Draeven didn't get the chance to answer.Somewhere deeper in the tunnel, boots struck stone in a rhythm too even to belong to anything that had crawled up from the burial hall. Voices followed low, disciplined, the particular cadence of men trained to move as a unit.Severin's head snapped toward the sound. "That's a church pattern. Six-count spacing.""You're certain?" Malgraves whispered."I trained half of them."Draeven filed Nerez's words away the same way he filed everything he couldn't afford to feel yet into a locked room, door shut, dealt with later. Later was a habit he'd built an entire life on. It would hold a little longer."How many?" he asked.Severin listened for another second. "A search team. Eight, maybe ten. They're not looking for us specifically, not yet but they will be the moment they find that hole in the ceiling."Oric shifted Malgraves's weight against his shoulder. "So we don't let them find it.""We don't have time to hide a collapsed tomb," Draeven said.

The ridge trail narrowed into a scramble of loose rock and root, and Draeven took it at a pace that left his lungs burning and Nerez's weight feeling heavier with every stride. Every few strides, the old hunter's boots dragged instead of stepping, and Draeven adjusted his grip without slowing, refusing to let either of them acknowledge what that meant.Behind them, the horn didn't fade. If anything, it multiplied a second signal answering the first, then a third, spreading out along the treeline like the corps was mapping their position by sound alone."They're boxing us in," Severin said. "Standard containment pattern. Three points, closing.""Then we don't go where the pattern expects us to go." Draeven cut hard left, off the trail entirely, down through a stand of black pine where the ground dropped steep enough to be more fall than descent.Oric swore behind him but followed, dragging Malgraves through the same gap. Branches tore at exposed skin. Somewhere below, water moved a str

The water near the bank rippled against the current.Draeven noticed it a half-second before anyone else did, some old instinct flagging the wrongness of movement that didn't match the flow. He was on his feet before he'd fully processed why, water still streaming off his coat, boots slipping on the mud."Everyone up. Now."Oric didn't question it. Neither did Severin. Malgraves needed a hand to move at all, and Nerez was already trying to push himself upright when the first shape broke the surface twenty feet downstream.It had been human once. That was the worst part. Waterlogged skin hung loose over a frame too thin to have died naturally, eyes clouded white, mouth working in a slow, wet rhythm that wasn't quite speech and wasn't quite hunger. It fixed on the blood trailing from Draeven's burned palm the way a compass fixes on north, and didn't so much walk toward it as drift, current and current alone deciding the pace."Drowned," Ner

"You carry something inside you that predates the church, predates the curse they think they invented, predates even the man screaming behind that gate you sealed shut." Sylveth's voice moved through the clearing unhurried, each word settling like frost on stone, patient in a way that made the hair on Draeven's arms rise. "Aldric doesn't understand what he built. I do. I've had far longer to study the pieces he left scattered across these mountains."Draeven's grip on the token tightened. "Then explain it.""Not through a piece of bone in a forest, hunter. Some truths lose their shape when you shout them across a distance, and this one deserves better than to arrive half-formed." A pause, almost thoughtful, as though she were choosing her next words the way a surgeon chooses where to cut. "But I'll give you this much for free, as a gesture of good faith between two things the church would rather see dead than understand the thing your blade called you, the correction, isn't a metaphor