They did not walk down the mountain so much as fall in slow motion.
Every step hurt.
Not the satisfying ache of pushed muscles.
The deep, hollow pain of a body that had spent everything it had and was now operating on whatever scraps it could find.
Kairn kept moving because stopping would mean thinking, and thinking meant realizing how close he'd come to not having to move ever again.
"Left," Joren called from ahead, voice steady despite the way he limped. "Loose stones. Don't trust them."
"Like gods," Fen muttered.
"Like your jokes," Lysa said hoarsely.
Barra grunted something that might have been agreement.
They reached the first wider switchback, the one where the wind always knifed across the path.
It did now too.
But there were no half-heard Choir scraps in it anymore.
Just air.
Thin.
Cold.
Honest.
Kairn stopped long enough to brace a hand against the stone wall.
His heart thudded against his palm, slow and uneven.
He could still feel the smear where Null had bitten into his own pathways.
If he looked at it wrong, his thoughts skipped.
He deliberately didn't look.
"Drink," Barra said, shoving a skin at him again.
Kairn swallowed, water dribbling down his chin.
He wiped it with the back of his hand.
Far below, clouds slid along the mountain's flank.
Even further, he thought he saw the faint glint of river.
Hall somewhere beyond that, small and stubborn.
"You still with us?" Lysa asked quietly, close enough he could feel the warmth of her shoulder through his coat.
"For now," he said.
"Define 'for now,'" Fen said dryly from behind them.
Kairn managed a frayed smile.
"Everything hurts," he said. "Nothing's humming that shouldn't. Nothing's quiet that should be loud. That counts."
Lysa's gaze softened for a heartbeat.
Then she looked down the path.
"He felt us," she said, voice low. "The real him. Through that Gate."
"Yes," Kairn said.
"Did he see where you were?" she asked.
He thought of the web-core flash.
The distant vastness of the King's true mind.
The way the severed thread had snapped, recoiled, carrying with it the taste of this sky.
"He knows this place is noisy," Kairn said. "And that we're here. He lost his handhold for now, but he won't forget there's a world he can't reach anymore. He doesn't like that."
Fen kicked a pebble off the edge.
"Good," he said. "Let him stew."
Kairn didn't say the next part out loud, not yet:
The recoil had cut Mornspire free.
It had also *widened* something on the other side.
He'd felt it.
A thin gap in the web-core's own armor.
A path.
Not open.
Not safe.
But there.
He was going to walk it.
Later.
If he lived long enough.
The idea sat in his chest like a stone under skin.
He hadn't told anyone yet.
He would have to.
Not now.
"Don't drift," Lysa said, fingers tightening briefly on his sleeve.
"I'm not," he lied.
She raised an eyebrow.
"Liar," she said.
He exhaled.
"Later," he said. "I'll show you what I saw. When my head's not full of holes."
She nodded once.
"Later," she said. "When we're not on a path where you can fall off if you forget which way is down."
The descent blurred into a rhythm of pain and stone and thin air.
By the time they reached the treeline, Kairn's legs shook with each step.
Barra called a halt.
"We rest," he said. "Ten breaths."
"Only ten?" Fen asked, collapsing onto a rock.
"You can take them slow," Barra said.
Kairn sank down beside a stump.
Greenfold's presence brushed him—curious, distant.
"You tore his hand off my mountain," she murmured, leaves rustling. "You nearly took your own roots with it."
"Occupational hazard," he muttered.
"You are bad at being small," she said.
"Learning to be worse," he said.
She seemed amused.
"His voice is farther now," she said. "He can still whisper in branches if they lean toward places he has eaten. But here? He cannot lean from that peak anymore. The sky above my leaves is quieter."
"Good," Kairn said.
He picked up a fallen twig, rolled it between his fingers, then let it drop.
"We're going to go where he eats," he said quietly.
Greenfold rustled.
"You will die," she said matter-of-factly. "Or you will not. Either way, it will not be quiet."
"Probably not," he agreed.
"You've tied more threads to this world now," she said. "More people. More places. More roots. Every one makes it harder to leave and easier for him to hurt you by pulling."
"I know," he said.
"And you're still going," she said.
He looked up through the branches.
Light speared down, broken green.
"Someone has to," he said.
"That's what all the fools say," she replied. "Some of them are worth growing around."
Her presence withdrew.
The forest noise swelled back.
