Some heights test what you can hold. Some test what you'll let go of to hold it.
The Predator didn't jump. It committed. Air made room for it like a host who didn't trust the guest but had no choice. The three iron rings set into their platform clicked in a neat little sequence—one, two, three—like a lock remembering its manners.
[ENTITY: PREDATOR — Speaker]
Posture: edge-claim, anti-grapplePack: present (3 Sky Hunters circling)
It landed without sound. Long legs folded, then decided they didn't need to. The face was bone sanded into an argument; the eyes were holes in cold metal.
The slope of the stone shifted under Kade's boots—minute, persuasive.
[ABILITY — EDGE CLAIM]
Rim segments within 3 m: bias toward bearer
Anchor difficulty: +20%
Lateral step penalty: +1
"Take the inside," Euthy said, already moving.
Nor slid half a step left, shoulders square, burned hand open and careful. He didn't look at the edge. He never did when it mattered. The Mist Horse put itself where a fall would start and breathed a sheet of cold across the lip. Frost took, then argued with itself.
The three Hunters rose on wider arcs, content to let the larger thing write the plan.
The Predator tilted its head until its face agreed with gravity. "Wrong bearer," it said in the dry, clean voice of linen over steel.
Kade didn't give it his eyes for long. The Aeolian rings were set crooked into the corner of their platform—one near a spalled seam, one by a bolt with a tired eye, one out on a blunt spur that wasn't a step but could pretend to be one. He tasted the air. The shimmer over the middle distance had a pulse he could count.
"Left ring first," Euthy said. "Half… hold… set."
The Predator came in without hurry. Not a rush. A correction. The edge around its right foot belonged to it; Kade's knee wanted to agree. He told it not to.
Duskveil threaded for the nearest ring. The thread went dull against iron, bright through air, then dulled again. One.
He didn't touch the second. He waited.
The Predator's hand extended toward Euthy. Not to grab. To claim. The slope under her boot betrayed her by a breath. She didn't fight it. She let the slip happen and stepped into the wrongness like it had been waiting for her. Her blade came up in a line that discouraged lazy decisions.
"Now," she said.
Kade sent the second thread. Two.
The Hunters tested the circle. One scissored a dive for the Horse; the Horse dipped its skull and left a temporary stair in the air for no one but them. The Hunter clipped frost, hated it, climbed.
"Don't chase," Nor said, quiet. He did not raise his voice in fights. He saved sound for when it changed things.
The Predator put a heel on the rim and lowered its weight like a promise. The platform tried to tilt a degree more. Kade's breath had some work to do.
[Ambient hypoxia] — Stamina ceiling: –10%
He went for the third ring and found there was no ground between him and it. There was only a suggestion. He needed more than that.
"Please," he told the Horse.
It stepped. Vapor made lace over nothing. He used the second before it melted.
Three.
[Aeolian Loom] — tensioned (sequence 3/3)
Stability aura: +4.0 s (local)
Secondary: current shaping (minor)
The low note came up through his boots—the one that said the world would be honest here for a few seconds. Honest didn't mean kind. It meant knowable.
The Predator felt it. The emptiness in its eyes got tighter. The edge immediately around the Loom's triangle stopped listening to Edge Claim and decided to listen to math instead. The Hunters shifted higher, measuring.
Euthy took the small steadiness like a gift. "If you're going to do something clever," she said without looking, "do it now."
Kade didn't run for a weapon on the floor that wasn't there. He made one.
He pulled the Loom's tension through his palm the way you pull thread through a needle, and let Duskveil wear it like new teeth. The three anchored lines fed into the ache in his hand and back out again, and then the ache turned cool.
A ring formed where there hadn't been one—thin, sky-glass pale. It sat around the base of his thumb like a memory of metal.
[RELIC FORMED — AERON KNOT]
Slot: Main
Commands: Tie / Draw / Step / Sever / Release
Fuel: Residuum; <20% draws on Duskveil (Overdraw risk)
TOLL applied: Breath Tax (–O₂ margin; mild vertigo)
Air went shorter for a second. He didn't say it out loud. He changed how he breathed.
The Predator moved to break the little triangle with its foot, and learned that rules didn't enjoy being stepped on when someone else had paid for them. The heel skidded half a thumb over honest stone.
Kade lifted his hand, the Knot a cold thought under skin. "Tie," he said.
A filament of pressure drew from ring to ring, then up to a point over the Predator's shoulder. The air along that line hardened into the idea of a cord.
The Predator recognized it the way wolves recognize fire.
"Draw."
The cord pulled lateral—not to Kade, not away—sideways, into the axis that Edge Claim hated. The Predator adjusted with a knee that could do that and still lost half its stance. Nor took the half it lost and made it matter: a short, patient cut at the back of the leg, not deep, precisely where a man's balance lives even if this wasn't a man.
