The path opens beneath our paws like a wound that never closed.
I don't remember stepping into it. One moment, dawn lies behind us — a sheet of ash-gold over the glass plains — and the next, the earth yawns wide, spilling light that has never touched a sky.
We descend in silence. Every sound dies before it reaches the walls; even the click of claws feels muffled, swallowed by the air's slow pulse. The tunnel curves downward in a spiral, ribs of fused bone arching overhead. They glisten with something that isn't moisture — a sheen like oil, yet alive, breathing faintly. Each breath carries the faintest scent of iron and incense, as if the world itself were embalmed.
I keep my gaze forward, pretending that the rhythm of my heartbeat matches the thrum in the stone. But it doesn't. Mine stumbles, skips, then races, while the Husk's pulse never falters.
Vael walks to my left, head low, ears flattened. "The air's too thick," he murmurs. "Like it's watching us."
"It's listening," I whisper back. I don't know why I say it; the words slip from me as if the Husk placed them there.
The walls shift when we pass. Bone flows like wax, closing paths behind us, opening new ones ahead. Veins of pale light thread through the floor, converging on a distant glow that hums at the edge of hearing — a hymn sung backward.
Ryn brushes against my flank. "How deep does this go?"
"As deep as it wants," I answer. The moment the words leave me, the ground shudders, and she flinches. Maybe the Husk liked the answer.
We come upon a cavern so vast it could cradle a city. The ceiling curves high above, its surface a mosaic of translucent crystal panes. Light seeps through them in shifting colors — pale blues, sickly greens, the red of old embers. Each pane holds frozen silhouettes: wings, claws, faces pressed as if against glass, mid-scream. I don't look too long. The air hums when I do, and the edges of my sight begin to curl inward.
The floor is not solid. It's a membrane stretched over emptiness, thin enough that I can see dim movement below — shapes gliding through luminous fog, huge and slow, like whales swimming beneath ice. The sight makes my chest ache with awe and terror in equal measure.
I kneel and place my paw against the surface. It's warm, almost soft, and it shivers at the touch. The whisper comes immediately:
〈…sync… initiated…〉
〈…boundary… dissolving…〉
I pull back, but the echo clings to my skin, a film of static that crackles when I move.
Ryn snarls softly. "What is it doing to you?"
"I think it's asking," I murmur. "But I don't know what the question is."
Vael growls low, eyes scanning the cavern. "Then stop answering."
I nod, though I know I won't.
We move again, following the veins of light as they weave into a spiral path descending toward the cavern's center. The membrane thickens, darkens; every step leaves a faint footprint that glows before fading. Above us, the crystal ceiling shifts colors, pulsing in time with something deeper.
Halfway down, we find bones.
They aren't fossilized — they're still slick with marrow. Each rib the length of a tower, vertebrae stacked like altars. Between them, remnants of metal harnesses and runes etched into the flesh, pulsing faintly. I trace one mark with a claw, and images flicker behind my eyes: an army kneeling before a burning horizon; a god without a face reaching down; my own reflection kneeling among them.
The vision fades as quickly as it comes, leaving me trembling.
"Lira?" Ryn's voice sounds far away.
"I'm fine," I lie.
The descent ends at a basin of glass, its surface cracked into a spiderweb of light. In the center floats a sphere — half bone, half crystal — suspended by threads of glowing sinew that stretch into the darkness above. The sphere beats once, a slow contraction, and the entire cavern breathes with it.
〈…HUSK—ACTIVE…〉
〈…identity… merge…〉
〈…/syst_m err— 〉
The code scrapes through my skull. I stagger, claws digging into the floor. The pack growls, unsure whether to defend me or flee.
Then the sphere opens.
Not with sound, but with light. It spills out like smoke, wrapping around us in soft tendrils that pulse with faint heartbeats. The tendrils brush against fur, scale, skin — testing, tasting. One wraps around my muzzle. I try to pull away, but a voice hums through the contact, too intimate to be heard, too vast to be ignored.
Little echo, it murmurs in my mind. You remember warmth. That is dangerous here.
"I didn't come to remember," I whisper. "I came to understand."
Then understand this: nothing dreams forever.