"Kairn?" Lysa said.
"Talking to trees," he said. "As you do."
"Ask them not to trip us when we go back up," Fen said from the rock.
"We're not going back up," Joren groaned.
"Not that mountain," Kairn said. "Different one. Later."
Barra shook his head.
"Stop volunteering us for future bad ideas while we're still recovering from this one," he said.
They reached the foothills by late afternoon.
The air grew thicker.
Breathing stopped hurting quite so much.
Kairn's limbs felt like lead, but the spinning in his head eased.
By the time the hall's outline appeared in the distance, smoke rising from its chimneys, his vision had stopped doubling every time he blinked.
Barely.
The gate opened before they could shout.
Sia, Tam, and Mar were at the front of the watching crowd.
They were supposed to be behind Roadkeepers.
They weren't.
Rules bent when people you cared about walked up mountains.
Sia's eyes scanned the returning group in a heartbeat.
Counting.
She exhaled hard when she saw all five.
"See?" Fen said, swaggering purely on stubbornness. "We only partially died."
Tam ran forward.
Barra's glare slowed him.
He reduced his speed to an urgent walk.
His eyes went to Kairn's face.
"You look bad," he blurted.
"Excellent," Kairn said. "That means you've been paying attention."
Mar's gaze flicked to his hands, to his chest, to the way he shifted his weight.
He frowned.
"Something's missing," Mar said.
Kairn blinked.
"What?" he asked.
"In you," Mar said. "Like… like when the Stone hums wrong because a line's been cut."
Kairn's skin crawled.
"I told you not to let kids stare at you too much," Fen muttered.
Yselle pushed through the crowd.
She looked first at the climbers' faces, then at their legs, then at the state of their gear.
Then she looked past them, to the sky over Mornspire.
It was just sky.
No shimmer.
No web.
The line of her shoulders dropped a fraction.
"Well?" she said.
Kairn met her eyes.
"Mornspire's his never-again now," he said. "No Gate. No hand. If he wants to touch this peak again, he starts from nothing."
Her jaw clenched.
"You're sure," she said.
"Yes," he said.
The Hall Stone hummed in agreement from its room.
Everyone felt it.
Even those who didn't know what it meant.
A sigh rippled through the yard.
Not relief.
Not yet.
Something like it, half-formed.
Yselle nodded once.
"Then we mark it," she said. "Never-again, Gate. Not never-again, climb. I'm not throwing away a peak with a view that good forever just because a god tried to stand on it."
Barra snorted.
"What did I say?" he asked.
"That you're predictable," Fen said.
Tam tugged Kairn's sleeve.
"You're shaking," he whispered.
"Adrenaline," Kairn lied.
"What's that?" Tam asked.
"The thing that makes you feel like you could jump a wall and then reminds you, halfway up, that you can't," Lysa said.
Kairn's legs chose that moment to underscore the point.
They folded.
He would have gone down hard if Lysa hadn't already been moving.
She took his weight with a grunt.
Barra grabbed his other arm.
"Bed," Yselle said.
"I have a report," Kairn said through gritted teeth.
"You can report horizontally," she said. "You look like a scarecrow someone set on fire and then changed their mind halfway through."
He didn't argue.
In the small room that had become theirs, he lay on the cot and tried not to flinch when Lysa pressed fingers along his ribs.
He failed.
She hissed.
"Cracked," she said. "Maybe broken. You tore something in your head. Your heart forgot how to beat for a minute. We're not doing that again."
"Famous last words," Fen said from the doorframe.
"Get out," she snapped.
He held up his hands and vanished.
Kairn stared at the ceiling.
The stone was reassuringly solid.
His **Web Map** pulsed faintly behind his eyelids.
The King's threads were still there in the wider world.
Towers in other skies.
Anchors in other places.
But here, in this small cluster of roads and halls and forests and peaks, there were new scars where web had been and wasn't anymore.
He was a scar too.
"I saw something," he said quietly.
Lysa didn't ask what.
She waited.
"Through the Gate," he said. "When it tried to finish. I saw where we'll have to go if we want this to end."
"The web-core," she said.
He nodded.
"It's… open. A sliver," he said. "We cut his hand off here, but it made a crack in his own armor. A tiny one. I can feel it. If I pull on the right line, I can get back to where I bit him last time. Maybe further."
"And then you die," she said flatly.
