Alea. No need. It’d be stranger if he volunteered everything freely.

  “Before that void,” the first elder asked. “What work held your days?”

  For a second he almost said husband. That wasn’t what they were asking.

  “Construction,” he said instead. “Roofs. Walls. Making sure bad stone doesn’t win. If I fall, I die. If my work falls, someone else dies. You learn to pay attention to what carries weight.”

  Tharel cut in before the elders could chase that further. “Wolves died under his hands,” he said. “Two, at least. His eye slit like a cold-blood’s when the thing lit. Yesterday he could barely ask for water. This morning he speaks like a man who grew under our roofs.” His gaze held Matas’s. “Stone may have taken a liking. Or not. I will not pretend to read that alone.”

  The left elder grunted softly and glanced at his counterpart, a look with more weight than any spoken word. “Pain keeps careless feet off our hills,” he said at last. “It keeps the curious from turning our doors into a game. If you prove you are not another fool the mountain will have to bury, the chief may choose to ease that burden. Or he may decide you are not worth the risk.”

  The word chief snagged. Tharel didn’t flinch at it; neither did the elders. Nobody had used a title yesterday. There was someone who sat even closer to the fire than they did—or something. Another piece of the load path Matas couldn’t see.

  Merrik shifted in the doorway, an eager half-step forward. “If the Hills—”

  Serh’s voice cut across his, low and sharp. “Merrik. He has not earned those words.”

  Her glare hit him like a thrown hammer. Merrik’s mouth shut with an audible click. The right elder’s eyes flicked to her and dipped, the smallest nod of approval. Whatever “Hills” meant, it wasn’t a lesson you shared with the first stranger who bled on your floor.

  “Wall scout,” Tharel said, final as struck iron. “He stands on our stone and looks outward. He hunts the slopes. He watches for cracks in rock and for omens in the air. If he brings meat, he eats. If he holds the wall, he sleeps under it. If he fails, the wolves take his share and whatever else they can reach.” His gaze cut between them. “Merrik. Serh. You bring him up. If he turns bad, you shall answer.”

  The left elder snorted softly. “We have buried scouts for less cause than this one. Do not pretend this will be simple because his tongue is quick.”

  Merrik swallowed, spine straightening. “We’ll watch him. And the slope.”

  Serh didn’t blink. “If he breaks,” she said, “I will drag him to the wolves myself.”

  No vote called. No cheers. That was that.

  The mailbox in the corner of his vision snapped upright again, flag stiff and bright.

  Settlement: Samhal.

  Access: Provisional (Wall Scout).

  Conditions: Contribute or expulsion.

  Chill poured down his spine like a leash tightening—not the full body-wreck from before, but something cold and procedural locking into place. Tracked. Filed. Slotted a little deeper. The vertigo bucked mildly, enough to make the coals smear in his vision for a heartbeat. A faint hollowness scraped behind his ribs, like something inside had been shaved down to match a template.

  No helpful prompt. No “congratulations.” Just more ink on the ledger of whatever he was now.

  “Barracks. First light,” Tharel said. He turned for the door. The elders rose more slowly and followed, coals hissing faint as they passed, like the fire disapproved of the whole thing.

  Serh jerked her head—move. Merrik fell in at his flank, spear upright, his usual easy humor tucked under a more careful expression. The corridor walls seemed to lean inward as they walked, stone remembering all the other verdicts that had marched this way.

  By the time they dropped him on a narrow bunk in a cramped room full of strangers’ breath and old sweat, his legs were shaking hard enough that he wasn’t sure if it was from the walk or from the latest system hit.

  He slept like a roofer during a rainstorm.

  Like shit.

  * * *

  The barracks woke up in layers. First, the cold: a draft knifed in through the narrow window and slid across bare faces and hands, pulling groans from wool-wrapped shapes. Then the scrape of canvas and blankets, beds creaking, someone’s quiet cough turning into three in a row. Boots hit stone. Metal clicked as spearheads came off pegs. Oil sloshed in a dented pot near the door as someone warmed it with a thumb-sized coal.

  Two dozen people shrugged into leather around him, rolling stiff shoulders, stretching scar-laced arms. At the far wall, a pair of scouts traded a joke Matas caught only half of—the meaning lagged a breath behind the sound—but the cadence was pure job-site: insult, answer, groan-laugh.