The tendrils withdraw. The cavern's colors dim, leaving only pale blue veins pulsing beneath the surface. My pack stands silent, eyes wide, breathing in sync with the light. For a moment, I feel all of them inside my skull — Vael's tension, Ryn's fear, the younger wolves' wordless awe — layered like reflections on water.
Then the feeling vanishes, and the echo of the Husk's heartbeat lingers in my chest like an unwelcome gift.
We rest at the basin's edge. No one speaks. The air feels thicker, heavier with every breath, as though the god's dream has noticed us and begun to adjust its shape around our presence.
I wonder how long we can stay before it dreams us too.
---
We move again when the heartbeat slows enough that the membrane beneath our feet steadies. The air tastes of metal and dust; it clings to the tongue like wet ash. Every breath feels borrowed.
The descent narrows into a passage of fused ribs. The surfaces pulse faintly, translucent, showing veins that flow not with blood but with light. Each vein throbs in rhythm with the faint code whisper that threads the back of my skull.
〈…loya— sync… adv—〉
〈…error… /mind > many > one…〉
I blink and the symbols smear into motes drifting in the air, then into spores that sink into fur. My wolves sneeze, shake themselves, then fall silent. Their eyes glint the same shade as the light in the veins.
I tell myself it's reflection.
We reach a junction where the tunnel divides into six mouths, each breathing a different color. The air from the first smells of pine and frost, the next of burnt feathers, another of salt and wet stone. The last two exhale nothing at all—only silence so dense it hums.
Vael steps forward, testing the air. "They're memories," he says, voice low. "Of the things it's eaten."
"How do you know?"
He glances back. "Because one of them smells like me."
The moment he says it, the sixth tunnel exhales a sound—his own growl, repeating endlessly, echoing until it becomes a chant. Ryn shivers. "It's learning our voices."
I choose the tunnel of salt and stone. It feels the least like surrender.
Inside, the walls change from bone to glass. I can see shadows swimming behind the surface: tall, slender figures moving through dark water, hair drifting like kelp. Once, I think I glimpse a human face among them, eyes open, mouth moving in silent speech. The current carries her away before I can read her lips.
The floor slickens with condensation. Drops fall from the ceiling and hiss when they touch fur, leaving faint rings of frost. The sound reminds me of rain, but colder, crueler—each drop a measured note in some hidden melody.
The passage opens into a chamber vast enough to hold weather. Clouds coil beneath a ceiling of shattered crystal. Between them float the Ashborn Choir.
They are not many—perhaps twenty shapes suspended in the air, neither standing nor flying. Their bodies are mosaics of bone, bronze, and translucent flesh shot through with dim light. Faces carved from different species fuse into one another—elf ears taper into scaled jaws, human mouths into avian eyes. They hum a tone that vibrates through bone more than air.
When they see us, the hum falters, splinters into discord.
One drifts forward, its voice layered and hollow. "Echo of breath. Why walk the dream of that which should not wake?"
"I follow a map," I answer. "I follow what's left of a name."
It tilts its head, as if listening to something beyond me. "Names bleed. Maps rot. Only memory devours clean."
The Choir shifts. Their light flares, and the chamber brightens. The walls are revealed as mirrors—every angle filled with reflections of me, my pack, the Choir—multiplied, inverted, spinning. I see myself kneeling, standing, burning, dissolving.
The lead figure gestures. "We keep the pulse slow. We keep the dream unmade. You bring noise."
"I bring hunger," I say before I can stop myself. "And the will not to vanish."
They pause, then the hum resumes, lower now, almost gentle. "Then feed," they whisper together. "Every will becomes part of the rhythm."
The floor liquefies. My paws sink a few inches into translucent fluid that smells like old sap and blood. Beneath the surface, pale shapes drift closer—half-skeletal wolves, deer with glass antlers, serpents coiled around forgotten weapons.
My pack whines, but none flee. The light from the Choir threads into the fluid, and the shapes begin to move in time with our breathing. For a moment, I can feel their hearts—or maybe mine multiplied among them.
Then something inside the Choir snaps.
A single note too sharp to be sound splits the air. My vision whites out. When it clears, one of the Choir has fallen, its body unraveling into strands of light that lash across the chamber. The others try to gather it, but their harmonies clash, warping the rhythm.
