Stone screamed as it tore loose and fell.
Dust hit Kiran like a thrown cloak; the bridge bucked and a long section slid away into the canyon.
He grabbed the rail and tasted grit on his tongue.
The gap gaped, a raw wound in the span.
"What in the—" Elias breathed, voice tight with a map's alarm.
He hauled the mule back with one hand and knelt to test the stones that remained.
"Not natural," he said. "Someone pulled that."
Across the new void a shape moved with the slow appetite of something certain of its rights.
It was larger than any bear Kiran had ever seen, the bulk of it layered in plates of moss and rock, as if the canyon had decided to walk.
Where its eyes should have been were long vertical slits that gleamed like veins of polished ore.
It licked at the broken stones with a tongue that rasped like metal across flint.
Each lap left a wet shine on the rubble.
The creature made no aggressive sound.
It produced a low, wet rhythm—an animal busying itself with a meal.
Around it the air smelled of old stones and a faint, electrical tang Kiran thought of as the taste of resonance.
The sensation slid along his teeth and left his molars humming.
"Devourer," Garam said softly from the bench at the bridge's midpoint.
He had been rearranging the offerings as if folding laundry.
"A resonance-eater. Old name for what chews the leftover echoes."
Elias swallowed and squared himself.
"We can turn back," he said.
The plan floated in the air like a thin rope: safer choice, loss of time, perhaps loss of mission.
Garam looked at the gap and then at Kiran.
He drank in the mule, the packs, the knotted rope.
"Or we pass," he answered.
His voice had the steady cadence of someone who catalogued risks and accepted them.
"He ignores small gatherings. He gorges on loud things—candles, clashing metal, shouted names. Move quiet, move one by one, and he may hold his head down."
Kiran's hand found the sword where it hung at his hip, fingers curling around the cord until the leather rasped.
The old lessons—Elias's metronome for breath, the counted knots, the patience with the echo-beasts—pulled against the animal instinct to hold a blade ready.
The amulet at his throat warmed and then cooled like a pulse.
"Is that safe?" Kiran asked, because asking turned the possibility into a choice rather than an inevitability.
Garam shrugged one shoulder as if he were arranging the weather.
"Safe is a word for courts and ledgers. Quiet is the tool."
Elias made a small plan with the economy of minutes.
"I'll go first," he said. "Watch the footing. Keep your meters tight. When I make it across, I'll find a sliver of anchor beyond the fallen stones to secure a rope. Then Garam, then you."
"One at a time," Kiran repeated, as if saying it steadied his feet.
They moved with the deliberate hush of thieves.
Elias put the mule down and stepped onto the fractured lip like a shadow testing its sound.
Kiran watched the veteran's soles find purchase on stones that had wanted to slide.
Elias's body mimicked a learned rhythm—small adjustments, silent breath, feet like hands feeling for the world's weak seams.
The Devourer flicked its head and sniffed the air.
It made no move beyond its cleaning.
Its attention grazed over Elias and then fell back to the stones it lapped.
The creature's lips curled into a slow, content line.
Elias reached the far side and did not hurry.
He set his pack down and found a notch in the remaining span, then hooked the rope and tested the tension.
The rope held and the mule snorted with relief.
Elias looked back and wiped dust from his sleeve.
"Go," he mouthed.
His eyes were a map; the signal meant trust and caution in one gesture.
Garam rose like a reed and walked.
For a moment Kiran expected the old man to break into a limp shuffle, but Garam moved with a grace that surprised him—small sure steps, hands steady at his side, the canteen swinging like a metronome.
Kiran thought of the stories Elias told around the fire: collectors of silences, hunters who learned to breathe like stones.
Garam moved as if he knew the language of being unnoticed.
Halfway across, Garam stopped.
He did not stop because his foot slipped, nor because he feared the chasm.
He stopped because something at his boot caught his eye.
Kiran watched the old man's fingers reach down and pluck a shard from between the stones—a miniature crystal, jagged and shimmering with a collected smear of light.
Garam held it up and turned it in the dim wind.