  Kids darted past the open archway outside—no bunks for them, just water-hauling and errands. One had a wooden fox tied to his belt by a string, its tail already chipped from too many collisions with stone. A woman at the gear racks sat on a low stool, patching leather with quick, economical stitches. As Serh walked past, she looked up and smiled. “Good watch last night,” she said.

  The words settled in his head almost as fast as if he’d grown up with them. The tone needed no help: a quiet, everyday gratitude you spent only on people you trusted not to let your children die.

  Merrik stepped into a kid’s path just long enough to catch his shoulder and keep him from slamming into a rack of spears. “Eyes on your feet,” he scolded, voice light. Then he mussed the boy’s hair. The kid swatted at him, the nearby scouts snorted, and the moment slipped back into the room’s hum. Good-hearted trouble. Clearly theirs.

  Not all of them knew what had just been decided by the fire. Bunks traded meat-tallies and near-misses, not the contents of elder glances.

  A rough hand closed on Matas’s shoulder. “Up,” Merrik said. His spear was already in his other hand, faint runes etched along the haft catching the gray light. “We’re on the slopes this morning.”

  He shoved an iron spear toward Matas. The shaft felt heavier than it looked, the balance a little nose-heavy compared to anything he’d use on a roof. The tip had a nick, but the edge still threw a clean line where it caught the light. No quiver, no backup blade. Just iron, hands, and whatever the system thought passed for fairness.

  Serh waited by the door, bow slung across her back. The limbs showed a faint undercurrent of runes, nothing gaudy, just a suggestion of lines beneath the lacquer. Her gaze moved slowly and precisely, taking the room’s measure without hurry.

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  “Eat something,” she said. “The mountain does not care if you faint on its face.”

  No tour of the halls. No speech about rules. Whatever he needed to know, he would learn in the places where it could kill him.

  Rations waited on the slab beside his bunk: yesterday’s bone-scrap broth, congealed cold. Hunger clawed behind his ribs hard enough that even the gelled fat on top looked appealing.

  “Hunt brings stew,” Merrik said over his shoulder as they headed for the door. “This”—he tilted his bowl of the same cold scrap—“is what you get when yesterday was thin. Keep the wall, keep the bunk. Simple.”

  Serh fell in on his right like a shadow given knives. “And keep your questions for when your breath is not fog. We talk when the work lets us.”

  Tunnels sloped up from the cell wing, stone complaining softly under boots. Here and there, his eye caught mortar that had been re-packed, cracks stitched and pinned. In other places, the rock had been allowed to shift, leaving small gaps that said “later” in a language any tradesman would recognize. Someone here fought the mountain one patch at a time.

  The barracks level opened into a broader junction. Racks of spears and thicker bows lined one wall, each slot half-claimed. No gleaming parade of armory pieces—every weapon showed use. Worn grips, stained leather, spots where oil had been rubbed in more from habit than pride. Merrik’s rack held better steel—spares, practiced favorites. Serh’s spot beside it carried a bow whose grip had been shaped over years to one hand only. Matas’s peg waited on the far end, bare.

  “First light, every day,” Serh said, as they climbed the last stretch toward the outer door. “You stand your watch, you bring something back, you sleep warm. You fall, you feed the ground. The terms are not complicated.”

  Merrik let out a small breath that could have been a laugh. “She’s very cheerful in the mornings,” he muttered. “You will get used to it.”

  Wind slapped him in the face as they stepped out at the trailhead, cutting through the last of the sleep. Wolf scat lay fresh on the jagged ground, gray-brown clusters already starting to dry. The slopes rose out of Samhal’s gut like a long, scarred knuckle, paths cut into its side and anchored by teeth of darker stone.

  The stone under his boots hummed wrong in ways he didn’t have words for yet—pockets where it didn’t quite ring true, tensions running at odd angles. On Earth, he’d call it a roof built on too-thin trusses. Here, it was just a bad feeling that settled in behind his ribs.

  The first test came sooner than he would’ve liked. A ledge ahead jutted out over a drop, giving the illusion of a straight, easy path. The rock above it, though, leaned forward a touch too far. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

  “That line is bad,” he said, nodding toward it. “The overhang’s already cracked. If it goes, it drops everything right where we’ll be standing.”

  Serh didn’t argue out of habit. She stepped up, put her boot on a fist-sized chunk near the edge, and shifted her weight.

  The stone turned to crumbs under her sole, skittering down the face and bouncing twice before vanishing.

