CHAPTER 671: A UNIT THAT BREATHES TOGETHER (END)

"My people do not like bones that rise," she said. The words were flat, carried like a helmet she’d worn for years. "We hate it, most days."

He waited.

"There was one Elder," she said after a beat, voice blade-thin but steady. "She raised them too. She was a contradiction. And the kindest woman I ever met."

"That tracks," he said softly. "Every kind thing contradicts something ugly." Three jokes queued in his throat and stayed there. Don’t make light. Hold it with her. He nodded once. It was not enough, but it was honest.

They marched onto a ribbed bridge that crossed a fall of sap.

The spray was as fine as breath. It lacquered stone to satin. The fall’s mouth exhaled in pulses that wanted knees to lie and feet to take wrong steps. Mist pearled on Thalatha’s braid and made gold a little brighter. It beaded on Mikhailis’s lenses and he wiped them with the back of a glove, smearing lines into a rainbow.

Rodion tapped cadence directly into their ears.

The skeletons formed a tortoise without being told—two tower shields lowering in front, two sliding up to roof. Silk panel nets tied along the flanks with quick, efficient knots. Tanglebeetles scuttled left and right, setting lifelines to the ribs in a lazy zigzag that would turn a slip into a swing instead of a fall. No one had to like the drop to respect it.

Graveknights waited midspan, anchor chains hammered through the deck like harpoons. Their greatswords were not fancy, only heavy. The first one dragged its chain in a long spark-trailing hiss, a dog with a loud collar.

"Ankles," Mikhailis said. "Chains second."

Scurabons slid close and shaved greave seams with tidy cruelty. Two cuts. Lift. Third cut—inside the curl. The knee found itself with less to believe in. Crymber Frost breathed a clean kiss where the chain met deck. Crymber Ember tapped that same kiss and the metal cracked with a dry, satisfying pop. The Knight leaned for menace and discovered it had one leg tied to the world and one tied to a lie.

Slimeweave made the deck ours. A thin, invisible skin of neutral gel went down in hand-wide bands. Boots stopped pretending to skate. The sap slick became rumor.

Above, Scythe-Vines unrolled with a gardener’s patience and a butcher’s taste. Their heads swung on rune-pivots, seeking a rhythm.

Mothcloak rose to meet the pivots and brushed each sigil with one soft edge. The runes didn’t go out; they smeared. Hypnoveils lifted and offered honest misses—the last empty arc, the last harmless crash. The next swing happened without conviction. Root knots tangled themselves and hung sulking, blades safe for the moment in their own stubbornness.

Rodion kept time like a drum hidden under a song. Thalatha walked the front line as if the bridge were a drill yard.

"Left toe. Closer," she said, tapping a skeleton’s ankle plate with two fingers. "Spear lower." Not barked—placed. A front shield dipped under the spray; she stepped in, shoulder under the rim, and lifted without ceremony. The shield reset. The wall looked like a wall again.

Acceptance, for her, was not a speech. It was fixing the thing that would otherwise break a neck.

Cores fell here with a different gravity—iron taste in the middle, heat at the rim. The sound of them ticking across wet stone had weight.

"Sorted," Mikhailis said, hand already out. The liches were already sorting—glass to left roles, iron-tainted to right. Silk took a trace and their panels baked hard faster, no crumbling edge. Crymber’s hot-cold stepped a hair stronger; the breath that made white bit a little deeper; the tap that sealed it rang truer.

Across the bridge, a Graveknight tried to wrench free and overbalanced on the wrong foot. A Scurabon made a neat incision at the top of the greave like a tailor opening a seam. The knee buckled. The chain at that ankle snapped a beat late and the Knight met deck with great dignity anyway.

Thalatha’s mouth stayed tight, but she was doing that thing again—watching hands. Noticing where the liches did not look (the ossuary niches), where the ants did not crowd (the easy kills), where Mikhailis’s fingers didn’t twitch to do too much. It mattered.

Above them, one Scythe-Vine got irritated enough to try a clever swing. It arced across both lanes, blade whistling.

