The dust tasted like memory. He had learned that years ago,
down in the bone mines where his father died. God-dust didn't sit on your
tongue like salt or sand—it dissolved, left you with flashes of someone else's
life. A woman's laugh. The smell of burnt cedar. The shape of a word you'd
never spoken.
But that dust, and the one in the air now, was a different
dust—the processed kind, rendered down until most of the resonance had been
burned away. What he'd breathed during the collapse, trapped in Chamber 19 for
six hours while they dug toward him through rubble, had been raw, uncut. It was the kind of
concentrated divine essence that should have killed him like it had killed the
others, still humming with whatever made gods divine.
He spat into the grit and kept walking. The Ribs rose ahead
of him, bone-white against the salt flats, curved high enough to swallow the
morning sun, Tharos's ribcage. The god had been dead three thousand years, but
the corpse still hummed—a frequency most people couldn't hear. Kael could. He'd
been able to since the collapse, since the dust got into his blood and changed
something fundamental.
He hated it.
"Kael! Wait up!"
He didn't slow. Behind him, Joren stumbled through the
scrub, breathing hard. The older man had been drinking again—Kael could tell
from the way he moved, too careful, overcompensating.
"We're going to miss the caravan," Kael called.
"No we won't."
"We will if you keep dragging your feet. I told you
you'd had too much to drink yesterday."
"Slow down. Please"
Kael stopped and turned. Joren caught up, bent double,
hands on his knees. At twenty-seven he looked forty, too many years in imperial
service, too many things he wouldn't talk about. The left side of his neck was
bandaged, always bandaged, hiding the god-corruption that was eating him alive
one inch at a time.
"You alright?" Kael asked.
"Fantastic. Never better. Why?"
"You're sweating."
"It's a desert."
"It's dawn, and cold."
Joren straightened, wiped his face with his sleeve. For a
moment something flickered behind his eyes—pain, maybe, or fear—but he grinned
it away. "You worried about me, kid?"
"No."
"Liar."
Kael turned back toward the Ribs. The caravan camp was
visible now, a scatter of canvas and cook fire smoke against the bone. Twelve
wagons, forty people, all of them trying to cross the Lorn Expanse before the
memory-storms hit. They'd hired him as a guide because he could sense when a
storm was building, could feel the resonance shift in the god-bones before the
sky turned red.
They didn't know why he could do that. He'd made sure of
it.
"Think they'll actually pay us?" Joren asked.
"If we get them across alive."
"And if we don't?"
"Then payment won't matter much."
Joren laughed—rough, sharp, the kind of sound that wasn't
really amusement. "I like your optimism."
They walked in silence after that, boots crunching through
salt-crust and fossilized bone fragments. The deeper into the Expanse you went,
the more of Tharos and the other dead gods you found—vertebrae the size of
houses, finger bones like fallen towers, ribs that curved overhead and cast
shadows that never quite aligned with the sun.
The empire mined it all, shipped god-bone back to the Spine
cities, rendering it down in forges, to build engines and weapons and the
framework of their perfect ordered world. The process left dust, the dust left
marks.
The hum changed. He stopped walking.
"Kael?"
The resonance in the bones had shifted—still faint and distant,
but wrong, like a string pulled slightly out of tune. He closed his eyes, and
concentrated to isolate the feeling. It was coming from the south. Deep south,
past the caravan route, past the mining camps, out where the Ribs tapered into
the sternum and the real corpses began.
"Kael, what is it?"
He opened his eyes. "Something's wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"I don't know yet."
Joren's hand dropped to the knife at his belt—old reflex,
military training. "Storm?"
"No. Different."
"Different bad or different interesting?"
Kael looked at him. "In my experience, there's often
no distinction."
The caravan master was a woman named Tessa Vrome—short,
scarred, with the kind of voice that carried across fifty yards of wind. She
was arguing with her second-in-command when Kael and Joren arrived, something
about water rations and whether they could risk a faster pace.
She saw Kael and stopped mid-sentence. "Tell me
something good."
"Route's clear," Kael said. "No storms for
at least two days."
"At least?"
"I'm not a priest. I can't predict the future."
Tessa grunted. "Can you predict whether we'll hit a
sinkhole?"
"No."
"Then what exactly am I paying you for?"
"To not die horribly in a memory-storm."
She stared at him for a long moment, then barked a laugh.
"Fair enough. We move in an hour. Stay close to the lead wagon."
Kael nodded and turned to go, but Tessa caught his arm. Her
grip was strong, calloused. "That thing you do," she said quietly.
"The listening. You learned that in the mines?"
He didn't answer.
"My cousin worked Lorn Deep-18," Tessa continued.
"Said there were kids down there who could hear the bones sing. Said the
empire took them away."
"Your cousin talk a lot?"
"He's dead."
Kael pulled his arm free. "Then he's got nothing to
worry about."
He walked away before she could respond. Joren followed,
silent for once.
They were two hours into the march when Kael felt it
again—that wrongness in the resonance, clearer now, closer. He slowed, scanning
the horizon. Nothing. Just salt and bone, the cold, and the shimmer of God bone
dust in the air. But the hum was louder.
"Joren."
"I know. I feel it too."
Kael glanced at him sharply. "You can—?"
"Not like you. But something's off. The air's too
still."
He was right. The wind had died completely, and n the
Expanse, that was never a good sign.
Kael moved up to the lead wagon, where Tessa rode shotgun
beside the driver. "We need to stop."
"We just started."
"I know. Stop anyway."
Tessa looked at him, then at the sky, then back at him.
Whatever she saw in his face made her decision. "Hold!" she shouted.
"Full stop! Circle formation!"
The caravan shuddered to a halt. Drivers called out, wagons
creaked, but within minutes they'd formed a defensive ring—standard procedure
for the Expanse, where threats could come from any direction.
Kael stood in the center of the circle, eyes closed,
listening.
The resonance was changing. Not a storm—storms built
slowly, like pressure behind your eyes. This was sharp, sudden. It felt as if
something had woken up.
"Kael," Joren said quietly. "South. Look
south."
He opened his eyes.
On the horizon, maybe two miles out, the air was bending.
Not heat shimmer—this was wrong, geometric, like reality was folding in on
itself. And in the center of the distortion, something was moving.
"Gods'," someone whispered.
"The gods are dead," Tessa snapped. "Stay
calm. Weapons ready."
But Kael couldn't look away from the distortion. Because
now he could hear it—not just the resonance, but voices. They were layered,
overlapping, and spoke in a language he shouldn't understand but somehow did.
The vessel approaches. The singer draws near. The cycle
begins again.
His blood went cold.
"It's not coming for us," he said.
Tessa turned to him. "What?"
"Whatever that is—it's not coming for the caravan.
It's going somewhere else."
"Where?"
Kael's throat was dry. "The Spine. It's heading for
the Spine."
And then, cutting through the morning heat like a blade, he
heard it—her. A voice, clear and impossible, singing a melody that shouldn't
exist. The resonance in every bone fragment around them shivered.
Joren grabbed his shoulder. "Kael, your nose."
He touched his face. His fingers came away red, and the
singing was getting louder.