CHAPTER 672: THE RIVER YOU STILL CARRY (1)

Rodion’s projection spun slowly above the stone floor, a faint dome of cold light, almost like frost trying to become a shape. To anyone else it would have looked like a heat-haze or a trick of breath in winter. To Mikhailis—because of the calibration behind his lenses—it was a map with bones and lungs and memory. The Whiteways were never still; even stone here seemed to breathe. The model showed that breathing: corridors flexing on the beat, tiny pulses like a heartbeat where the leyline ran thicker, and ghost-dots drifting where footsteps had been.

He planted his boots, hands on hips, and leaned in until the light brushed his nose.

If this thing starts showing pop-up ads I’m uninstalling you, he thought, the corner of his mouth tugging.

The corridors in the hologram were narrow veins. Some were clean arteries, straight and strong. Some splayed in messy capillaries, splitting and rejoining, doubling back like a frightened animal’s path. In three places, the glow deepened—slow throbs that did not match the Whiteways’ inhale-exhale. Enemy musters. Ley forks. Both. The information arrived like a smell, and he let it sit in his head before trying to force it into a plan.

Cold sweat had a taste here. Iron and mold.

His eyes left the hovering map and drifted to the wall itself. There was a seam there the projection didn’t bother to display because it wasn’t a passage. He stepped closer and the stink of rot dropped away a little, as if something in the stone had forgotten to decay. Curves cut the surface, too smooth for Blight chisel, too patient for human rush. He brushed with gloved knuckles and a thin film of dust lifted, not gray but a soft gold that clung to the glove like pollen.

Leaf shapes ran along the seam. Not random leaves. Not copied by someone who only loved the idea of a forest. The angles were right, the veins placed where sap would have wanted to flow.

"Elvish," he said, almost under his breath, as if the hall might get shy and hide if he were rude.

Rune filigree pattern match: ninety-three percent probability of pre-Blight Elvish origin. Anomaly, given the surrounding Blight conversion rate.

He listened to the wall. Not metaphorically—he pressed the side of his head to it and closed his eyes. The hum there had a hitch, an arrhythmia. It wasn’t a steady siphon. It was sip-pause-sip-gulp. Like someone taking care not to drink too fast and choke.

"Mm." He tapped the carving with two knuckles. The sound came back tight, as if there was hollowness behind, but not empty. Not a cavity. A vessel.

"So... an elvish lounge in the middle of a rotting dungeon," he said, eyebrows lifting. "That’s not suspicious at all."

He slipped a little vial from his belt and pinched out a pinch of pale powder. It smelled faintly of mint and old paper. He blew it softly over the seam. Where the powder touched raw Blight it turned gray. Where it touched old elvish wards it glowed a very faint green, like moss under moon.

The seam pulsed once and the green flicker ran like a thin stream down and to the right before fading.

"Tracked," he murmured. "You still carry your river, don’t you?"

He felt Thalatha before he saw her, that steady presence with the quiet boots. She stood a few steps behind him, saying nothing, because she knew sometimes words broke a thing you were listening for. He loved that about her, the soldier’s respect for silence. He also feared it a little; silence let your head speak too loudly.

Mikhailis set two fingertips on the motif and let Rodion measure the tremor through his bones.

"Energy siphoning," he said. "Not random, is it?"

Negative. Pattern aligns with controlled extraction from contained entity or entities. Pulse interval irregularities indicate a limiter or a caretaker function—something tries to prevent overdraw.

He tilted his head. "Caretaker. Or prison guard with a conscience."

He scraped the gold dust from his glove with his thumbnail and rubbed it like a perfume onto the inside of his wrist, a silly gesture that grounded him anyway.

Contained... elves? That would be one hell of a bargaining chip for Elowen. The thought came bright and uninvited. He pictured Elowen’s face when he told her—how her eyes sharpened when a thing moved from rumor to proof. How she grew careful when lives could be leveraged, not in the cruel way, in the way a ruler tries to hold a dozen threads and not drop any.

He rubbed the back of his neck. The map to the surface glowed easy and obvious on the projection; the path toward the seam was a question mark and a dare.

Take the neat hallway to daylight, lover boy, he told himself. Be responsible. Go home, report, request a proper team with proper wards and papers and three committees to write letters at each other. Be boring.