"Up," Thalatha said, calm. The roof shields rose a palm. The blade slid, kissed iron, and carried on without claim.

Mothcloak ghosted under the arc and brushed the vine’s pivot again as if petting an angry cat. The rune gave up its temper.

The cadence changed under their boots as enemy weight shifted. Rodion dropped his voice half a register.

Half-step. Mind the gust.

They minded the gust. It hit like a door opening in the wrong direction and passed like a sulk.

Cores kept ticking. The Archivist’s delicate hands flicked three into jars with the disapproving efficiency of a clerk filing complaints. The rest, clean enough, went to Mikhailis’s palm and out again in stingy blessings.

The liches invested two bright hearts without flair.

They gestured like accountants moving figures from one column to another. Twelve skeletons rose, neat from drift—joints fitting themselves by long practice—no plates, no plaques. They joined the tortoise by stepping into gaps that had not existed a heartbeat earlier.

The number rode in the air the way a good statistic does—quiet, satisfied.

Seventy-two.

The Whiteways widened into a rotunda, and the ceiling opened like a flower made of ribs. From the center, a siphon pulled ley into black filaments that crawled toward the depths. The air had a bass note that sat in the belly.

A Legion waited—three blocks of phalanx, Wraith Lancers eager at the flanks, priests in the middle with resonance cords that ran up into the ceiling. The floor was seeded with little Spinecrawlers, mines that looked like friendly stones.

Mikhailis did not call for brave charges. "Screen forward," he said. "Chevron, not line. Silk, curtains for the horses. Tangles, yo‑yo them into Crymber funnels. Slimeweave, seat the caps."

The chevron formed, point toward the center block. Silk laid curtains across the lanes the lancers liked, filmy and strong. Blue lines caught riders and threw them back into waiting frost and heat. Mine caps lifted under gel, tried to spit, and found themselves wearing a neat, clear hat that kept the nasty inside.

The Scurabons moved like a rumor through the priests. They did not stab ribs. They tapped wrists and cut cords on the two and the four. Hypnoveils lifted and showed the last error—just the last one, fresh in memory—and chants stumbled. Mothcloak drifted behind and brushed the runes mid‑phrase so the vowels slurred and the consonants forgot where to sit.

Rodion called an oblique advance and the skeleton spears bit the left block, not the middle. Bows volleyed into the right to keep heads down. Ants kept the choke in the middle clean. "Door," Mikhailis said, and the Scurabons stole the seam the way thieves steal purses—without argument. The middle block folded where it should not.

Priest cores were glassy and bright. When the Hypnoveils tasted a sliver, their mantles held shape wider and did not tremble at a bad tone. Aeriform plumes drank a dusting and their range reached down the hall. The Scurabons tried a pinch and spat it out; bad fit. The liches consumed two choirs without swelling into hunger and raised ten skeletons from the drift without touching a name or a plate. Ninety‑two.

Wraith lances left thin threads like spider silk that twanged in the air. The Riftborne reached its staff and spliced those lines into the contract so the leash on the liches had more room to grip. The crowns dimmed, but from investment, not thirst.

Thalatha watched restraint after restraint and felt her shoulders change shape. She did not smile. She said, low, "The elder necromancer was like this. Order with mercy."

Mikhailis did not make a joke. He nodded once. Remember. Do not lose this line.

The siphon mouth finally stood before them. It was a turbine of roots, each vein trying to drink the ley and spit it into four sangrail pillars that twisted into one black throat. The pull hummed and tried to teach our bones a new song.

Rodion’s voice dropped a note.

Aeriforms, read pulse.

The plumes sang a tight map. Silk threw bricks into mouths where Blight had cut grooves. Crymber Frost iced the brick; Ember locked it. Tanglebeetles made lassos for the chittering golems that swarmed, and the blue lines yo‑yoed them into saws of frost and heat until they fell apart without stink.

Two figures in bark masks stepped from behind pillars. Their hands moved like druids, but their palms were wrong. The runes under their work were Blight script wearing warden shapes like stolen clothes.

