Tala had never liked caves.
In the forests of home, darkness was soft; cedar-shadow, salmon-river gloom, the kind she could press a palm into and feel life breathing back. But this darkness was different. It wasn’t made by trees. It was made by stone and old hunger. It tasted like iron filings and wet ash, and the air inside the cavern carried a vibration that set her teeth on edge.
Even before she understood what she was feeling, Cedarheart did.
The drone clung close to her shoulder like a living thing, its cedar ribs humming low as it scanned the space ahead. Tala could feel its instincts through the thin thread that always connected them, an invisible braid of memory, spirit, and shaped wood. Cedarheart did not fear the dark.
It feared what slept in it.
The digging machine had stopped. Its iron jaws hung open, teeth slick with pale stone. Steam hissed in lazy breaths from its pipes, and the men clustered around it looked suddenly small and stupid beside the carved chamber beyond.
Beyond the cavity in the wall, the cavern widened into something impossibly old.
The walls were not raw stone, they were carved, scored with images in bronze and jade that caught what little light there was and turned it into shapes. Dragons twisting around rivers, beasts with too many limbs, men kneeling before something that was not human, not animal, but machine. The figures danced across time, dynasty after dynasty layered into one great warning.
A deep thrumming pulsed from the altar at the far end of the chamber.
Tala felt it in her bones the same way she felt thunder through a canoe before the storm arrived.
Mother earth is crying, she’d whispered earlier, and she hadn’t been wrong. This was not ordinary grief. This was the grief of a sealed mouth forced open.
Then she saw him.
Tobias Locke stood at the far end of the chamber as though it belonged to him.
Even with Bertrand’s molten fists having struck him, even with his face scorched and bleeding, he had the posture of a man who had never needed to bow in his life. One hand was braced lightly against the ancient machine—jade-paneled and ribbed in brass, older than the dynasty itself. The other hung loose at his side, relaxed, as if he were merely examining a museum relic.
Between him and the altar, a lion moved.
Not a living lion. Not flesh. Stone and metal, immense as a carriage, its joints grinding with a sound like a millstone turning. Dust sloughed from its shoulders. Its jade eyes burned with a patient fury.
It was awake.
It had been sleeping for a thousand years, and now it was awake.
Jiàn was already there.
She moved like storm-smoke across the cavern, mist blade drawn. The vapor curling off her sword made the air around her look briefly wrong, like the world couldn’t decide whether it was solid or breath. Jiàn’s boots splashed through shallow water that had pooled over centuries. She planted her feet and drove the blade to Locke’s throat with a steadiness Tala envied.
Locke lifted both hands slowly, smiling even as blood shone on his mouth.
“Hello,” he said.
His voice was softer than it had any right to be. Not ragged. Not frightened. Not even angry.
Warm, almost.
Like a man greeting an old friend.
“Hello, my dear Jiàn Lù. It is very good to see you.”
The words felt wrong in Tala’s ears. Not because of their meaning, but because of their shape, like a prayer twisted into a threat.
Jiàn didn’t answer.
Her goggles hid her eyes, but Tala could feel the heat coming off her anyway, the way a furnace radiates even through iron.
“You should have died in the palace,” Jiàn said at last, voice low and terrible. “I should have made sure.”
Locke’s smile sharpened.
“You tried,” he murmured. “And yet… here we are.”
He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something only he could hear. Then his gaze slid away from Jiàn’s blade.
It found Tala.
The moment it did, the world seemed to narrow.
Tala felt it like a hook beneath her ribs, the sudden sense of being pinned and measured. Cedarheart shifted on her shoulder, wings twitching, as if it had sensed the same predator-stare and wanted to bite.
Locke’s eyes brightened, too bright.
“There you are,” he said, and the way he said it made Tala’s stomach drop.
Not surprise, not recognition.
Relief. As though he had expected her. As though he had been waiting for her to enter the cave like a key sliding neatly into its lock.
Tala took one step back without thinking.
“You don’t know me,” she snapped, but her voice came out thinner than she wanted.
Locke chuckled. “Oh, child,” he said gently. “I know you better than you know yourself.”
Jiàn surged forward, sword pressing into Locke’s skin. “Do not speak to her.”
Locke didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. Instead he spoke past Jiàn, calmly, like she wasn’t there at all.
“Słux̱ʷił Yəhaw̓,” he said.
Tala’s blood turned to ice.
No one in Shanghai said her name right. Not even people who tried. It was too foreign on their tongues, too shaped by river and sea. They shortened it. They laughed at it. They called her girl, or savage, or child. Even Jiàn used Tala because it was easier.
