Stone tore itself away with a sound like a held breath breaking.
Kiran's shout split the air and the bridge bucked beneath him.
Dust filled the span and grit caught at his teeth.
"Elias!" Kiran screamed, voice thin with gravel.
The mule reared and scrambled, hooves skittering on loosened rock.
He saw Garam fly as if the world had catapulted him.
Garam hit the stone with a sound that was not a cry but a dull punctuation.
He collapsed face-first, limbs splayed, unmoving.
Blood darkened the mortar at his temple.
"No!"
Kiran's mouth made the word like a small weapon.
He dropped to his knees and the rope's slack bit into his palms.
The Devourer's head swiveled with slow certainty.
The creature's slit-eyes focused on Kiran as if browsing a menu.
It rose, each movement a rearrangement of weight that made the bridge send a small, sickening shudder through his ribs.
"Run!" Elias shouted from the far edge, voice split by the canyon.
He had the crystal high, a bright cut in his palm.
"Garam—move!"
Garam's hand twitched but did not find purchase.
His face was a map of old things; his lips moved once in a pattern Kiran could not catch.
The shard Garam had held slid from an open palm and skittered away into a fissure.
Kiran crawled forward on hands that left dusty smears.
"Don't touch him!" Elias barked. "Stay where you are!"
Kiran froze with one knee hovering over stone, fingers inches from Garam's shoulder.
The world narrowed to the Devourer's breathing—wet, patient laps of sound that unstitched him into a small, raw point.
The creature sniffed the air and its attention sharpened.
It lifted a paw the size of a wagon wheel and tested balance.
The bridge vibrated with the movement.
"Hold the rope!" Elias ordered.
His voice had the crispness of commands given to storm-familiar sailors.
"Tighten. Don't make a sound."
Kiran's hands obeyed without thought.
He wrapped fingers around the coarse fiber and braced foot against grit.
The rope hummed a tension note that matched his pulse.
The Devourer stepped forward and the bridge sang a higher, fragile note.
Dust fell in little sheets.
The beast's jaw flexed; a low tearing sound unreeled like a blade through water.
Garam lay still.
Blood had streaked across his cheek in a thin, insolent line.
His hand stayed open.
No movement promised recovery.
"Please," Kiran mouthed without sound, because pleading aloud felt like feeding the thing.
The amulet at his chest pressed into his sternum and warmed quick as a warning.
Elias moved with a speed that contradicted his age.
He did not reach for a blade.
He pulled a measuring-crystal from his pack and struck it with the pad of his thumb.
The device flared—thin, acute—and a pulse rang out like glass being struck.
The Devourer's head snapped.
Its slits flared, drawn to the clean, bright frequency like carrion birds to a flare.
The creature's posture shifted from gnawing to hunt.
"Run!" Elias roared and began to sprint, holding the crystal up like a flare.
He ran not away from the bridge but to the canyon floor below, a deliberate retreat into noise.
Kiran watched Elias throw his body into motion, a man offering himself in exchange for the rest.
The Devourer followed, whatever patience it had folding into pursuit.
It leaped from ruined stone to canyon, impact catching at Kiran's teeth through the board.
Dust rose into a second, choking cloud that swallowed Elias and the beast.
The sound of their clash dragged down into the ravine and then, after that huge, grinding impact, both vanished in a billow of grit.
Silence fell like a lid.
The bridge seemed smaller under it.
Kiran's breath tore sharp in his throat; the rope creaked under tension and then slacked as the mule shifted.
He stayed knelt, palms on the coarse fiber, as if the rope could tether his fear.
Someone from beyond the dust called a single name—Elias's—and the canyon swallowed the echo.
Kiran crawled to Garam because upright felt like abandoning the old man.
He reached Garam's chest and found it still, not rising.
The older man's eyes were open but unfocused; his face had the wash of someone who'd seen something enormous and paid in body.
Kiran's fingers brushed the palm.
No shard rested there.
Instead a crumpled scrap of parchment lay half-protruding from the old man's fingers, edges blackened by dust.
Kiran lifted it with a careful thumb and unfolded it as if the paper might still be hot.
"A scrap," Kiran said aloud, because speech had weight and needed to name what his hands held.
The scrap was rough with age.
A single word had been written in a steady, unhurried hand.
Kiran read it once, and his mouth made no sound.
He read it again as if repetition might alter what the ink claimed.
"LÂMINA," he whispered the word, tasting consonants like small stones.
He looked up at the sword at his hip the way a man checks a map to find a hole.
The rusted guard of his blade had the same crude pattern—two opposing arcs and a small notch where leather had worn through.
"That isn't—" he began, and stopped because ellipses cannot hold truth.