Pain made no sound. The Predator didn't give them that.
A Hunter tried to get clever from above. Euthy pivoted into the dive, closed the distance in a line that said work with me, and slipped a gloved hand along the joint where wing met torso. When she drew the hand away, blood streaked her fingers. She pressed two quick marks back onto the Hunter's membrane as it passed her again—small, raw shapes.
The air around the Hunter hesitated.
Dominion didn't command here, not cleanly. But for two seconds the animal forgot whose instinct it belonged to and thought about hers. Two seconds was the same as a blade if you were honest.
Kade saw the opening. "Step."
The Knot lifted a short stair in the current—no more than a knee—exactly long enough for him to make a wrong angle feel right. He rose into that lie and let it tell the truth about where his weight was. The Predator's arm swept for his throat at a speed he didn't like; he wasn't there when it arrived. He was left of there, and Euthy's point was already writing across the seam of the Predator's shoulder.
[Residuum] +5% — Aeron Knot stable
Edge Claim pushed back. The rim under the Predator's other foot tried to slant further inward.
"Sever," Kade said.
The cord you couldn't see cut the direction you couldn't name. Edge Claim's bias dropped out of the heel like a pulled nail. The Predator's hips stuttered, small, human for the width of that failure. It didn't fall. It remembered how to in the same breath and didn't.
It was fast the way cold things are fast. It snapped the distance with a straight-line reach, not flashy, nothing that wasted work. Kade felt the breath-tax bite and ignored the complaint.
The Mist Horse beat its ruined head against nothing and made a patch of air solid. Euthy used it without a word. Nor didn't move his feet at all. He set his shoulder where someone would need a shoulder soon.
The Predator put its palm against space and pressed. The space agreed to indent. The platform's inner roll tried a fraction harder to throw them off.
[ABILITY — EDGE CLAIM escalating]
Rim bias: +30% within 2 m
nchor difficulty: +30%
"Shorter calls," Euthy said. Her voice wasn't tight. She'd worn tighter shoes.
Kade counted his own pulse to find the Loom's count. Seven beats of reliable shape, then fray. He had already used three.
"Draw," he said. Lateral again, hard. The cord bit low, behind the Predator's knee. It skidded a fraction, caught, pushed back with a grace that would have been admirable in anything that wasn't trying to erase them.
The Hunters returned to the language of teeth. One slashed for the Horse's ribs. Frost jumped from hoof to empty and made a slick nobody could use twice. The Hunter found the slick exactly once. It flailed past Nor and lost a strip of primary to Euthy's blade without understanding how.
The Predator stopped being curious and tried to end something. It stepped into Kade's triangle like it had paid for it and found it hadn't. Kade felt the hardening of air against his hand as the Knot resisted Edge Claim within the Loom's rule. Two kinds of law argued inside his ribs. He picked one.
"Tie.""Draw.""Step."
Short stairs, wrong pull, correct angle. The world became a tiny room where only three forces got a vote.
The Predator used a fourth: not strength, not speed—timing. It read his shoulder, stole his intention by arriving half a breath before he needed the space, and tried to replace his plan with one of its own.
The Strike should have landed.
Nor put his forearm into the path, not to block—just to cost the Predator a handful of degrees. The skin over Nor's knuckles went white with pain that didn't make noise either. The burned hand stayed open, useless for a moment; his weight never left the ground.
"Two more beats," he said.
Kade gave him a nod he didn't have time for.
"Sever."
This time the cut went through a vector the Predator had already chosen. It staggered, first motion it hadn't consented to since it landed. Euthy made a line across its thigh that would have ended a man. The Predator kept all its blood as a philosophical position.
Edge Claim pushed harder again. The rim tried to become a slope into a throat. The Hunters smelled that and came down together for once.
"Don't let them split us," Kade said, breath narrow.
They didn't. He felt Euthy closer on his left shoulder than she preferred to be to anyone. Nor shifted half a foot, exactly enough to own a lane that wasn't visible if you weren't him.
The Loom's count reached six.
The Predator recognized the Loom now—not what it was, but that it was a rule it hadn't written. It stopped trying to break it and tried to step sideways out of its jurisdiction. Kade didn't allow the step.
"Draw."
The cord took the ankle. You couldn't tug a thing like this without paying for it. Vertigo licked the back of his eyes. He kept his breath flat and unambitious the way men do when air becomes a negotiation.
[TOLL — Breath Tax]O₂ margin: –Vertigo: mild
The Predator came up with a new answer: it took the edge behind Kade instead, claimed the rim at his back, and made the floor plan want him gone. He felt his heel ask to be elsewhere. Duskveil sewed that heel to sanity for one insulted second.