But Locke said it like he’d learned it the proper way. Like he’d spoken it in a room where her ancestors listened.
Tala’s lungs forgot how to breathe.
“My little voice of the inside waters,” Locke continued, voice almost tender. “So far from home.”
Tala’s fists clenched. “You—” she tried to speak, but the cave swallowed her words.
Locke stepped closer.
Jiàn pressed the blade harder and Locke’s throat beaded red. Still he didn’t care. Still he looked only at Tala.
“You crossed an ocean because you felt a call,” Locke said. “You thought it was destiny.”
He smiled. A soft thing. A cruel thing.
“But you were only following me.”
Tala felt the world tilt.
Her father’s stories flashed like lightning: the Thunderbird shedding its form, waiting for someone to remember it right. The blueprint. The drone. The song.
Had it been real? Had any of it been hers?
Or had she been led like a thread through a needle’s eye from the beginning?
Cedarheart emitted a sharp click—warning, warning, warning—its inner light pulsing hard.
Locke’s gaze flicked briefly to the drone. “And you brought your pretty little owl,” he murmured.
Tala’s throat tightened.
“Tell me,” he said to Tala, “does it feel brave? Or does it feel like drowning?”
Her vision blurred.
Jiàn’s voice cut through, suddenly fierce. “Shaohua. Take her. Now.”
Shaohua was at Tala’s side immediately, as if he’d been waiting for permission to move. His hand closed around her wrist, not painful, but firm.
Tala jerked away. “No—”
Jiàn’s head snapped toward her. “Tala.”
One word.
Tala heard the command underneath it: live.
So she stumbled backward, letting Shaohua pull her, Cedarheart fluttering in frantic loops above them.
Locke watched them retreat like a man watching prey run into his trap.
“You will die in this cave,” he said conversationally, as though remarking on the weather. “And you will die knowing you walked here willingly.”
Tala’s stomach clenched, rage rising hot enough to burn away fear.
She wrenched free and took a step forward again.
“Shut up,” she hissed.
Locke’s smile widened. And Tala saw his hand move—not toward Jiàn’s blade, not toward the lion, but toward his coat.
Toward something small and brass.
“No,” Tala breathed, instinct suddenly screaming.
But it was already too late.
Locke activated the device.
The sound was not a sound.
It was a tearing.
A shriek that didn’t travel through the air so much as it crawled inside it and turned it inside-out. It slammed into Tala’s skull like an axe. Her teeth vibrated. Her tongue went numb. Her eyes flooded with involuntary tears.
Cedarheart screamed.
Not in bird-clicks. Not in whistles. In pure wrongness. Its wings snapped open, rigid. Its inner light flared bright—too bright—then stuttered like a dying lantern.
Tala felt Cedarheart’s spirit recoil as if struck.
The thread connecting them, so familiar, so warm, so alive, suddenly became a wire.
A wire pulled taut. A wire sizzling.
Pain exploded through Tala’s palm, up her arm, down her ribs.
She collapsed to her knees with a strangled sound she didn’t recognize as her own.
Around her, the others fell too.
Min cursed. Shaohua braced himself against stone, but it didn’t matter. Even Jiàn staggered, her blade erupting into uncontrolled vapor as if it were trying to escape her grip.
The mist blade howled.
Tala could feel it—feel it like the scream of a spirit being drowned.
And the Guardian Lion—
The lion’s jade eyes flared blinding green.
It threw its head back and roared.
The roar was so ancient Tala felt it in her marrow. Dust blasted off the walls. Stalactites trembled. The air shook as if the cave itself were terrified.
Locke stood untouched in the center of it all, as calm as a monk.
He looked down at Jiàn.
“You see?” he said, almost kindly. “This is why you failed.”
Then he glanced at Tala.
“And this,” he whispered, “is why you will succeed.”
Locke hurled something toward the mouth of the cavern with a flick of his wrist, like a man tossing away an apple core. The object spun end over end through the dust-thick air, catching a stray glint of light; brass casing, a wick-like fuse, a cruel little ingenuity.
Tala tried to scream a warning, but the dissonance had stolen her voice. Only a raw rasp left her throat.
The explosive struck stone near the entrance and flashed white-hot.
For an instant the entire cavern turned into a photograph. Every carved mural, every jagged stalactite, every face in the group caught in stark relief. Then the world jumped. The shockwave punched through Tala’s chest like a fist. Dust and pebbles rained down. A crack split through the ceiling with a sound like a tree breaking in winter.
Stone began to fall.
