The ink remained wet, red smeared across the vellum over her assumed alias. The office suddenly felt smaller than a grave. Envar had handed her the uniform, smoothed over forged paperwork, and slipped silver into her hand for her starving sisters. And every name entered before hers belonged to trainees who had vanished into the Ghol-Breaches. He was feeding them to the deep.
She snatched the volume, tucking it under her arm. The volcanic pebble in her lining, the one Skritch had unearthed, radiated a sharp chill through wool and linen. She could not confront him here. Slipping through the corridor, the bound parchment pressing against her ribs, she tracked him to the mess hall entrance where he supervised the distribution of thin gruel with calm authority.
“Envar,” she said, pitching her voice low, though a passing soldier still glanced her way. She pulled him toward a dripping rock alcove away from the chow line. “I found this.” She thrust the pages toward his chest, cracked open to her crossed-out name, watching his pupils for any twitch of guilt.
Envar looked down without flinching. Taking the book, his dry fingers grazed hers, and he shut it with a soft thud. “Ah. The registry of targets. I should have warned you, Keth. Forgive an old soldier's silence.” He spoke with smooth, paternal softness.
“Targets?” Kethra kept her jaw tight. “My name is struck through in fresh red. Just like the boys who went missing in the tunnels.”
He gave a sorrowful sigh. “A grim record. It tracks novices singled out by the breach cultists. They watch for anyone showing mercy or clean conscience, preparing them for the deep. Your name was taken by their informants. That red strike means you were singled out, boy. They believe your temper holds an alignment their rites require.”
Her gut churned. A clean conscience—the exact trait Envar had praised when she tended wounded boys during intake. The dark mineral in her pouch seemed to throb cold against her hip. “And the others who disappeared?”
“Swallowed by the dark, the fortress claims,” Envar murmured, leaning close enough that she smelled dried tea on his breath. “Taken. Which is why I need you. The zealots utilize those fissure fragments, like the shard your lizard dug up. They act as anchors for their sorcery. Gather them for me so we can learn to sever the connection. Your eye for those relics is why I sponsored you.”
He offered a slight, weathered smile. “Bring any more you uncover straight to my quarters. It is the only path to keeping our company alive.” He handed the register back. “Hide this under your bunk. Be silent about it.”
Kethra took the book, sickened by how easily the explanation settled into place. He sounded earnest, yet every syllable was too tidy, too prepared. She backed away toward the barracks, the bound leaves tucked against her ribs and the mineral shard heavy in her cloth.
By late afternoon, the sun was only a bruised slit along the crags. The training yard had turned to grey muck churned by eighty pairs of iron-shod boots. Drill masters ran them through heavy carries and blunted spar matches without water breaks. Kethra paced her breathing, letting heavier novices exhaust their bulk early, while Skritch nestled against her ribs, claws lightly ticking through her uniform fabric.
Halfway through a pack sprint, a thickset trainee named Borik planted himself across her lane. “Look at the runt,” Borik sneered, broad shoulders blocking the mud track. “Struggling under half-iron. Run back to the infirmary to bandage blisters, girlie.”
Two squadmates snickered behind him. Kethra cut left to dodge around, but Borik sidestepped into her path, reeking of sour grease and cheap tallow. “What’s the rush, pretty face?” His thick hand clamped onto her upper arm, fingers sliding inward until his thumb dug directly into the linen binding flattened across her ribs. Kethra stopped dead, all air leaving her throat. Near the terrace wall, Darev stood watching the field with folded arms, seemingly oblivious.
Borik’s grip tightened, an ugly smirk on his face. “Soft, aren’t we? Feel like a woman under all those rags.”
A shadow crossed the gravel before she could twist away. Darev crossed thirty paces without a shout, slamming into Borik like an iron battering ram. His gauntleted fist drove straight into Borik’s jaw with a crack like split pine. Borik stumbled back into the churned mud.
Darev followed him down, kicking the man's planted knee sideways and burying an elbow in his gut. Before the brawler could inhale, Darev seized the offending wrist, wrenched it up between Borik’s shoulder blades, and drove his knee down until bone cracked. Borik shrieked, rolling into the mire while gripping his dislocated arm.
The yard went dead. The entire cohort stood frozen in the mud. Darev loomed over the groaning man, his shoulders rising and falling in harsh spasms, his knuckles raw and trembling. He did not glance at Kethra, but the violence rolling off him felt sickeningly intimate.
Nausea knotted her ribs. This was no routine reprimand for rowdy soldiers. It was the frantic, shameful obsession she had seen tearing at him in the corridors—a seasoned commander losing his mind over an unbearable, forbidden pull toward a scrawny male private.
Inside her vest, Skritch hissed. Six sets of claws raked her shirt as the lizard lunged toward an iron runoff grate ten paces away. Violet light seeped between the rusted bars. A subterranean rumble vibrated through her boot leather, smelling of copper slag and rotting bog. The paving stones surrounding the drain fractured into spidery tracks, the glow flaring like hot pitch.
Iron sheared with a deafening screech as the grate blew upward. A plated, eyeless snout rimmed with barbed tendrils broke through the flagstones, spraying wet rock across the yard. The abyssal beast did not lash out at the terrified men around it. Its blind head twisted on a thick neck, sensory whiskers flaring, and oriented straight toward Kethra, drawn to the dark shard buried in her lining.