Low in the stone, beneath the iron and the wet, there was a pulse that never settled. Kai sat with his back to cold rock and counted it to keep from hearing the other sounds, the clink of unattended chains, the whisper of something small moving in the walls, the sigh that crawled along the corridor when the Veil shifted its weight. The light remained the same witch-violet as before, the kind that lit edges and left faces in hollows. It made Malric look carved rather than born.
"Drink," the Lunarborn said.
Kai blinked. Malric had dragged a dented cup across the floor with his foot, chain scraping stone. The water tasted of iron. He swallowed anyway and felt it land in an empty place.
"They'll come again," Kai said. His voice sounded too large in the cell. "You said the Veil thins."
"Not for hours." Malric tugged once at his wrist shackle, habit, not hope, and settled against the wall. The man had a way of being still that wasn't rest, every line braced, eyes half-lidded and listening. "They like you hungry. Tightens the blood. Makes the echo clearer."
"Echo" Kai echoed, dry. "Is that what you call it?"
Malric's mouth tipped, not quite a smile. "Call it what you like. It calls back no matter."
For a time, the only sound was the distant drip and the small, almost-rhythmic rasp in Malric's breathing, as if he counted too. Kai let his head fall back and stared at the ceiling. Basalt, seams filled with the same faintly glowing mortar as the floor lines. Every so often, whatever passed for wind down here nudged the torch-sconces and sent shadows walking.
"You said you saved me," Kai said finally. "From the watchers? That Storm wasn't you?"
Malric's eyes slid to him. In the violet light they looked like coins in a deep well. "No, the bloodborn can only manipulate the shadows, they were watching you, I reached through and pulled you through."
"Why, save me, only to end up here?"
"They have empty hunger," Malric said. He rolled the word in his mouth, as if testing its weight. "The Bloodborn will drain you slow until your blood tells the truth. The Watchers will empty you and take the shape of your soul and leave the husk. Neither is mercy."
"You talk like you've walked both."
"Close enough."
Kai studied him. The collar at Malric's throat sat like a moonless horizon, matte black, the binding runes dull now, the faint red heartbeat of them quiet. Up close, Kai could see where the skin beneath had scarred in rings.
"They keep you leashed because you're dangerous," Kai said.
"They keep me leashed because I'm useful," Malric corrected. "Dangerous is a consequence."
"And which are you to me?"
"Ask me after the moon rises."
That almost-smile again, gone before Kai could decide if it deserved one back. He set the cup aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"My grandfather said the hook isn't cursed," he murmured.
"That's the trick of the Echorin." Malric's voice gentled without softening. "They amplify traits, make the impossible seem possible. Like when your adrenaline flows, but they can also affect those around it?
Kai frowned. "Around it?"
"You think the world broke because someone dropped a stone in the wrong well?" Malric flexed his fingers once, as if the memory lived there. "Every fracture was a bargain. The worst kind. Sacrifice dressed as salvation. Your line sealed away the consequences and called them Echorim. In the right hands one can amplify strength, but in the wrong hands it can make everyone around it feel weaker."
Kai let the words settle. Torash shifted again, the floor lines brightening by the thinnest degree. He felt it in his sternum more than he saw it.
"You talk like you were there."
"My line remembers different things than yours," Malric said. "The Lunarborn were reshaped by the aftermath. Our memories burn through night and habit."
"And the Bloodborn?"
Malric's lip curled, not in contempt, exhaustion that dressed as it. "They remember hunger most. When the sun began to burn their skin like a match to paper they fed off the Resonance the Echorim gave off."
Kai looked down at his wrists. The cuffs were smaller than Malric's, but their bite was the same. He flexed, felt his pulse knock against iron.
"They said my blood hums," he said. "That I'm a compass they didn't ask for."
Malric's gaze sharpened. "Did you hear it? The hum?"
Kai hesitated. The lie would be easier. The truth might be fatal. But the chain between them, literal, iron.
"Yes," he said.
"Where?"
"Everywhere," Kai admitted, surprising himself. "In the floor. In my teeth. In the part of me that knows I should run and the part that knows there's nowhere to run to. It… changes. Like it's trying different doors."
Malric's jaw tightened the smallest fraction. "Good."
"Good?"
"If it were only in the floor, they'd own you, but if it's in you, you might have a chance." He leaned his head against the wall, studying the ceiling as if it would confess. "Listen, Theryn. Strength isn't muscles or bone. Not down here. Strength is which part of you that you let break and which part you refuse. Decide that before they decide it for you."
The words landed with an odd gravity. Kai swallowed, the taste of iron lingering.
"You speak like a man who's broken the wrong parts before."
"I speak like a man who's still here."
The corridor breathed again. A distant hinge complained. Malric's head tilted without moving otherwise, the way a wolf might lift its ears, listening along a line the human eye couldn't see.
"They'll want you soon," he said, voice flat. "Save your words."
"I thought you said we had hours."
Malric's mouth hardened. "The Warden is impatient in victory."