"Borrowed bark," Mikhailis said. It tasted ugly on his tongue.

The Hypnoveils lifted and reflected the mismatch—real druid form on one side of the mirror, the Blight cheat on the other. The proxies’ gestures stuttered against themselves. The Riftborne did not reach into their heads. It recorded the pattern on its rings so someone would have proof later.

"Binders," Mikhailis called. "Knees and hips."

The Scurabons carved the knots that let the Wardens stand like pillars. Mothcloak blurred the proxy sigils until they looked like water. Slimeweave smothered the rune‑lines that crawled toward the mouth. Rodion tapped a counter‑beat and the node choked a breath and paused. Mikhailis touched the lotus chain to the marker ring at the rim and the old authority of the vessel cut the pull like a knife. The draw down stopped.

Orbs dropped from the proxies—amber, not bone. The liches sorted. Mikhailis nodded once. "One each for the Twins. One for Moth." The cohort ate small. Everyone’s timing came a touch quicker, call‑and‑answer cleaner. The liches made eight archers from compliant drift. One hundred and ten.

In the hush after, the Riftborne lifted its staff and drew a map in light: a root‑tunnel sketch, siphon mouths like knots, the main vein like a river toward one big bloom who drank everything—Prime Rhizome.

On the way out of that room, Thalatha walked beside Mikhailis, steps in time with Rodion’s beat. "I know you," she said without looking at him. "You are the goblin who cut me free. You moved today the same way."

He swallowed. The mint of earlier tea felt far away. "If this line will save the next outpost," he said, "I will walk it, no matter how deep it goes."

"I’ll walk it with you," she answered. Simple. Solid.

They did not shake hands. They did not need to.

The march after that was a string of clean clips. Bone Witches tried to knot a hall; Silk dropped soft hoods over their hands and Scurabons tapped the wands from their fingers like old thieves with good manners. A corridor of tooth‑runes thought to be clever, and Tangles laid a grid while Slimeweave sheened the floor; no one bled, and Rodion sounded smug without changing his tone.

A glass foyer tried to echo their steps into a storm; bows volleyed calm, Mothcloak ghosted arrows half a hand toward truer lines, and the liches raised six from the compliant drift at the end. One hundred and twenty‑eight. The ants’ small buffs stacked in ways you could feel if you watched long enough: edges that did not dull, silk that did not sag, hot‑cold that found the right breath, movements that matched without counting.

On a wall that used to be a gate, they found the first clear graffiti. Bark masks nailed like calling cards. Thin glints of sap with Elven rune shapes bent wrong—warden script perverted, not remade. The marks shone like shame.

Thalatha’s mouth set hard. Anger moved in her throat, then stopped short of speech. "We prove it," she said at last. "Then we cut it."

Mikhailis touched the edge of a mask and his fingers came away sticky. "We cut it clean."

The Whiteways opened to a cavern that felt like a stadium. The real river mouth waited there—a stone throat gulping ley in slow, huge swallows. Hundreds of repeater blossoms pulsed around the rim, a false garden blinking a wrong morning.

Two true proxies knelt at a thorn console, hands inside living runes, heads bowed as if in prayer. The Prime conduit hummed in a bass that made teeth buzz.

False daylight tried to rise, soft and bright. The Hypnoveils lifted their mantles and turned it into memory. The Aeriforms cut the pressure that fed it. The light sat down like a child who learned please and sorry the same day.

Mikhailis stepped forward and planted the lotus sling on a marker ring engraved in the floor. The chain hummed like a tuning fork finding the right note. Rodion’s voice was very calm.

Thalatha raised her voice and it went over the heads of bones and silk and carapace like a well‑thrown rope. "Set spears—eyes up."

They inhaled together. The Whiteways inhaled with them. The river mouth breathed out. The next fight pulled itself into shape like a knot ready to be untied by someone who had time and sharp hands.

Mikhailis let himself grin, just a slice. "Try not to die stylishly," he said, very soft.

Let’s make this line hold.