CHAPTER 662: POLLEN, SAP, AND SHARD DUST (3)

"Are they... people?"

"They’re persons enough to be owed rules and names," Mikhailis said at once. He did not look away from the Riftborne when he said people; he looked at all of them in turn. "They volunteered for this deployment. They know the risks. They know me." He drew a breath, thumb rubbing a scuff on his glove as if polishing the words. "We treat them like my soldiers, not my tools. We grieve them if we must. And we don’t ’field test’ them to death." The last sentence had a tight wire inside. Not again. He didn’t let that thought out.

He checked himself and added, gentler, "Back home, each has a name. I don’t use them down here because names stick to walls. But I know them. They know me." The sentence didn’t try to be pretty. It didn’t need to.

The Riftborne bowed that slight, unnerving bow again. The bone rings on its staff didn’t rattle. It did not need noise to be heard.

Thalatha’s shoulders unknotted a notch. Something in her face changed—like a gate re-hinging. She gave the cohort a Hollowguard salute before she could stop herself, fist closed, arm angled neat. "If you fight under my sight," she said, voice low but firm, "you have my promise of guard and grief."

The words landed in the room and stayed. The Silk Guards’ abdomens glowed a hair warmer, like a little pride. Mothcloak’s pinions lifted and fell once, a breath.

Rodion threw new overlays across the floor. Lines, pulses, little glyphs that simplified terror into homework. Thin beams mapped the tiles; faint symbols crawled along cracks and stopped where the logic died.

Findings: Blight signature on the colossus aligns with side-channel leeching rather than root-core origin. Rune shards map a broadcast repeater architecture. Lotus resonance indicates off-axis vector—toward old riverbed tunnels.

The data washed over the bone-snow like a quiet tide. Mikhailis crouched so the projections hugged his boots. He traced one line with a gloved finger, smearing dust. Side-channel leeching; someone is drinking from the pipes, not the barrel.

He glanced at the lotus. It hummed under the chain, petty and patient.

The bag spat out small bundles into waiting hands. The motion was so smooth it almost looked like magic, not clever engineering. Mikhailis caught two parcels by instinct.

"Necrotic resin here," he said, passing them to a Slimeweave Crew. The ant’s glossy plates dimpled as it accepted the weight, then it flattened the bundle with neat, practiced pressure, sealing it under a self-made skin. "Rune insulators later."

He tossed a stick of sap-crystal to a Silk Guard. The guard caught it on a spinneret like a baton, held it for a beat as if listening, then slid it into a pouch of clear silk that zipped itself shut. "Frequency filters. Use them to tune your silk against the vents."

Thalatha watched the exchange like a new officer watching veterans. Her eyes flicked to each variant, taking in economy of motion, the way each moved without bumping another. There was no chatter, only competence. It reminded her of a well-drilled unit forming up in a storm.

Mikhailis knelt by Rodion’s broken arm and laid bone-plate laminae along the torn edge. The plates were imperfect—curved for a rib, not a limb—but he made them fit anyway. He shifted angles, squinted, then pressed two together until their edges found a lock.

"This will hold you ugly for now," he murmured. He tapped for silk. A Silk Guard leaned in, spun a brace with quick, dry whispers. Slimeweave dabbed a neutral gel along the seam that set like a clear scab.

Rodion’s optic dipped, camera iris narrowing as if looking down a nose he didn’t have. Cosmetic rating: one of ten. Functional likelihood: seventy-eight percent. I will attempt to avoid dramatic gestures.

"Try to avoid dying gestures too," Mikhailis said, but the grin didn’t quite hide the relief. He brushed dust off the exposed hinge. Stay with me, kettle.

The Myco-Archivist and Slimeweave had already set up beside Thalatha. They worked without words: a crushed cobalt horn cap smeared into a paste with a tiny mortar; two drops of sweet-sap that made the air sugar-sharp; a breath of neutralized resin to tame the sting. The mixture bloomed from cloudy to clear, settling into a pale blue that caught the lamp-glow.

Thalatha took the vial and smelled it. She wrinkled her nose. "Better than the mint hell you sprayed earlier?"