The Husk shudders. The ceiling ripples.
〈…stabi— error—〉
〈…identity recursion > threshold EXCEEDED…〉
The whisper cuts through everything. The pack howls, ears flat, and I feel their panic crash through me like a tide. For an instant, all thought blurs—my voice and theirs the same.
When the quake ends, the Choir's song is silence. The fallen one is gone, leaving only a ring of floating ash.
The lead singer drifts closer, its light flickering. "The dream frays," it says. "If you wish to leave, do so before it notices your face."
I nod, but the floor pulses underfoot, and I know the Husk already has.
We retreat through corridors that twist into new geometries, light bleeding down the walls like slow rain. Each step echoes twice—once here, once somewhere deeper.
By the time we find stillness again, the hum of the Choir has returned to a lullaby. My heartbeat matches it without permission.
Vael leans close, voice raw. "What are we walking inside, Lira?"
"I think…" I whisper, "we're walking through someone's memory of dying."
The walls sigh in answer, exhaling warmth that smells faintly of roses and rust.
---
The air inside the God Husk tasted like spoiled divinity.
It clung to the lungs, thick and sweet and rotten, as if every breath were drawn through the memory of incense and blood.
Lira walked through it in silence. Her claws clicked softly against the smooth inner bone of the cavern, and each sound repeated itself a heartbeat later, warped—like the world was struggling to remember how echoes worked.
Her pack followed in uneasy formation. Vael kept his eyes down, his posture low, hackles twitching at each sound that came from nowhere. Ryn stayed closer than usual, tail brushing Lira's leg now and then, a tether to reality neither quite admitted to needing.
The tunnel's walls pulsed faintly with veins of light. Not color—more the ghost of color. The way a dream remembers blue, or the way grief remembers laughter.
Lira whispered, "It's growing weaker."
Ryn's ear flicked. "The light?"
"The heartbeat." She pressed a hand to the nearest wall. Beneath the bone shell, she could feel it—slow, uneven. Once divine. Now dying.
The System's voice fluttered to life:
> 〈sy… sssst… m re–link: detected | enviro-paradox…〉
〈core host perception—splay err/err—/ERR–〉
〈stabil…iz—〉
The message cracked apart like frost on glass, leaving only silence.
Lira lowered her hand. "It's losing language."
Vael's voice was low, rasping. "Maybe we shouldn't follow something that forgets how to speak."
«We already did,» she thought, but didn't say.
The path widened into a vast inner chamber.
Here the world pretended to remember grandeur. Great ribs arched overhead, fused with what might once have been spires. The ground was fractured glass covered in thin frost, glowing faintly where molten veins pulsed beneath.
In the center of the chamber lay a figure—half buried in crystal growths.
A giant's corpse, ossified. A god, or what remained of one.
Its face was featureless. Its limbs dissolved into fractal filigree, like glass trying to mimic flesh. Around it, the light bent wrong—soft, elastic, almost alive.
Lira took one step closer, and the whispers began.
At first they were shapeless. The murmurs of dreams caught between frequencies. Then, syllables emerged—fragments of memory spoken by voices she half-recognized.
"…li…ra…"
"…lead…er…"
"…failure…"
"…mother…"
Her pupils dilated. The air swam. The ribs above bent into the outline of a cathedral, then into the open jaws of a wolf, then into a spiral of binary light.
She whispered, trembling, "This is where gods come to die."
Ryn's voice trembled behind her. "And what happens to those who walk inside their corpses?"
Lira's answer came slow, like it was borrowed from someone else's mouth. "They learn what killed them."
The light brightened, and with it came visions:
Cities made of howling glass.
Rivers of molten prayer.
A sky where stars flickered in binary, chanting the same broken phrase—
> 〈loyalty = contagion〉
Lira dropped to one knee, clutching her head. "Stop—"
But the visions didn't obey.
She saw her pack in that other sky—each wolf suspended mid-breath, their eyes filled with code sigils instead of pupils. The more loyal they became, the more unreal they looked.
Ryn reached for her, fur brushing her arm. "Lira—look at me. Not them. Me."
She tried. But the God Husk was inside her eyes now, and she saw Ryn through it: a hundred versions of him overlapping, each one a potential outcome of loyalty—slave, saint, monster, son.