Kai slid the cup back to the wall with his toe and gathered himself up to sit straighter. His hands shook once and then stopped
"If I go," he said, "and I don't come back…"
"You'll come back," Malric said, as if refusing a reality by starving it of language. "They want you tuned, not emptied."
"That isn't what I was going to say." Kai looked at him. "Don't let them get my younger brother, if they do tell him to be strong, hes stronger than I ever was."
Something flickered behind Malric's eyes. "He'll hear you without me."
Kai almost asked how, but the hinge-cry turned into footfalls.
The torches near the bend paled, then flared. Their fire never widened the way true flame did, it sharpened instead, as if cut with a cold blade. Kai drew in a breath and let it out slow. Malric's chain settled with the softest click, like a promise tabling itself.
"Whatever happens," Malric said, voice low, "don't let them make you sing their song. Sing yours or keep your mouth shut."
Kai nodded.
"Good," Malric said. "Now look beaten."
Kai tried. The footsteps stopped outside the door. Keys spoke to metal, a brief, intimate argument. The lock surrendered.
The door opened.
Two Bloodborn stepped in first, moving with that drifting precision that always made Kai think of leaf-shadows on water. Behind them came a thin man with a ledger and a intrigued expression. He smelled faintly of smoke and salt.
"Subject: Theryn, Kai," the ledger-man said, not looking up. "Response trials scheduled. Secondary captive remains bound. No contact permitted." His eyes flicked to Malric. "The collar stays."
Malric smiled with his teeth and none of his face. "Come take it off, accountant. I owe you a bite."
"Restrain your pet," one of the Bloodborn hissed at the clerk.
"He restrains himself," the ledger-man said mildly. "That's why he's still interesting."
As they turned him toward the door, Malric spoke in a tone that didn't quite carry, but reached anyway.
"Remember the choice."
"I heard you," Kai said, and surprised himself again by hearing steadiness in it.
The corridor beyond the cell felt narrower than before, though the measurements hadn't altered. The violet light thinned and deepened in alternating patches, like the world breathing through a bruise. As they moved, Kai discovered that if he set his teeth just so, the pulse in the floor climbed into his skull and steadied.
They took him down a path to the left where last time he'd gone right, then down a stair whose steps were worn in the center. The air cooled.
"Eyes down," a Bloodborn said. Not a threat. A reflex. They didn't like to be looked at too closely, as if presence were a wound.
Kai disobeyed a little. He slid his gaze where it didn't catch and saw enough, alcoves with simple iron altars, dark stains of dried blood. Narrow wells that hummed from a place deep down in the earths core. A doorway sealed by a slab of obsidian scored with hairline cracks that flickered blue when he passed.
They brought him into a chamber that emitted sorrow. Tall, with a ceiling that arched like the inside of a lung. The floor was a pattern of rings carved shallow and filled with that pale mortar, each ring inscribed with symbols that made his eyes want to water. A frame, more like a doorway than a table, stood in the center, its uprights forged of the same black as Malric's collar. It wasn't meant for bodies, not exactly. It was meant for passage.
The Warden waited by it, layers of silk taking in the violet and giving back a sheen like oil on black water. She looked at Kai the way she looked at everything, as if he were a problem she had already solved and was now grading the universe's work.
"You've rested," she said. "Good. I prefer subjects with their words still inside them."
Kai kept his mouth from moving. He let his anger stand behind his teeth and show only as steadiness. The ledger-man approved of something only he could see and began to mark the air with a quill that had no feather.
"Place him," the Warden said.
They did. Not strapped, not yet. The frame required proximity, not binds, to begin its work. When Kai's chest crossed the threshold, the rings on the floor woke like startled eyes. The hum leaped, clean as a tuning fork struck in the bones. He fought the instinct to flinch. He did not want to give them that.
"Theryn," the Warden said gently, which was worse than cold. "Your bloodline pretended to be guardians. I will teach you the truth of your service."
He looked at her with a slide glare trying to prepare for what next may come.
A murmur. The ledger-man's quill paused. The Warden's expression didn't change, but something drew tight in the air.
"Begin," she said.
They set their hands upon the rings. The symbols turned from pale to pearl to a color Kai could not name. Sound arrived in the room like the ocean arriving in a shell, at once and from very far. The frame thrummed. The air grained against his skin. He tasted copper and old pears and the first breath before a storm.
Behind his ribs, something answered.
Not the hook. Not exactly. The memory of it. Waking where it had touched him. His body wanted to lean into it the way men lean into wind they know will hold them. He didn't move. He remembered Malric, Decide which part you break.
He chose his throat. He held it shut.
The Warden stepped closer. "There it is," she breathed, not to him. "Hear how the pitch resolves. He's tuned. Pull the thread."
Hands lifted on rings. The sound shifted from the room to him, needle-fine, seeking, coaxing. For a heartbeat, the picture rose in him, the skiff deck, Tomas's fingers on wet rope, the hook heavy in a world that did not want it, the lake holding its breath like a liar deciding which truth to tell. He could have followed that thread like a fish follows a current.