  She looked back at him, expression flicking through two or three judgments before settling. “You see more than the surface,” she said. “Good. Our hills are not kind to people who like shortcuts.”

  Merrik grinned. “We go around, then. Better a longer morning than a short life.”

  They swung the path wide. A few extra minutes of climbing in exchange for not testing gravity’s sense of humor. Matas was fine with that trade.

  Tracks thickened a little farther on. If his read on pad size and spacing meant anything, they were looking at three wolves, maybe four. The drag mark between two sets said they’d pulled something away from a kill site. The gouges in the stone said whatever it had been had fought.

  “Pack of three,” Merrik murmured. “Hungry enough to come this high.”

  “Or pushed up from below,” Serh said. “Either way, we do not let them try the walls.”

  The trail narrowed, hemmed in by a tumble of boulders on the uphill side and a steep fall on the other. A textbook place to get flanked, if textbooks covered this kind of thing.

  “Watch the rocks,” Matas said under his breath. “They don’t need much cover.”

  A flicker of gray moved between two of the upper stones, gone as soon as he focused on it. His left eye caught the motion a fraction earlier than his right, edges turned sharp in a way that felt alien and too helpful.

  “There,” he added, pointing without taking his gaze off the gap.

  The lead wolf came in exactly where he’d marked, launching itself down the slope with jaws wide. The other two angled from above and below, using the narrow trail to trap them.

  Serh’s first arrow left the string almost before Matas registered that she’d drawn. It sank into the lead wolf’s ribs and knocked it a hand-span off its line. It hit the stone in front of Merrik instead of his chest, claws tearing at the ground as it tried to twist.

  Merrik stepped into it, spear driving low and up, catching the beast under the ribs. The haft shuddered in his hands as it took the wolf’s full weight. Blood washed over his boots.

  The lower flanker barreled for Matas, teeth bared. The spear in his hands felt clumsy and heavy, but he knew leverage. He planted his back foot, let its momentum build, and met it with a two-handed thrust. The point punched into the soft of its throat. Hot blood flooded over his fingers.

  It didn’t just fall. It crashed into him, its weight driving the spear back, his boots skidding on loose rock. His left ankle rolled toward the drop. Pain flared bright where something in the joint protested.

  Before he could recover his stance, a shape slammed into his shin. The third wolf had gone low, snapping for his ankle. Pain lanced up his leg; he dropped to one knee, vision jittering.

  “Down!” Merrik shouted.

  Matas didn’t argue. He let his upper body drop flat. Merrik’s spear swept over him, a hard line of iron and intention. It took the attacking wolf just behind the shoulder as it lunged past, pinning it against the uphill rock. It writhed, claws tearing deep grooves before going limp.

  Serh’s second arrow buried itself in the side of the one still impaled on his spear, just in case.

  The last wolf—the one that had hung back to see how they handled the first rush—decided it didn’t like the answer. It turned and bolted up-slope.

  Matas’s hand found a rock more by memory than sight. Years of tossing chunks of shingle and scrap down to a dumpster had left grooves in his muscles. He threw without thinking about it.

  The stone caught the fleeing wolf in the side of the head with a very solid, very final sound. It stumbled, legs tangling, and went down hard.

  Silence followed, sudden and sharp, broken only by their breathing and the slow patter of blood onto stone.

  “On your feet,” Serh said after a moment. “If you can stand, we move. Never stall here.”

  Matas pushed up, testing weight on the bad ankle. It hurt, but nothing felt loose in the wrong way. The wrist screamed about the spear work, ribs complained about being compressive members again, but he was still upright.

  Forty pounds of wolf ended up across his shoulders, hot and heavy, soaking into cloth that had already seen too much of that color. The weight dragged at every bruise.

  “Not bad for a man who fell out of the sky,” Merrik said, wiping his blade on a strip of fur before cutting into the carcasses. “Your throws are ugly, but they work.”

  “Throw’s a throw,” Matas said. “As long as it lands.”

  Serh hefted one of the remaining flanks as easily as if it were a sack of feed. “You are not useless,” she said. For her, it might as well have been praise. “Keep seeing the bad stone. Keep putting meat in the pot. Do that and we can talk about other things later.”

  “Like the Hills?” he asked.

  Her eyes met his, flat and unreadable. “Like whether you are still alive by then. The rest will follow, or it won’t. Down-slope.”

