Sunny was sitting on top of a dead scavenger when he heard the cracking behind him.
Nephis and Quinn were working through the bodies scattered across the ground, prying soul shards free with the efficiency of people who had done this enough times that it had stopped feeling like anything in particular. The sound of carapace splitting open had become as unremarkable as footsteps.
He looked at the results of the last hour and did the accounting.
They had come to this gully intending to draw a few scavengers into an ambush. The noise of the fight had attracted more — scavengers from further along the shore, and something else entirely, long and segmented and wrong in the way that things are wrong when they've had too long to become whatever they wanted to be. The two species had found each other before they found the three humans, and what followed had been a chaos that Nephis, Quinn, and Sunny had moved through like water finding gaps in stone, taking what the chaos offered and staying out of its way when it didn't. The haul was significantly larger than planned.
Sunny's Echo was working nearby, methodical and unhurried, its missing arm already regrown. He watched it for a moment, then looked at the shore ahead.
Three weeks since they had left the rock. Three weeks of moving west, the pace picking up steadily as Nephis accumulated soul shards and Sunny accumulated shadow fragments and the collaboration between the three of them stopped requiring thought and started requiring only execution. Cassie rode the Echo with the calm of someone who had accepted her situation and found it workable. The formation moved well.
They moved on.
The light changed before the terrain did — a dimming, a deepening of color that had nothing to do with the time of day. Then the ground changed too, the pale mud giving way to something darker, denser, the color of old wounds. The coral that grew here was a deeper red than elsewhere, almost black at the base where it met the earth.
Sunny recognized it a moment after Quinn did, and Quinn a moment after Nephis, though none of them had seen it before.
A fragment of the Crimson Spire. Or something that had once been part of it and had since become its own thing, spreading outward from whatever root connected it to the rest.
Sunny looked at Cassie. "Is this what you saw? The mountain?"
Cassie tilted her head. "Yes," she said quietly. "That's the one."
Sunny remembered what she had described — the seven severed heads, the seven locks, the dying angel at the top. He looked at the dark earth and the darker coral and said nothing.
Behind them, Quinn had crouched down and was digging with his hands, scooping the dark soil into his pouch with the focused satisfaction of someone completing a task they had been waiting on for a long time. He packed it carefully, tied the pouch shut, and stood with the expression of a man who has just crossed something off a list that mattered to him.
Two more ingredients. Then the potion.
They kept walking.
Nephis raised her hand and they stopped.
"Get ready," she said. "We're almost at the Bone Ridge."
The Bone Ridge was, in fact, made of bone.
The skeletal remains of something colossal lay across an enormous mound of coral, its spine arching above the ground like the ribs of a buried cathedral. Whatever the creature had been in life was impossible to reconstruct from what remained — the bones were too large, the proportions too strange, the scale too far outside anything that had a name. The coral grew thick and dense around it, climbing the old bones, spreading outward in every direction in rivers of red that had solidified into something permanent.
Sunny looked at it and thought that the coral wasn't burying the bones. The coral was growing out of them. Ancient blood turned solid, turned stone, still spreading after however long it had been since the thing that made it had stopped needing it.
He kept the thought to himself.
Sunny's shadow moved ahead through the Ridge and came back with nothing alarming to report. They went in anyway with weapons out, because the shadow not finding anything dangerous and there being nothing dangerous were two different things, and they had learned the difference the hard way.
They came out the other side without incident.
That night they camped close to the Spire's edge, near enough to feel the difference in the air but not so close that it felt like a decision they couldn't take back. Nephis cooked. They had salt — collected from the flatfish left behind when the tide receded — and the meal was the best thing any of them had eaten since arriving in the Dream Realm, which was a low bar that it cleared by a significant margin.
Somewhere in the past week, Nephis had started paying attention to the way Cassie spoke. Not studying it exactly — observing it, the way Nephis observed most things, filing it away and processing it and eventually producing her own version of it. The results were not seamless. The first morning she had greeted both Sunny and Quinn, the words arriving in Cassie's cadence but Nephis's voice, and both of them had reacted with the specific alarm of people whose threat assessment had been triggered by something that looked wrong in a way they couldn't immediately name.
Sunny had nearly summoned his sword.
Quinn had phased through a nearby rock and crouched behind it.
They had looked at each other from their respective positions of defensive readiness, then looked at Nephis, then slowly stood down.
Since then she had defaulted to smiling instead of speaking in the mornings. The smile was more natural than the greeting had been, which should have been reassuring. It was not entirely reassuring. But it was better.
The mornings continued.