The shard was small as a fingernail but it carried the dead pulse of someone else's passage.
Kiran's breath thinned.
The Devourer drew its head up.
The rock-skin creature's slits focused.
Its licking slowed.
"Don't touch that," Elias hissed, low and sharp, as if someone were moving a page too fast.
Garam's fingers closed over the shard with the gentleness of someone cradling a memory.
He did not turn away from the creature.
Instead he looked at it and then slid his gaze toward Kiran.
"You should know," Garam said in a whisper that nevertheless cut the span between them, "I have seen the silence I wanted."
The words were an offering and a warning.
Kiran's mouth opened for response and no sound came that wouldn't turn the canyon into a ringing.
The Devourer rose.
It did not charge with hooves or leap with claws.
It unfolded like a mountain shifting: a gradual heave of the shoulders, a tilt of the head.
Its eyes—those dark slits—burned brighter with a curious light.
Around its jaws the stone plates flexed and small dust fell like a slow rain.
It emitted a sound that was not a roar and not a bellow but a tearing of the air itself, a low rupture that made the fine hairs along Kiran's forearms stand.
The noise seemed to cut edges off other sounds; the wind thinned out in a circle around the beast.
The air in Kiran's lungs felt denser, as if the sound folded space.
Elias's hand clenched on the rope.
He shouted something—too sharp, a windstorm against the new gap.
"Sit! Stay! Do not run!"
Garam did not run.
He held the shard out like an offering, palm up.
The creature's nostrils flared and the fissure-slits narrowed with a focus that read like hunger turned scholarly.
Its head lowered and the sound deepened, like a throat testing the shape of a word.
Kiran's feet rooted.
The mule stamped and squealed; a pebble dislodged and skittered into the void below.
The sound struck the beast's flank like a slap and it turned, all at once, in a motion that telescoped speed into size.
"Don't," Elias barked, but his voice came out thin in the thick air.
The rope held, straining against two human weights and one mule.
Garam's lips moved.
Kiran heard the whisper as clear as a bell across the span—no echo, no distortion.
The words were not a chant or a spell but a small, precise sentence about acceptance.
Then the creature's sound grew into a tearing that unstitched the air.
Kiran's muscles fought between two urges: to spring with a blade and make a futile slash, or to keep still and keep the blade sheathed as a ridiculous, private altar.
He thought of the Test of Silence, of the way the crystal had ceased when his hand brushed the sword; he thought of the festival lantern that had died against the blade; he thought of the Redemoinho falling apart near him like a map losing its lines.
Each memory was a small ledger entry that argued both for and against motion.
Elias's face was a study in controlled emergency.
He moved a single hand, not toward the sword, but toward the rope, making a signal—hold, tighten, do not make the beast's feast louder.
His mouth formed quick orders that Kiran could only translate into the simplest action: do not add to the noise.
Garam's fingers tightened on the crystal and his eyes shifted from the Devourer to Kiran.
The old man's expression was not fear but a kind of exhausted recognition, like someone who finds a missing page in a book but knows the price of reading it aloud.
"Listen," Garam said, and the sound of his own voice was thin and exact.
He bent his head in a manner that made the motion seem ceremonial.
"Everything ends somewhere. Some of us gather the ends."
Kiran felt the rope vibrate under Elias's grip.
He thought of Meira's face at the gate and Kael's parcel in his pack and the amulet heavy against his chest.
The choice he would make if the beast lunged was no longer theoretical.
It would be a measure of what he would protect and what he'd risk.
The Devourer's fissure-eyes narrowed once more and then widened in a movement that suggested a decision.
It shifted forward, each step hammering the bridge into a note.
The sound of its movement carved a hollow through the air and left nothing but the pressure of expectation.
Garam did not try to flee.
He looked at the beast with the composure of a man who had counted the cost and found it acceptable.
He turned his head to Kiran and spoke, words that were both a confession and a key.
"Everything is okay. I have seen the silence I sought," he said.
The beast advanced with a low, tearing sound that did not come from a throat but from the air itself.