Not in chunks at first, small rocks skipping and clattering, bouncing down the passage like thrown teeth. Then the larger pieces came, slabs breaking free with a deep, rolling thunder. Tala could only stare, dazed and helpless, as daylight vanished behind an avalanche of rock. The last thin ribbon of sun winked out like an extinguished candle.
Darkness swallowed them.
The air went instantly thick with grit. Dust slammed into her mouth and eyes, scratching, choking. Someone coughed violently nearby and another voice swore in a hoarse, strangled breath. Tala tried to breathe and only inhaled earth.
The dissonance device’s shriek finally began to fade, the worst of it trailing off into a high ringing that made her skull feel split open. But the silence it left behind was not relief.
It was worse.
Silence the shape of an empty shrine after a god has been insulted.
Tala lay on her side, cheek pressed into damp stone. Her ears still hummed. Every nerve in her body buzzed like a plucked wire. Somewhere above, the digging machine hissed one last exhausted breath and went quiet, as if it too had decided it wanted no part in what had just been done.
Cedarheart’s shape lay crumpled near Tala’s shoulder.
That, more than anything, pierced her.
She reached for the drone with shaking fingers, feeling blindly through debris until her hand found carved cedar plating—warm where it shouldn’t have been warm, like skin feverish with pain. Cedarheart gave a weak, ragged click that sounded nothing like its usual crisp voice.
Tala’s throat tightened.
“Cedarheart,” she rasped.
The drone’s light flickered once, dimly, then stuttered like a lantern starving for oil. Not gone. Not dead. But wounded, its spirit recoiled deep inside its cedar ribs as though something had slammed a door in its face.
The thread between them, the gentle communion Tala relied on, was still there. but now it felt frayed.
Tala blinked hard, eyes burning from dust. Shapes began to resolve through the haze: Jiàn on one knee, braced against stone, her blade trembling in her grip. Vapor still curled from it, but not with its usual purpose. This steam was wild, panic-steam, breath without direction. Jiàn’s shoulders rose and fell as if she’d been sprinting for miles, her composure fractured for just a heartbeat.
Shaohua had one hand planted flat on the cavern floor, the other gripping his own forearm as if trying to anchor himself in his body. Min crouched near a stalagmite, face pale beneath her anger. Tung-Bai was coiled tight around her neck, its glass eyes fixed and unblinking, as though even it had forgotten how to move. There was no sign of Daiyu or Rennie and her eyes darted around, trying to find them in the dust but couldn't see them anywhere.
Tala tried to sit up. The cavern tilted. Pain flared behind her eyes.
Somewhere ahead, deeper in shadow: movement.
Locke.
Just a smear of a man through dust and dim light, slipping between the ancient pillars as though he’d been born into this place. He moved with quick certainty, the confidence of someone who had already decided the ending.
Tala couldn’t see his face anymore, but she could hear his voice, faint and maddeningly calm, drifting back like smoke curling under a door.
“Find me,” he called softly, “when you are ready to hear it sing.”
Then he was gone—swallowed by the dark passages beyond the shrine.
Jiàn’s breath hitched, and for an instant Tala thought she might fling herself forward despite the dust, despite the pain, despite everything.
But she didn’t.
Because something else moved.
Slowly…Heavily.
The sound didn’t belong to a man.
It belonged to the earth itself.
A deep grind of stone on stone rolled through the chamber, followed by the metallic clank of joints waking up. The dust shifted. A silhouette rose out of it: vast shoulders, lion’s head lowered, jade eyes burning like coals underwater.
The Guardian Lion had turned.
Its attention was no longer fixed on Locke.
It was fixed on them.
On the intruders. On the ones still present. On the ones who had brought dissonance into sacred stone.
Tala felt the air change as the lion stepped forward. It wasn’t just fear, it was pressure. Like a stormfront arriving without warning, making every hair lift, making every instinct scream kneel.
The lion’s stone paws splashed through shallow pools with slow certainty. Each step shook grit off the ceiling. It paused, head angled, as though listening for the language of thieves.
Its iron maw opened and the sound it made was not a roar like a living beast.
It was the roar of a gate slamming shut, a warning carved into sound.
Tala’s heart hammered. Her fingers curled around Cedarheart’s broken body, pulling it closer to her chest like a child might clutch a wounded sibling.
Cedarheart twitched faintly beside her, as if trying to rise anyway. As if even injured it still remembered its purpose: protect.
Tala swallowed hard, forcing breath into lungs full of dust.
They weren’t chasing Locke anymore, they weren’t even hunting answers.
Now they were trapped in the belly of an old god’s shrine, sealed behind rock, surrounded by sacred machines and the Guardian Lion was awake.
And it was not in the mood to forgive.
