The Weight of Stone

They left Ursuline's hideout with her still breathing, arrows through both knees, tied and slung across Bruin's back like one more piece of luggage. Someone raised Grayvault — hand her to Ilsabet, let the dowager decide what justice looked like — and someone else killed the idea before it finished forming. Too far back. A full day lost walking a bound woman to a seat that wasn't going anywhere, when Thornhollow and its broken wall were an easy walk in the other direction. They chose the wall.

The road brought them to a rough workstation, tools laid out too neatly for a job abandoned in a hurry, fresh‑cut stone waiting beside a bench nobody was sitting at. It took one look to see that neat wasn't the same as undisturbed. Deep gouges scored the mud. Blood, old and dark, had dried on more than one stone. And where the hillside had given way, a crevice yawned open into the rock — the kind of gap that shouldn't have been there, in a hill that had only ever needed a retaining wall, not a door.

Two dwarves lay in the mud and rubble outside the chasm, crumpled together, their chests and backs opened by something with claws. They had put up a fight. It hadn't been enough. The party had barely finished taking that in when the shuffling started in the brush around them, and the ambush that had killed the masons came for the people who'd found them.

Four of the things came out of the tree line — the stink of them announced it before the shapes did, something between wet earth and meat gone a week too long. Edric doubled over, gagging, before he ever swung a weapon; the rest fared little better as the fight opened. Zara put a hand crossbow bolt through one skull at range and kept shooting, calm and precise the way she always was with a called shot, while Makani went the other way entirely — a roar, a rage taking hold, a morning star that didn't stop moving once he started swinging it, feeding stolen vigor to whoever near him had taken a hit. Orion put Bruin between the party and the worst of it, laying into one creature with a warhammer while the steel bear traded blows of its own, and when Edric finally cleared his head enough to fight properly, it was with a burst of shattering force that staggered two of the things at once and a spirit summoned out of nowhere — a mischievous shade named Tollin — to fold space and lift him bodily out of a losing exchange onto the top of the broken wall. From up there he traded insults for arrows, and once, when nothing else was reaching a thing that refused to die, he leaned in and whispered something only it could hear — a few notes pitched exactly wrong for whatever passed for a mind in there — and it seized up mid‑lunge and dropped where it stood before the sound had even finished.

Bruin didn't come through clean. A blow was already coming that would have finished him outright, no time left to get the steel bear clear of it, and it was Bruin who decided how it landed: a violent buck that threw Ursuline — still tied, still exactly where they'd left her — off his back and into its path instead. Nobody pretended afterward that it had been an accident. She went down atop her own captors' battlefield, thrown there by the very construct she'd been slung across like luggage. It only bought him a few moments. The creature's next strike found him anyway, and Bruin went down hard right after her, sparks and all, gears seizing mid‑stride. There wasn't much ceremony to any of it. Sorry, lady, was as much of an epitaph as anyone offered to Ursuline. It took Orion long, tense minutes to get Bruin running again — a whispered working, a spent charge, hands moving fast over joints that had seized solid rather than a shrug and a shake it off.

When the last of them stopped moving, the party searched what was left. Makani knelt by one of the corpses and salted its ruined face out of pure, unhurried curiosity, the way you'd salt a threshold back home, and watched for a reaction the way you'd watch an ant cross concrete — nothing happened, the salt just settled into the ooze. Not satisfied, he pressed his new moon‑touched morning star against it too, on the theory that a weapon that glowed might do something a blade wouldn't — nothing there either, and he said as much himself, cheerfully unbothered: I'm not the smart one. Orion, still catching his breath from the fight, turned up the only thing worth taking: a plain‑looking ring on one of the dead dwarves that turned out to let its wearer walk on water like solid ground. They made certain of every kill before they left — a boot to the skull of anything that so much as twitched — and started down toward Thornhollow with the day only half spent and blood on all of them.

Thornhollow met them exactly as advertised: a walled town wrapped around terraced vineyards, a busy little square, an inn easy enough to find. A boy leading a cow home recognized Edric on sight — you're the one who played up in Millstead, weren't you good — and got a shrug and a half‑truth about trouble on the road in return. At the smithy, an old man who called himself Smitty took one look at the state of them, sold a longsword nobody bought, and then admitted to a project he'd been nursing for years: an unfinished, oversized piece of fine metal that needed a strong back to help temper and beat into shape. Makani spent the afternoon at his forge earning it, hammering alongside him into what Smitty swore was his proudest work yet, stamped with his own maker's mark — Ol Smitty's Fine Weapons — in exchange for a promise to say whose hands had made it. The greatclub went into the coals to cool overnight — Smitty wanted to talk fair pricing once it had, and Makani hadn't gone back for it by the time they left Thornhollow again. While the hammer rang, Smitty placed a name to the dead: dwarven craftsmen, out of the Valley of Kirn, the same folk who'd repaired Thornhollow's own wall a few years back and were sent for whenever skilled labor was needed. Coldhallow, he said without much self‑pity, didn't keep many tradesmen of its own anymore.

Edric talked the innkeeper into two rooms for the price of nothing — a fair offer, a bold ask, and a roll that left the woman with no real argument left — and by evening had told the town what needed telling. It brought back a broad‑shouldered man named Hendrik, the closest thing Thornhollow had to someone in charge, and his questions were plain: dead craftsmen, unburied, and something with claws still loose near the wall. He had no coin to offer for help, only the town's hospitality and an early start, and the party agreed to walk him and his man back up at first light. That night the rain came down hard enough to drown out most other sound, and Edric felt his spirit allies grow restless in a way they hadn't before — nothing said outright, just an unease that hadn't been there the previous night.

Dawn brought Hendrik back with a man named Thaddeus at his side, a local given the job of standing guard while strangers worked. At the wall, the dwarves' bodies were gone — dragged off, by the look of the drag marks, straight into the crevice. That was where the argument happened, quietly, in a huddle apart from their two escorts: go down after whatever had taken the bodies, or leave it be and report back to Ilsabet with what they already knew. They had been hired to investigate a road, not to clear a dungeon, and after the day before, nobody was eager to find out what waited in the dark on the other side of that opening. They chose the wall a second time — plug the hole with stone meant for the repair, and let it stay shut.

It was honest, grinding work, made worse by wet stone and a day that wouldn't end. Makani and Bruin did the lifting; Zara and Orion kept pace; Edric, worn past usefulness with a rock in his hands, gave up hauling and played instead — pipes to keep spirits up, a murmured word of guidance passed along to whoever's arms were flagging. It was working, more or less, until Thaddeus's foot went out from under him on the loose stone, and he went down into the crevice screaming, and then he didn't. Hendrik froze. Someone floated the idea of sending Bruin in, or asking a spirit to fetch him out, and got shut down flat — there wasn't a rope, there wasn't dark‑sight, and there wasn't time before the light failed entirely. A thrown torch, chucked down to see how bad it was, showed a steep, muddy slope rather than a sheer drop — survivable ground, in principle — but no sign of the man who'd fallen down it, and no blood either. Whatever that meant, nobody was willing to climb down and find out with dusk coming on. There ain't no saving him, someone said, and nobody argued hard enough to change it. They finished sealing the hole around Hendrik's grief rather than his friend's rescue.

The last stone went into place as Thornhollow's bells began to carry across the valley floor, and the party had a long, tired walk back to town ahead of them before the gates shut for the night.