The deeper they went, the more the light abandoned them.
It didn't dim. It turned away. Their torches worked, but the shadows ahead remained indifferent. Sound came too slowly, echoing off root-slick stone like a memory that no longer wanted to be recalled.
Even Ivar, still haloed in the residue of transformation, moved like someone no longer fully attached to surface time. A ghost of his own skin. Flame flickered across his back, and the shadows he cast looked nothing like him.
The tunnels curved with root-veins too large for any tree. Bone soot clung to the growths like old ash. Crusts of fungal matter blinked in the dark—some sensing them. Some ignoring them. The air smelled not of death, but of digestion.
"They grew this place," Lysa murmured, running her hand along a wall slick with calcified bark. "It wasn't dug. It was birthed."
"'They'?" Rill asked, warily.
Lysa didn't turn. "Threadlings."
Rill scowled. "And this is what? Some sort of nursery?"
Lysa gave no answer. She only coughed.
It came sharp. Wet. A real sound in a place that no longer tolerated real things. Her hand came away from her mouth coated in blood—thick, veined with black. For a moment, it hovered in the air, defiant of gravity. Then it fell.
Fennel turned, the torchlight casting strange hollows beneath his cheekbones. "You're leaking again."
"I know."
"You said it stopped."
She didn't answer. She looked at Ivar instead. A quiet moment. Something exchanged in the silence. Then she turned, walking again—faster now.
They came to a vast chamber knuckled with old root-beds and carved hollows. At its heart, a jawbone large as a carriage arced between two slumped walls—half-swallowed by the earth, fossil-pitted and rimmed in moss.
It wasn't animal.
It wasn't quite divine.
Root-veins twisted through the sockets like veins preserving a memory. Blue-glowing mushrooms sprouted from the gumline in spirals, pulsing in uneven rhythm. It looked less like a ruin, more like something caught mid-exhale and never allowed to finish.
Fennel stepped lightly through the spongy moss, lips parting. "What did it worship?"
Lysa crouched at the edge of the jawbone. Her hand brushed aside the glowing fungus. A spiral pattern revealed itself beneath, inked into the very bone.
"Not what," she said. "Who."
Rill stayed back. "Tell me we're not sleeping here."
"Sleeping?" Fennel said. "We haven't slept in days."
"I mean staying. I mean lingering. I mean breathing near whatever this is."
Fennel didn't respond. He'd begun to hum. Low. Uneven. The spiral mushrooms flared brighter with each tone, then dulled again—responding. One unfurled slightly, as if curious.
Rill blinked. "Are you humming to the mushrooms?"
"They're polite," he said.
"Do you hear yourselves?"
"That's what makes it Eelgrave," Ivar muttered.
The Threadlings began their ritual without prompting.
They knelt around the root-bed. Each carried a rat—some stiff, some still twitching. They buried them with surprising gentleness, whispering syllables like stolen prayers.
Fennel tilted his head. "It's not language."
"It's older than one," Lysa said.
A rustle.
A jangle.
Trudge jangled into the firelight.
Rill stepped back, hand twitching toward her knife. "Why is he here again?"
"I follow good scents and bad instincts," Trudge grinned. He wore a necklace of bells and matted fur. A coil of yellow bone poked from one shoulder like a misplaced tusk. "And this place smells like spoiled marrow."
"You shouldn't be here," Lysa said.
"I'm never where I should be. That's the fun."
He dipped his spoon into a clump of glowing fungus. "Used to call this place the Choir Mouth," he said. "Before it was swallowed. Before the dreaming thing died."
"We're not here to wake anything," Ivar said.
"Oh, no one wakes gods," Trudge said. "They either die dreaming, or dream of dying. Either way—we're just squatters in their skull."
A Threadling—small, faceless but for stitch-marks—dug too deep.
Its hand struck something under the root-line.
A flash.
Blue light bloomed upward like breath underwater.
Lysa's eyes widened. "No—"
But it had already unearthed the sigil.
A disc. Porcelain-white. Veined like aging skin. It pulsed, slow, wrong. Light glowed from within its cracks—not bright, but heavy. Like weight, not color.
A voice cut through the stillness, sending a chill down Rill's spine.
"She broke him first."
"She made the lie flesh."
"He is not yours."
"He is old."
Rill stepped back. "What are they saying?"
"They shouldn't know any of that," Lysa said, her voice low.
"They're Threadlings," Rill said. "They're not supposed to know anything."
"They're remembering things they never lived."
A voice interrupted again.
All heads turned.
It was Drelk.
He twitched at the edge of the firelight, lips cracked and eyes bloodshot, like something already half-burned.
Rill opened her mouth, but Drelk spoke first.
His voice was wet with something too close to laughter.
"It's not coming," he said, and grinned wide enough to split.
"It's waking."
The root-bed swelled.
No warning. No fanfare.
A bulge, like a tumor behind bark. Then a slow, sickening peel. Roots split open with the wet sound of old meat, and something inside came into view.
A bone-mass.
Curled like a fetus. Wrapped in its own ribs. No eyes. No mouth.
Fungal veins laced its spine.
Its chest rose once—shallow. Like it had tried to remember how to breathe.
"Oh gods," Rill whispered. "Tell me that's not real."
"It hasn't decided yet," Lysa said.
"What is it?"
Fennel crept forward a half-step, transfixed.
"Stop him," Rill snapped.
Ivar stepped between Fennel and the mass.
Fennel blinked. "It's humming."
"No," he said after a beat. "It's humming... and I can almost hear the song."
The bone-mass didn't move again. But the sound continued.
Not out loud.
Through the soil.
Through the marrow.
Low. Vibrational. As if memory itself had picked up an instrument and begun to tune it, just slightly out of key.
In the far wall, spiral markings shimmered—faint, but clear.
Lysa's eyes found them. "There. Bone Choir left trail-sign."
"Tell me we're not going toward them," Rill said.
"No," Ivar said, already turning. "We're walking away from that."
He didn't look at the bone-mass. None of them did.
Trudge lingered, crouched at the base of the fossil-jaw, licking fungus from his spoon.
"Give my regards to the Choir," he called. "And tell them the marrow's gone bitter!"
The trail twisted into darker hallways, where the roots turned sharp and the walls began to hum softly under touch.
Threadlings followed, half-blind, some still bleeding from the nose.
"They're not singing," Fennel murmured.
"They don't sing until something's wrong," Lysa said.
"Something's always wrong," Rill muttered.
Ivar's eyes narrowed. "That was a cradle, wasn't it?"
Lysa nodded once. "Or a grave."
Behind them, the jawbone cracked.
Not from age.
From pressure.
The fetus-mass twitched once, and didn't settle.
And in the deep forgotten arteries of Eelgrave—beneath rusted shrines, in the marrow of collapsed homes—fungal spirals blinked once, then twice.
A low vibration passed through the bones of the city.
Not a call.
A remembering.