Grit burned behind Kai's eyelids; sleep kept slipping like water through paws. Each time drowsiness finally reached him, the genetic memory jolted his nerves with a wordless shove that felt louder than thought: Higher. Build. Prepare. The message had no grammar and every demand. By the thirty-sixth sleepless hour of Day 143, the command felt like a second heartbeat pulsing behind his ribs, steady and impossible to ignore.
He paced the deep chamber and faced the eleven stones again. Fungus-light traced their edges, thin blue gleam pooling in worn grooves and the knife-sharp cuts of old carvings. Lines almost became language and then blurred into scattered scratches. He rotated one stone by a claw-width. He nudged another closer. He stepped back and tried to see the whole pattern instead of its pieces. It still refused to become a map he could read.
Dig found him there in the morning, quiet as always, carrying the calm of bedrock in the set of the shoulders. The builder's whiskers twitched, once, like a plumb line settling against gravity.
"You haven't slept," Dig said. Not accusation. Observation.
"Can't," Kai answered, and moved a stone half a body-length to the right. "The memory keeps pushing. Build higher. Prepare more. It will not tell me how, so I am looking for the how in these."
"The upper chambers are already at limit." Dig crouched to test a hairline crack in the floor, the way only Dig could make testing look like prayer. "Higher stresses the vault. We can anchor braces, but every brace adds weight."
"I know physics," Kai said. The words came rough. "The pressure does not care about physics."
Dig breathed out and stood. No lecture. No scolding. Just a nod that meant I heard you and a turn that meant I will stabilize what I can while you chase what you must. Dig had learned when to argue and when to leave a line uncut.
By afternoon, Twitchy appeared in the doorway and checked the exits—one, two, three—paws light on stone. The ritual had become as familiar as Kai's breathing, but the count was faster today, clipped by worry that twanged like a tight string.
"You've been directing reinforcements for eighteen hours," Twitchy said. "They are sound. The chambers are sound. You are pushing Dig to build things that do not need building."
"Because they might," Kai said, and turned another stone. "Something is coming and I do not know what. If I cannot know, I can at least reduce how many ways it can hurt us."
Twitchy checked the exits again. The third look lingered on the shadows that pooled at a bend in the corridor. "That is not preparation. That is panic wearing strategy."
"Maybe," Kai said. He tried to laugh but the sound dried in his throat. "I cannot tell the difference right now."
He returned to the stones. They had always called to him. Today they were a chorus he could not walk away from.
Whisper was cataloging the set with that patient hum that meant the language specialist was counting shapes and weighing rhythms. Halfway through the second line, Whisper froze. Ears angled. Breath held. Paws cradled a stone like a fragile egg.
"It is cracking," Whisper said. The voice went thin. "Look."
A long pale line cut the artifact from edge to edge, splitting symbols mid-stroke. The fracture had old mineral frosting at its lip. Weeks of strain. Months perhaps. One more moment had finally been enough.
Grief hit Kai before thought. It rose like heat from a cave fire, as if his ribs had opened and left his heart against cold stone.
"Where was it?" he asked, sharper than he meant.
"Deep storage," Whisper said, shifting so the light could find the wound. "I was reorganizing weight. It split. Others will follow. Days, weeks. I cannot promise longer."
Under fungus glow, the broken edges threw jagged shadows that looked like speech trying to reform itself and failing. The ancient hand that cut those lines across time had been careful. The stone had not cared. Heat. Pressure. Water. Time. A thousand patient knives.
"The knowledge is erasing itself," Kai said. His mouth felt full of dust. "Everything they carved to outlive them."
"It is geology," Whisper offered, gentle. "Not malice."
"It is loss," Kai said, and drew breath until it hurt. "We record all of it. Every symbol on every face. Drawn. Described. Mapped. If the stone turns to powder, the shapes do not. We keep them."
"That is weeks of work," Whisper said. "Months, if we include the damaged faces."
"Then we work in shifts," Kai said. The plan stood up inside him like bone. "You create a parallel record in scent. Pheromone encodings. Meaning in chemical form. We build redundancy. Stone, script, scent. If one fails, the others hold."
Whisper hesitated, then nodded. "I can convert stroke order and sequence to combinatory markers. It will be crude at first. It will improve."
"Yes," Kai said. "Begin."
By Day 145, the preservation had weight. The chamber smelled like wet rock and bitter citrus as Whisper experimented with scent-pairs for verbs and shapes. The air wore thin threads of memory that curled through the room. Watching Whisper work smoothed the worst edges of Kai's thoughts. Order grew molecule by molecule.
Twitchy arrived, checked the entrances—one, two, three—and did not leave. Instead, the eldest kit watched Kai with the steady stare of a sentry who can see a friend's paw inches from a ledge.
"You have not led a hunt in three days," Twitchy said. "Dig is building alone. Scout is mapping alone. Someone must coordinate routes before the water shifts again."
"The stones matter more," Kai said.
"Do they?" Twitchy asked. "Or are they easier to face than our people?"
Before Kai could answer, Scout slipped into the chamber, fur damp, whiskers bright with static.
"The ecosystem is shifting," Scout said, eyes scanning the stones without really seeing them. "Water-bound species are climbing. Lower chambers are emptying. The flow feels wrong. It is not just rise. It is pressure and pull."
The words landed like a spark in dry moss. Validation. Proof.
"The ancients carved this," Kai said. "Upward migration. Pressure. The stones are not history only. They are warning."
"Or they are recordings of cycles," Scout said carefully. "Patterns that happen again and again. They observed. We observe. That is not prophecy. That is recurrence."
"It means they are right," Kai said. "If we study them closely enough, we'll know the sequence that comes next."
Scout's mouth opened. Closed. The water specialist had learned when argument would bounce off a wall.
Work moved forward anyway. Whisper inked lines onto leaf-sheets and lifted scent into the air. Twitchy stood watch. Dig carried braces and wedges until the floor stopped complaining. Kai slept not at all. The stones held him up in their silence and he let them.
Whisper ran paws over a face with carved water-lines rising like stacked teeth. Exponential growth. The next stone showed rise and retreat, rise and retreat, like the chest of a sleeping beast.
"They contradict," Whisper said. "Perhaps early prediction. Later correction."
Kai should have paused. He should have let the contradiction sit like a teacher in front of him. Instead, he felt the shape of an answer and reached for it.
"They debated," he said. "They learned forward. Like we are. Mistake, refinement, another try. That means their failure was not perfect knowledge crushed. It was uncertainty met with effort. That is the work."
Scout's face softened. "Then we are not doomed for being unsure. We are in the normal shape of surviving."
History was not a script. It was a logbook. Stone-reading was not a magical map. It was a craft. For a few hours, that felt like a strong floor to stand on.