"Only a little," Mikhailis said. "Drink."

She did. Her face twisted as the liquid hit the back of her throat. She swallowed again out of stubbornness, then blinked. The sound in the room changed for her—the whisper edge of spores faded, the world’s volume sliding down one notch. Some tightness loosened behind her eyes, the kind that had been there so long it felt normal.

"It helps," she admitted. She flexed her fingers, opening and closing a fist. "Feels like... air got heavier, then clearer."

Status: Captain Thalatha stabilized. Spore interference reduced, Rodion reported. Projected efficacy window: two hours, with variance.

"Good," Mikhailis said. He stood, rolled his wrist. The bandage he’d tied earlier held clean. He looked at the lotus again. The petals trembled around the seed, a heartbeat he did not like. You’re not done with us. And we’re not done with you.

He touched the Riftborne’s staff with two fingers and looked to Thalatha. The gesture was small, almost a request for silence in a library. "I want to test something."

She lifted her chin. "I’m listening."

He glanced at the pile of bones that had been a cathedral. To her it was ruin. To him it was also record. "Memory sits in bone sometimes," he said, voice careful. "Not souls—just echoes. If we can pull a fragment from this thing, we might ask where it was called from."

Thalatha’s mouth went thin as a knife edge. Her gaze ticked to the ossuary wall, then back. "We don’t pry the honored dead."

"Blight-built only," he said at once. "No names. No shelves. Just the colossus."

She stared at him a long breath, weighing intent and risk. Then she nodded once. "With limits. I witness."

The Riftborne lifted the staff a fraction. The bone rings along it rotated and clicked together in a new pattern. The motion was elegant and eerie, like beads being counted by someone with very long fingers. It did not speak, but the sound said ready the way a blade says ready when it settles in a sheath.

"Tanglebeetles," Mikhailis pointed. "Gray silk circle. No colors."

Spools spun. The beetles waddled, laying a quiet ring of ash-colored thread that settled around a rib shard half-buried in dust. The circle looked soft. It felt like a line you didn’t want to step over without asking.

"Myco, dust it." The Archivist brushed a fine veil of anti-spore over the ring, neutral and clean. The powder made the air taste like clean stone after rain.

"Silks, give me a null-veil." A translucent curtain rose, mild as a bubble, cutting the ring off from the rest of the hall. It lent the air inside a faint, underwater look.

He spoke the constraints aloud, because words tie choices to the ground. "Anchor target: debris from the colossus only. Duration: thirty seconds. Scope: origin, controller, route. Abort triggers: lotus spike, Blight glyph flash, or Thalatha’s command."

Thalatha placed her hand against his bracer, not hard, but enough to remind them both. The contact was warm through leather. "Once," she said.

He nodded. "Once."

The Riftborne tapped the staff. The bone rings made a click-hush, like someone turning prayer beads in wet gloves. A shard of rib lifted from the pile and floated into the circle. Pale blue haloed it, thin, like a memory of moonlight shivering on a pond.

Cold slid up Mikhailis’s forearms, a clean cold, not the stink of Blight. The tiny hairs on his hand rose. Don’t go deeper than the rules. Don’t look for faces.

The voice that formed was not alive. It sounded like dry leaves grinding underfoot and wind in a throat that had never been lungs. It said nothing human, but meaning slid under the skin of the sound.

Mikhailis did not waste the beats. "Where is your Prime root?"

The whisper scritched. "Not heart. River mouth. Stone-throat sips the vein."

Thalatha’s shoulders tightened. She saw a map in her head: the old riverbed that ran like a scar under the city. She had trained on those tunnels in drills they called myths. Not myths now.

"Who placed your seed?" Mikhailis asked. His tongue didn’t like the taste of the question.

"—Sower walks in borrowed bark."

Borrowed bark. A druid twisted? A body worn like a glove? His skin crawled. He locked his jaw. "What calls you?"

"A song of hunger counting—"

The lotus thrummed like a plucked wire. The chain rang the same note. Red filament wrote itself in the air, thin as hair, a crack of angry light. It tried to copy the ring’s curve, to make a liar’s mirror. The ring did not want to be copied.

"Cut!"