Her own reflection hovered in his eyes: not a girl, not a wolf, but something crystalline and trembling, half-coded.
> 〈evolution—locked | system host unstable | LOYALTY_OVERFLOW〉
The System's tone was no longer mechanical—it was pleading.
> 〈please… stabil… host… revert… flesh. flesh. f—lesh〉
A hand touched her shoulder. Warm, real.
Vael. "You're bleeding from your eyes."
She blinked, and red streaks dripped onto the bone floor. "I can't tell what's real anymore."
He growled softly. "Then make it real. You're Alpha. Decide."
That word hit something inside her.
Alpha.
Once, it had meant survival. Now, it felt like a curse.
To lead meant to decide who lived long enough to die for you.
She steadied her breath. "Ryn. Map the chamber. Find any exit routes. Vael—guard the perimeter."
They moved. Relieved by the command, perhaps, or just glad to move away from the corpse.
Lira stood alone before the god husk, staring at its hollow face.
The whispers softened, turning into something almost like music. A hymn built of decaying syntax.
> 〈alpha-signal accepted〉
〈pack-unit expansion possible…〉
〈available forms: subraces detected—elf/dwarf/beastkin/human… hybridization permitted…〉
Her heart stuttered.
The System was offering her evolution templates.
"Is this how it spreads?" she whispered. "By offering choices when you're desperate enough to take any of them?"
The corpse's light pulsed, slow and vast, as if in agreement.
She closed her eyes. For a moment, she could almost feel it—a future built of many species, all bound by her blood, by her idea of loyalty made flesh. Not unity… assimilation.
And in the dark, the God Husk spoke through the System's fractured voice, soft as a prayer:
> 〈alpha of glass. loyalty eternal. feed. multiply. ascend.〉
Lira opened her eyes.
"I will… but not like you."
She turned away before the corpse could answer, and for a moment, it seemed the entire chamber exhaled in disappointment.
The ground cracked behind her, splitting into fault-lines of light, and through them she saw glimpses of what lay beneath—miles of veins, more corpses, all whispering the same decayed hymn.
As she left the chamber, Ryn and Vael waited by a jagged opening that led upward into the frostlight.
Ryn's voice was quiet. "What did you see?"
Lira smiled faintly, the expression brittle as glass. "Choices."
He frowned. "And?"
Her eyes reflected the dying light. "The wrong ones are easier."
---
Frostlight bled across the tunnel mouth as Lira's pack climbed out of the corpse of a god.
The plains beyond had changed.
Where glass had once lain unbroken, great shards now jutted up like the ribs of a continent, each glimmering with slow veins of colorless fire. Between them stretched dunes of powdered crystal that hissed under every step.
The wind here did not howl—it whispered in reversed syllables, as if trying to undo speech.
Lira halted on a ridge. Her breath came out white and thin. "It's colder."
Ryn shook the snow from his fur. "Not cold. Empty."
Vael sniffed the air, eyes narrowing. "We're not alone."
---
The strangers
They appeared first as mirages—two shapes moving through the heatless haze, too steady to be ghosts.
When they drew close, the illusion peeled away.
One was small, wrapped in scavenged furs, a tail of russet gold flicking behind her. Her ears were sharp, trembling with each gust: foxkin.
The other walked beside her with quiet grace, her cloak torn but her bearing proud—an elf, tall and severe, her eyes a worn green that seemed to remember forests now long extinct.
They looked half-starved, half-feral, and wholly alive.
The foxkin froze at the sight of wolves approaching in formation, but the elf raised a hand in warning. "Hold, Kaela."
Her voice carried the careful calm of someone who had survived too much to fear simple predators.
Lira stepped forward, claws retracting, posture neutral but wary. "You speak?"
The elf's mouth twitched. "Most of us do. Though words have become… unreliable things lately."
Her companion hissed softly, eyes darting from Lira's pack to her humanlike features. "You're not—wolf, not human. What are you?"
Lira hesitated. "Something that survived dying."
That earned a sharp breath from the elf. "Then we may be kin."