Elias staggered up from the far lip, dust on his sleeves, the crystal dark in his hand.
His face was bone-white under grit; his breath came sharp and measured.
He crossed and crouched beside Kiran with the unhurried urgency of a field surgeon.
"You moved it?" Elias asked, the question clipped as a flint strike.
"No," Kiran said.
He held the parchment out.
The word sat on the page like an accusation.
"He had this."
Elias took it, fingers steady despite the dust.
His eyes narrowed and he tapped the single word with an index knuckle as if testing for hollowness.
"This script," Elias murmured. "Not a prospector's mark. An old hand."
His voice folded two things together—recognition and a ledger of worry.
"A collector's label. Garam didn't pick that up by accident."
Kiran's hands trembled enough to make the parchment shiver.
One memory rose, blunt and new: Garam's calm earlier, his remark about having "seen the silence he sought."
The silence now pressed on Kiran like a creditor.
"Why would Garam—" Kiran started, then swallowed.
Words felt like stepping on thin glass.
Elias's jaw worked.
He did not answer with theory.
He checked Garam's chest again, pressing with two fingers, the motion of basic field care.
"He took a risk," Elias said finally. "Some collectors trade lives to hold the thing they desire."
Kiran's mouth dried.
The bridge around them sagged with small settling noises.
The mule shivered and stamped; its eyes were wide and blank with a shock that mirrored human confusion.
"Can you—" Kiran asked, voice small and precise. "Can we help him?"
Elias shook his head once, a brief, finite motion.
"Not here. Not now."
He folded his hands briefly over the dead man's fingers as if covering a ledger entry.
"We get down. We find out if the Devourer followed. If Elias went with it—"
He cut the sentence and rose.
Kiran pushed himself up, a small grunt tearing free.
Grease from the rope marked his palm.
He looked at the mule, at the frayed rope Elias had latched on the far side, then at the torn abyss between them.
The canyon mouth smelled of dust and a faint, electric tang that left his teeth humming.
"We have to go after him," Kiran said.
Not a question.
A line on a map.
Elias met his eyes.
"Two options," he said.
"We climb down and risk the beast, or we follow the lower trail that folds behind the rock band. The first draws the Devourer; the second could let us flank and see if Elias drew it away."
Kiran's palms closed into fists until his knuckles brightened.
He thought of Garam's final look, the old man's calm like a folded map.
He thought of Meira waiting for coins and of Kael's awkward bundle.
He thought of the amulet heavy at his chest and the rusted guard at his hip that now matched a scrap of paper.
"If we flank," Kiran said, voice thin but firm, "we might find Elias. We might lose him. But if we climb, we likely die or distract him."
"Then flank," Elias decided.
He moved to the mule and balanced weight with the economy of a man who could split risk.
"We take the lower path. Keep the rope fixed. If the Devourer returns, you hold fast. Do not wave metal. Do not make sound. Breathe on instruments, not on it."
Kiran slid the sword back into its sheath though his fingers itched at the cord.
The blade's presence at his hip felt suddenly like a ledger pinned to his side; the parchment's single word burned like an entry that demanded reconciliation.
They moved along the canyon rim, keeping low, steps measured and small.
The dust from the fall still hung like a curtain ahead; the smell of torn stone clung to everything.
Kiran's shoes left thin prints that the wind tried to erase.
Elias kept his meter near his ear and tapped a rhythm against his thigh—two light knocks that meant "steady."
Kiran matched them and felt his pulse settle to the metronome.
The world reduced to breath and footfall and the small arithmetic of staying alive.
A quiet pressed over them like a hand, heavy with the weight of Garam's open palm and the scrap of paper now folded back into Kiran's pocket.
The word LÂMINA sat in his mind like a seed with sharp edges.
He cast a glance at the rusted guard of his sword as they skirted the rock band.
The pattern matched the ink's crude drawing so exactly that the coincidence no longer felt accidental; it felt like an invitation.
Kiran's fingers curled at the cord around his wrist.
He slid his thumb into the loop of the amulet and found its cold seam.
The cold moved up his arm as if answering the paper's claim.
The canyon swallowed their steps and the path grew steeper.
Dust sifted down like slow confetti.
They pressed on, the taste of rescue and the price of curiosity mingling in Kiran's mouth.
Kiran is alone on the bridge, with Garam's motionless body a few meters away.
The silence returns, now laden with guilt and horror.
He looks at the old man's hand, still open.
In it, there is no crystal, but a piece of old, crumpled parchment.
Written on it, in a firm hand, is a single word: "BLADE".
And a simple drawing of a sword whose guard matches exactly the rusted pattern of his own.