"Please," he told the Horse, and meant something bigger with the word without making a prayer out of it.
The Mist Horse set both forehooves like a brace. Cold climbed the tooth of stone and turned a hand's breadth of tilt into a wider breath of even. The Loom throbbed as if the rings approved the idea of teamwork.
"Sever," Kade said, as gentle as cutting ever gets.
The Predator lost the edge under its right foot. That was all. Sometimes all is everything.
Euthy used the beat to put steel where joints hate it. Nor didn't add a cut. He added presence, the kind that makes knives choose better lines.
The Loom ticked to seven.
The little honest room they'd made started to unmake itself at the edges. Kade felt the drift as a suggestion. He could hold it longer by paying more. He chose not to. Edges you hold too long charge interest.
"Release."
The cords went to memory. The Loom fell silent.
The Predator stepped in for the finish at the exact moment the room ended. That should have been the end of them. It wasn't, because ending things isn't tidy on platforms with opinions. The Hunter Euthy had marked earlier came through its hesitation late, found its flock gone and a vector it didn't trust, and arrived between the Predator's hips and intention for a blink of wrong. It wasn't help. It was noise. Sometimes that's what you get.
Kade put a new cord where the old one wasn't. Not ring to ring now. Palm to edge to enemy.
"Tie."
The Aeron Knot answered like a kept promise. The filament bit the Predator at the waist, not to hold, just to suggest. He didn't yank. He leaned.
"Draw."
The lean turned to a fault line. The Predator had to pay for staying upright. Paying meant giving him a knee. He took it.
"Step."
Short stair, short man, wrong place, right time. Euthy finished the lesson the moment gravity arrived honest under the Predator's center. Her point rose through the thin space beneath the collar and wrote a quiet line under bone. If there had been a breath to steal, she would have taken it. There wasn't. The world flinched anyway.
Kade didn't wait for the thing to decide whether it wanted to stay. He used the Knot one last time before the Breath Tax got rude.
"Sever."
The Predator's vector—the hopeful one that said recover—cut in half. It hit the Mist Horse's frost-edge with what would have been a grunt in anything that did grunts. Bone creaked like an old hinge. It slid, went over, and took a slice of claimed rim with it as it fell past.
The Hunters reeled back and chose not to mourn.
[ENTITY DOWN — PREDATOR (Speaker)]
Residuum +12%
Aeron Knot: stable
[Note] — Pack clock advancing
Kade stood still until the world stopped trying to ask for more air than it had. He rolled his shoulders once. The ring of sky-glass was a cool weight, not heavy, not light, like a coin you shouldn't spend.
Nor looked at him, then at the rings, then at Euthy. "We're not done," he said.
They weren't.
Four shadows came in on tidy vectors and landed as if they were punctuation, evenly spaced along the rim they hadn't claimed yet. Same bone-faces. Same eyes that weren't. The one with a mark carved into its skull looked at Kade's hand and then at the rings in the stone.
"We speak before we hunt," it said. The voice had no pride in it. It didn't need any. "Return the knot."
Euthy wiped her blade on clean air, because there was no cloth you could trust here. "He made it," she said.
"That is the error," the marked one replied. It was not angry. It didn't have that in its pocket. "Give it back."
Kade kept his hand low. The ring of the Knot didn't glow. It didn't have to. "It isn't yours," he said.
"Everything tied to edge is ours," another said, mild. "You tie. We claim. This is the order."
Nor's fingers flexed and settled. The burned hand shook once and stopped. He didn't offer the debate any words.
A wind rose that hadn't been invited. It found the Loom rings and made the iron talk in small voices. The Hunters drifted wider to frame the conversation without becoming the conversation.
Kade looked at the four of them and didn't count them out loud. He had the small feeling you get when a ledger adds itself while you're still finding the chalk. He breathed through the tax until the numbers were quiet in his ribs.
"We won't keep you long," the marked one said, almost polite. "It is kinder to end you now than later, when some of us might hesitate."
Euthy's eyes didn't change, but her stance did by a few truths. "Then you should try," she said. It wasn't bravado. It was scheduling.
Kade felt the Knot's filament itch for lines, looked at the rings, at the currents, at the Horse's stubborn patience. He didn't look at Nor. He didn't need to.
"Stay close," he said, which meant if they split us, we don't make it clean.
The marked Predator inclined its head with the grace of a creature that expected to be obeyed by physics. "We speak before we hunt," it repeated, and all four stepped in—one for the rim, one for the air above them, one for the line behind Kade's heel, one for the small, honest triangle they had made and would have to make again.
The Loom rings clicked—a new sequence he hadn't met yet—and the wind braided itself into four narrow cords that felt like questions.