  As they started back, a faint red haze flickered high on the far side of the ridge, near a darker line of rock. It might have been nothing more than sunrise hitting iron-rich stone. His left eye didn’t buy that. A sudden ache speared behind it, and for a heartbeat his vision on that side collapsed into a narrow, vertical slit of clarity, the rest of the world dimming around it.

  Then it snapped back. No system text. No explanation.

  He filed it under “problems for later” and kept his feet under him.

  By mid-sun, the kitchens were a different kind of busy. Kids hauled water past the arch, dodging around scouts bearing slung game. The woman with the needle had moved closer to the big hearth, stitching in the good light. As Serh passed, she gave a small salute with her left hand. “Steady hands, steady wall,” she said.

  Those words clicked even faster. The more Matas heard them talk, the fewer gaps the system had to stitch over.

  Their meat hit the communal pot with a wet thud. The cook—a stocky man with forearms like wrapped cables—grunted. “Good weight. You earn more than your own bowl today.” He tossed in a pinch of dried green leaves from a little clay jar. The stew thickened as it simmered, fat rising and beading on the surface.

  Scouts at the tables looked up when Matas sat. Their eyes flicked over his spear, his limp, the way he cradled the bowl. Outsider, yes. But an outsider who’d carried meat in, not just blood. A couple of them gave him the short, economical nod that meant we see you and nothing more.

  The first full bowl since the void sat hot and solid in his hands. The broth was still thinner than any diner cook on Earth would tolerate, but there were real chunks of meat in it, and the salt hit hard enough to make his jaw ache pleasantly.

  Earned counted for more than full.

  When he set the empty bowl aside, the familiar ache behind his eye had faded to a manageable throb. His wrist still felt like it had been used as a test piece in a cheap hardware demo, but the grinding was a little less sharp.

  Later, as scouts peeled off to clean gear or collapse onto bunks, Merrik drifted past and dropped a strip of dried something onto Matas’s blanket. “For later,” he said. “Trail’s longer tomorrow.”

  He hesitated, then added in a lower voice, “Don’t over-think. Keep your path forward and the levels…”

  Serh’s boot thumped the bunk leg before Matas could answer, rattling the frame. “Sleep. First light comes faster when you talk.”

  “See?” Merrik said, straightening. “Cheerful.”

  She gave him a look that could have carved stone and moved off to check the racks, fingers running along spear hafts, counting something Matas couldn’t see.

  Night pressed in heavy as the lanterns went down to embers. The barracks smelled of sweat, leather oil, and cooling stew. Snores started here and there, broken by the occasional muttered curse. Outside, the wind had picked up, pressing against the slit windows with a low, persistent moan that made the stone hum in sympathy.

  The mailbox pulsed in the corner of his sight.

  Behavioral data: Scout/Hunt sufficient.Subject: Matas.Level Index: 4.Resources partially restored.

  The hit came a breath later. Vertigo rolled through him, but not as violently as last time; the bunk felt like it shifted a couple of inches instead of a couple of feet. The hollow scrape behind his ribs was softer, more like someone sanding down sharp edges than carving out new space.

  Integration creeping in. Or the system deciding he was worth a slightly smoother ride so it could get better data. Hard to say which.

  The stew sat heavy in his gut, a counterweight to the floating feeling in his head. On a roof, it was the difference between a structure that creaked under wind and one that shuddered. Neither was safe, but one bought you more time to get off.

  Somewhere deep under the barracks, farther down than the cell wing and the pantry and whatever other tunnels laced this mountain, a low rumble rolled up through the stone. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. The rock carried it with unnerving clarity.

  Two guards by the corridor to the lower levels moved immediately, spears coming off hooks as if yanked by a shared wire. They walked down to the mouth of the passage and crossed the shafts, blocking even the curious kids who had drifted closer.

  No one shouted. No one panicked. This was a sound they had heard before and filed under “worry, but not yet run.” That said more than any lecture could have.

  The stone under his bunk hummed a little deeper, like something large had adjusted its weight in a hollow room far below and the mountain was taking note.

  Level 4. Meat was his, for now. The bunk had a spear on it that other people would notice if he took and didn’t bring back. Somewhere above the fire room, people played with words like “chief” and “Hills.” Somewhere below, things big enough to make stone vibrate were moving.

  Not every bunk got told the same stories.

  The rumble peaked once, then smoothed back into the bones of the place. Sleep came slowly and without comfort, like lying under a roof whose trusses he hadn’t had time to inspect, listening for the first worrying creak.