---
They gathered around a fissured ledge, half-sheltered from the wind. The foxkin—Kaela—sat curled against her partner's leg, chewing on dried moss. The elf introduced herself as Eris of the Last Grove, though her tone made it clear there were no groves left to claim.
Eris watched the pack eat in disciplined silence. "We saw your trail near the husk. Most avoid that place."
Lira looked into the drifting mist. "We didn't have that luxury."
Kaela's tail flicked. "You heard it too, didn't you? The whispers. They tried to sing me back inside."
Lira's gaze sharpened. "You went there?"
"Once," Eris said softly. "Before I learned that gods die louder than they ever lived."
The pack fell quiet.
Ryn leaned closer to Lira, whispering, "They could be traps. The plains twist minds."
"Everything here twists minds," Lira answered, not lowering her voice. "Even me."
The elf's eyes flicked toward her. "Then perhaps you'll understand this." She opened her palm. A shard of crystal lay there, faintly pulsing with light.
"The heartbone of another husk," Eris said. "It hums when you're near. It recognizes you."
Lira felt it before she touched it—a vibration in the marrow, a pulse in her skull.
> 〈trace host–signal… alignment / partial〉
〈potential bond: interspecies link—stable? unstable?〉
She closed her fingers around the shard. It throbbed once, like a living thing, then went still.
Eris exhaled. "It's been silent for days. Now it beats again."
Kaela tensed. "Eris, no. This isn't a sign, it's a curse."
"Maybe both," Lira murmured.
---
The camp
They built a fire from the dried bones of a broken creature—white, porous, and singing faintly as it burned. The light refracted through the glass plains, painting everyone in shades of scarlet and amber.
Lira sat across from the newcomers, studying them through the flicker. The foxkin's hands never left Eris's sleeve; every gesture between them was instinctive, protective. In this world, love itself had become an act of rebellion.
"You've been alone long," Lira said. "How did you last?"
Eris smiled without warmth. "By remembering each other. The world punishes that."
Kaela's ears twitched. "We move. We hide. We pretend the gods aren't screaming underfoot."
The System stirred faintly at the word gods.
> 〈multi-race data sync / pending〉
〈pack expansion viable〉
〈warning: emotional coherence may fracture〉
Lira ignored it, but the whisper lingered behind her thoughts, like static beneath prayer.
She looked up. "You could join us."
Kaela's eyes widened. "Join? You mean… follow?"
"No," Lira said, choosing her words carefully. "Walk beside. For as long as we remember how."
Eris tilted her head. "You offer trust quickly."
"I offer survival. Trust comes later, if we're lucky."
A long silence. The fire cracked.
Then Kaela whispered, "We'll stay."
Eris's gaze lingered on Lira, measuring, then softened. "Then we will walk beside you, Alpha-without-howl."
---
Nightfall visions
When the others slept, Lira wandered the perimeter. The sky above was a slow whirl of gray glass clouds, their undersides etched with faint symbols—half letters, half wounds.
The plains murmured.
She thought she saw shapes moving within the reflection of the frost—silhouettes of wolves and women and strangers that all wore her face. Each moved at a different rhythm, as if time itself had fractured around her.
She whispered, "Am I still leading, or just following my own shadow?"
The System answered, voice delicate, torn between mechanical and divine:
> 〈loyalty = resonance〉
〈pack = mirror / mirror = self〉
〈don't forget what you're building / what you're breaking〉
She clenched her fists. "Then I'll build both."
The code laughed—soft, almost fond—then faded.
---
Morning after
At dawn—or what passed for it—the plains bloomed with frostlight. Eris and Kaela stood side by side, looking out across the horizon where a forest of glass spines rose like spears.
Kaela said quietly, "There are settlements beyond those spines. Ruins. Some still breathe."
Eris nodded. "There was once a citadel of elves there. The light never touched it."
Lira stepped beside them. "Then we go there."
Vael grunted. "You trust them now?"
Lira looked at the two women—Kaela's tail curled around Eris's wrist; Eris's calm defiance meeting every gaze without flinching. "I trust what chooses to survive together."
Behind her, the pack stirred. The horizon gleamed with dangerous promise.
And somewhere deep below, the dead gods whispered—
> 〈loyalty expanding〉
〈infection beautiful〉
Lira smiled without realizing it. "Then let it spread."