He stood and looked toward the mountain’s peak. "Tomorrow we climb to the heart. With watchers. With mory. And we give it sothing new to dream of."
The others nodded, quiet resolve in their eyes.
That night, as the fire crackled and children slept wrapped in woven shawls, Jude sat beside Grace and carved one final glyph into the earth: twelve circles around a central fla, lines connecting them like veins in a leaf.
mory, he whispered.
And in the mist above, the watchers answered.
Mist rolled over the mountain’s shoulder as morning broke, thin and chill as if the peak itself exhaled in warning. The ash-laced wind stirred the braided hair of the wives as they stood beside Jude, wrapped in cloaks of vines, feathers, and silence. The children remained below, safe beneath the watchers’ glimring vigil in the lower camp. Up here, the world was sharper, less dream, more mory. Every stone, every gust of wind seed to carry voices not quite past, not quite future. Jude raised a hand, feeling their pulse in the air. The glyphs carved into the stone beneath his feet throbbed faintly, like a heartbeat too slow to belong to anything still alive.
They moved in a line, slow and deliberate. Scarlet at the rear, watching the mist behind them. Susan and Grace kept pace beside Jude, while Emma and Rose carried the long mory-banner on their shoulders, its glyphs dancing faintly in the rising light. Serena led the group with Sophie, their steps sure, unflinching. The watchers spiraled above like moths around a dying fla, slower than usual, more solemn. They knew this place. They had seen what slumbered within.
As the path narrowed, curving toward a mouth-shaped hollow in the mountain’s black stone, Zoey stumbled. Lucy caught her, but she didn’t fall. Her body shivered, her breath hitched. For a heartbeat, her eyes went gray.
Then she whispered, "It’s awake."
Everyone froze. The watchers didn’t move. Even the wind fell still. Jude turned, gently gripping Zoey’s arms. Her pupils had returned to normal, but her expression was distant, mouth slack like soone caught halfway between dreaming and drowning.
"Do you rember what you saw?" he asked.
Zoey shook her head slowly. "No. But it’s not a na anymore. It’s... it’s a hunger."
Jude swallowed. "Keep moving. Carefully."
Inside the mountain, the tunnel widened into a chamber. High above, the ceiling opened to the sky in a jagged wound, casting pale gold light on a sunken floor of obsidian tiles. At the center, a massive circular slab of stone, smooth, seamless, sat embedded with hundreds of glowing glyphs. None of them were Jude’s. None of them were the watchers’. These were older. More brutal.
The watchers halted at the rim, forming a circle around the group, but they did not descend.
Jude stepped forward first, the stone warming beneath his feet as he moved closer to the central slab. Every glyph pulsed in ti with his heartbeat. Each breath he took, they shimred, gold, then red, then black. Behind him, the wives stood in a semi-circle, the mory-banner stretched wide between them. The watchers hovered in complete stillness, no longer shifting.
Grace joined him beside the slab. "What is this?"
Jude knelt and placed both hands flat on the stone. "A gate," he murmured. "Or a prison."
He closed his eyes. The mories ca fast this ti.
A vast city swallowed by smoke. People screaming words that turned to ash in their mouths. A woman with golden eyes standing before this very altar, hands raised, arms bleeding glyphs. Twelve figures kneeling behind her, connected by threads of fla. The watchers above them, raining light that did not save them, only sealed them in. Then silence. Endless, aching silence.
Jude opened his eyes. "It tried to take sothing it shouldn’t. And the watchers bound it here, feeding it mory to keep it asleep."
"Whose mory?" Susan asked.
"Ours," Jude said softly. "Anyone who forgets pain. Anyone who lives past grief. Every ti we bury sorrow, it feeds."
The wives exchanged glances. Rose stepped forward. "Then how do we stop feeding it?"
Jude rose. "We show it what we refuse to forget."
He turned toward the others. "Lay your glyph stones around the slab. One by one."
Each wife stepped forward, placing her stone in the black dust. Petals, feathers, locks of hair, dried leaves, each piece of their personal truth laid bare. The watchers began to glow, slowly rising in brightness.
Jude drew a long breath and took the mory-banner from Emma’s shoulders, wrapping it around the stones, anchoring it with his own shard, etched with every wife’s na, every mont he rembered them saying I love you, or I hate you, or I’m still here.
The ground trembled. The glyphs on the slab flared gold, then red. Then sothing deep beneath them groaned, like a door dragged across a floor of bones.
A voice spoke, not aloud, but inside them.
You rember wrong.
Jude stepped forward, unshaken. "We rember truly."
Pain is not mory. Pain is illusion.
"No. Pain is proof," he said. "And we lived it."
The watchers moved now. Twelve of them, brighter than ever before, descended around the slab. They stretched their limbs toward the wives, who did not flinch. One by one, they touched their heads, their chests, their shoulders, mapping them with light.
The voice returned. Then take it. All of it.
Suddenly Jude was drowning in visions. Not his. The entity’s.
Burned lands. Lost worlds. Dead gods. A thousand minds crumbling beneath the weight of mory. The first watchers, not as they were now, but wild, screaming light, not protectors, but parasites. And the being beneath the mountain, once one of them, cast down for trying to devour grief like fire devours dry wood.
It didn’t want to wake. It wanted to be fed forever.
But they had starved it. With love. With truth.
Then the visions snapped away. Jude gasped. The wives were glowing, their stones burning white-hot. The watchers sang, not with sound, but with light, forming rings above each wife’s head, glyphs spinning faster than eyes could follow.
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