He closed his eyes against it and thought of nothing. Not lake. Not hook. Not name. He thought of sewing nets by a window with no wind and no sound and thread that never ran out. He thought of counting.
The hum faltered.
"More," the Warden said, annoyed at physics for misbehaving. The rings brightened. The frame kissed his sternum with cold. The sound thinned to a spike and tried to pierce.
Kai opened his eyes and met hers.
"No," he said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The room heard it. The sound met the shape of that word and shivered wrong. The spike glanced, scraping the part of him that would bruise later, and slid off.
The ledger-man frowned, a man denied arithmetic. "Odd," he murmured. "The amplitude dipped at…"
The far door banged open. A Bloodborn guard staggered in, panting like a man who had learned how too recently. "Warden," he hissed. "The surface, ripples. The hook burns bright. A second line."
The Warden's head turned a fraction, listening along a nerve Kai could not. In the same instant, something in the frame went dull in his chest, as if the instrument had decided it preferred another musician.
The hum broke. Not stopped, shifted.
The rings faded to pearl. The frame softened its insistence. The pulse in the floor ran sideways and out, like a river finding an old bed.
Silence. Then all the wrong sounds at once, quill stuttering, guards whispering, the Warden's breath leaving in a single held line.
Her eyes sharpened to knives.
"Its Echo has moved," one of the Bloodborn said, voice a rasp of fear trying to dress as certainty. "It's not centered on him."
"Impossible," the ledger-man whispered.
The Warden's gaze never left Kai's face. "Not impossible," she said, very soft. "I felt it shift." A pause that held a century. "Find the other line."
"The other…?"
"The brother," she said, at last letting the word cut. "Find the brother."
They threw him back like refuse.
Kai hit the floor hard enough for air to leave his lungs in a flat, useless gasp. Stone met bone. He felt the world tilt once and right itself wrong. The hum that had filled the chamber was gone now, replaced by the dull ringing of silence that follows a sound too large to fit inside the body.
Malric was already moving before the door finished closing. His chain stretched tight. He caught Kai under the shoulder and pulled him upright, rough but careful.
"You're breathing," he said. "That's good. The rest will hurt."
Kai blinked, the violet light crawling back into focus. He'd lost time, minutes or hours, he couldn't tell. The air still carried the metallic tang of the Warden's ritual, and something faintly sweet underneath, like spoiled wine.
"It… failed," Kai managed. His voice came out hoarse, like someone else's. "She said the Echo moved."
Malric's jaw clenched. "I heard."
"She thinks it's… Jaka."
The Lunarborn's eyes flicked toward the corridor, then back. "She's not wrong. The blood runs both ways. Whatever they started in you will reach him if it hasn't already."
Kai pressed his hands to the floor. It was cold, wet, uneven, yet beneath all that, alive. Each breath he took seemed to sink through the stone and echo back a heartbeat late.
"I didn't tell them anything," he said quietly. "I just said no."
Malric huffed a short sound, almost like a laugh. "Sometimes no is the right word. Sometimes it's a door."
He crouched, the chain on his neck drawing taut again, runes pulsing once like an exhausted heartbeat. "You did more than you think, Theryn. The hum changed. They feel it too."
Kai frowned. "Changed?"
"Like a tide turning against itself," Malric said. "The Echorin want balance. When one is provoked, another answers. You refused the Warden's call, so it went looking for someone who could still hear."
"Jaka," Kai said again, and the name hurt to speak.
Malric's expression softened, though only a little. "Blood remembers blood. You can't stop that. But you can use it."
Kai dragged himself to the wall, leaning against the same spot he'd occupied before. His limbs trembled as though the ritual had burned through his muscles. The light made his skin look dry, ashen and slick, veins faintly visible beneath the surface.
"What did she mean, tuned?" he asked after a while. "She said I was tuned."
"It means your blood sings at the same pitch as the Echo," Malric replied. "She wanted to bend it, make it her instrument. Instead, you snapped the string."
Kai exhaled, slow and shaking. "Then why does it still feel like it's inside me?"
Malric didn't answer right away. His gaze had gone distant, gold flickering in the dark. "Because it is. It marked you. The Echo doesn't fade; it learns. You touched one that carries the memory of lies. It's still resonates with you now."
Kai's eyes widened. "Lies?"
"Not the kind you tell your parents," Malric said. "The kind that bends the world around it before it breaks you."
Outside, something moved, stone grinding softly against stone, as though the dungeon shifted in its sleep. The violet torches guttered, flaring briefly blue-white before settling again.
Malric tilted his head. "Hear that?"
Kai listened. At first there was nothing, then, faintly, a resonance under his heartbeat. Slow. Measured. Each pulse sent a tremor through the iron at his wrists.
"I feel it," he whispered.
"It feels you back."
The Lunarborn's chain rattled as he straightened, pacing once across the limited span the bindings allowed. "They think the ritual failed. They believe the Echo fled. But it didn't. It followed instinct, hiding where it was safe. Inside you."
Kai met his gaze. "Safe? Inside me?"
"Safer than in their hands."