"Or I finish the job," he said.
She sat back on her heels.
Her hands were clenched.
"Say we do this," she said. "You pull yourself sideways into his heart. You go for the core. What happens to this sky?"
"It's not about *this* sky anymore," he said. "He'll keep reaching. If not here, somewhere. We can keep cutting fingers, or we can go for the throat."
"Throats go both ways," she said.
"I know," he said.
She looked at him.
"You're not allowed to decide this alone," she said.
"I'm not," he said.
His voice shook.
He hadn't realized how much he'd been assuming he'd have to.
"I need you," he said.
Her expression cracked.
"Good," she said. "Because I'm coming. If you think I'm letting you charge into a god's brain without someone hitting pots in his ear, you're more concussed than I thought."
He laughed weakly.
It hurt.
"Barra?" she asked.
"He has roads here," Kairn said. "He might come if we ask. Or he might stay. Someone has to keep this hall standing if we fail."
"The kids?" she pressed.
He closed his eyes.
He saw Sia, staff in hand.
Tam, staring at him like he could see missing pieces.
Mar, listening to the Stone hum.
"No," he said. "Not there. Not in that place. If it goes wrong, I want them as far from that web as possible."
"Good," she said.
She sighed.
"Yselle's going to love this," she added.
He grimaced.
"She'll throw me off a wall," he said.
"She'll want to," Lysa replied. "Then she'll realize she can't reach the sky that way and start drawing maps instead."
He opened his eyes.
"Do you think we can win?" he asked.
She didn't answer immediately.
"Yes," she said finally. "Or we die making it hurt. Either way, he learns he doesn't get to do what he wants without cost."
"That's not 'yes'," he said.
"It's the only answer you're going to get," she said.
He breathed out.
The room felt very small and very large at once.
A knock came at the door.
Yselle didn't wait to be invited in.
She stepped inside, ducking a little.
She took in Kairn on the bed, Lysa at his side, the way his hands shook when he tried to push himself up.
"Stay down," she ordered.
He obeyed.
She leaned against the wall.
"The Stone feels… different," she said. "Not just quieter. There's a line running off it now that isn't on any of my maps."
Kairn swallowed.
"That's on me," he said. "Sorry."
She eyed him.
"Explain," she said.
He told her.
Not all of it.
Enough.
The Gate, the core-glimpse, the crack.
His intention.
Her face didn't change much as he spoke.
The line of her jaw got tighter.
Her eyes went distant, as if she were seeing roads he couldn't.
When he finished, she exhaled through her nose.
"I knew it," she said.
"Knew what?" Lysa asked.
"That someone would show up one day and try to make my job bigger than one sky," Yselle said. "I just hoped it wouldn't be someone I liked."
Kairn blinked.
"You like me?" he croaked.
"Don't get used to it," she said. "You're infuriating. You break my towers. You make bargains with my forests. You drag my people into your fights. And now you want to walk off the edge of the world with my hall's Stone humming along like a dog on a leash."
"That's not—" he started.
She raised a hand.
"I know," she said. "It's not about dragging my hall. It's about using what you are to get somewhere no one else can reach. I'm not stupid."
She pushed off the wall.
"You're not doing it yet," she said. "You'll break in half if you try. You rest. You let my healers poke you. You let my mage poke the Stone and swear about whatever line you've hooked into it."
"And then?" he asked.
"And then we sit in my map room," she said. "You, me, Lysa, maybe that forest if she can be bothered to send a leaf. We lay it out. What happens if you go. What happens if you don't. What we leave behind either way."
Her eyes were hard.
"You've tied roads here," she said. "You don't get to pretend no one has to live with your choices when you're done."
He nodded.
"I know," he said.
"Good," she said. "Because if you try, I'll drag you back by your ear from wherever you end up."
She turned to go, then paused.
"And Kairn?" she said.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Next time you go somewhere that might kill you," she said, "you make sure you're not the only one holding the map."
She left.
Lysa stared at the closed door.
"She's going to help," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Because she's furious," Lysa added.
"Yes," he said again.
He let his head fall back against the thin pillow.
The fight on the peak had cut the King's fingers from this sky.
It had also put Kairn's hand on a wire that led straight into the heart of the thing he hated most.
The road ahead had never been longer.
Or narrower.
His body shook.
His mind ached.
His heart beat.
He was alive.
That meant he had work to do.