Something in his ribs tugged the other way.

He bent closer to the seam. The gold wasn’t just gold. It had a smell under the dust, light and green, stubborn, a smell that had no business living here. It wasn’t the sweet of sap with sugar. It was the bitter of bark, the bitter plants keep for teeth that shouldn’t bite them.

He imagined a person breathing behind the wall in tiny rationed sips. He imagined waking on the wrong side of time, hearing a world you didn’t know on the other side and not having hands to reach it.

Rodion broke his thoughts with his usual timing.

Faint bio-signatures detected deeper within the anomaly zone. Species confirmation: obstructed by Blight interference. Signal amplitude intermittently spikes when the siphon pauses, suggesting stasis slippage or motion inside containment.

"Mm." He tapped his lower lip. "You’re saying it could be elves. Or it could be very polite corpses."

Your gift for hope is noted. So is your gift for sarcasm.

He smiled without humor. "If you start complimenting my hair we’re turning you off."

Hair compliments will be issued only with cause. Current cause level: negligible.

He flicked a glance at the projection again. Rodion had tagged the seam’s faint stream with a thread of light; it ran along the wall, ducked behind a fallen rib arch, and disappeared into what the map insisted was solid stone. Another thread from one of the heavy enemy pulses drifted toward that same nowhere. The map tried to make the two lines pass each other like strangers. He knew they were probably shaking hands.

He took one step back from the wall and stepped on something that crunched. He looked down at a small handful of black moths, dead and dry, their wings folded like shut fans. Not crypt moths—their bodies were too long, their antennae too fine. He crouched and turned one with a fingernail. There was no rot in it. It had not died from hunger or old age. The powder lay around their legs like a ring where a bowl would be.

"Old bait," he said. "Mothlure. They used insect husk for the varnish in these wards. It’s still sweet to their kind."

He should have been delighted. He was, a little, even now, because bugs were his first language. But the delight did not warm his face like usual; it made a sharp little point in his chest.

"Someone maintained this after the Blight," he went on, mostly to himself. "And someone stopped."

He closed his eyes, listened again. The sip-pause-sip had a human impatience in it now that he knew to hear it, like a sigh that cannot be let out loud.

Thalatha had not spoken yet. He felt the moment she let herself breathe deeper, the way her breastplate shifted a shade under the leather. He liked that she had not told him to choose. He also knew she would watch how he chose and file it next to other choices for later, where judgments lived or did not.

He took a leaf of his map and pinched it into scaling, zooming in on the lattice of corridors feeding this wall. Doors that were not doors, ribs that were ribs and also pipes, stone that was stone and also a muscle that wanted to flex if it could remember how. He tried to see not what was there but what had been. The Whiteways were a history book with all the verbs swapped for breathing.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Assumptions. One: this was an elvish sub-sanctum before the Blight. Two: when everything went wrong, either the elves hid inside or were forced inside. Three: the Blight converted the corridors and outer rooms, but whoever set these wards kept them alive in a pocket. Four: the siphon is taking from them or from their wards. Five: not at a rate to kill. At a rate to keep them weak."

Corollary: Weak enough that the Blight does not fear a breakout, strong enough that it continues to feed. Efficient cruelty.

"Mm. Or a perverse mercy." His eyes tracked the faint powder-glow path again. "If there’s still a brain on the other side, it could be leashing itself to wait for help."

Your optimism is once again noted.

He huffed. "Not optimism. Pattern matching. People in cages either break, or they start gardening the cage."

He wiped his glove clean on the hem of his coat. The movement left a smear of dull gold on the fabric, and he had to stop himself from rubbing at it, as if it would sink through and grow into something.

He did the math quickly. Time to surface if they went now. Time to find the seam’s second mouth. Time for enemies to mass if they waited. He put the numbers in rows like a teacher making him show his work. The column that said people in a box didn’t care about the rest of the numbers.

He swallowed, and the swallow hurt like he had swallowed a square thing.

"You’ll tell me if the signatures go flat," he said.

Immediately. Note: signals are easier to read when the siphon pauses. I recommend sampling at the top of the pulse. Next pause in approximately nine breaths.

"I can hold my breath for eight," he said.

Your lungs disagree.

"Rude."