Chapter 360: War Is Coming [2]

The whole ground shook.

Cups jumped.

Meat slid on boards.

Somewhere in the hall a lamp chain rang like a struck bell.

Giants came half off their benches, hands finding hammers and spear-hafts that had been leaning in easy reach for exactly this kind of interruption.

"What is this?"

"Sea god angry again?"

"The posts—someone get to the sight lines—"

The Stone-Mother’s head turned first toward the upper cuts, toward the high house where her husband still held the ridge posts, then back to the warriors filling her hall.

The heavier tiredness didn’t crack.

It hardened.

"Go out and check."

Kane already had Mjoldr in his hand.

He was moving before the first rank of Giants fully stood, household falling in behind him without being told, Kessa’s ears flat, Griselda’s case clamped tight, Misha pale, Firlia’s medical kit already unslung, Thora on her feet despite the ribs and the argument they had not finished.

The path outside was the same.

Only the water in the pool below jumped and slapped the stone in wrong rhythms, rings chasing rings as the tremor rolled through again.

Thora’s bracelet lit up hard.

Not the soft proximity tick from the Hydra’s shallows.

A rapid, stuttering flash against her ankle, bright enough to see in daylight, insistent as a second pulse that did not belong to her body.

"Something’s—" Her voice roughened.

"Something’s wrong."

"GAHHHHH—!"

The shout came from the east cut, then another, then the sound of war-hammers hitting something that was not anvil and not shield.

CLANG!

The noise rolled down the ledges in pieces: impact, a wet tear, a Giant’s voice breaking mid-order.

Kessa’s nose wrinkled.

Her lips peeled back.

"That is not sea. That is turned. Close."

Kane took the steps toward the east cut at a run.

Giants poured out of the lower hall behind him, weapons up, the banquet’s merriment gone in a single breath.

The Stone-Mother’s voice carried over the chaos without strain.

"Hold the paths! Nothing with the wrong eyes reaches the children’s ledges! Stone-Watcher—signal the posts if you still have a runner!"

They rounded the last shoulder of rock, and the east cut opened in front of them.

What came up out of the ridge was not a living war-party.

It climbed.

Hands first, too long in the joints, skin the colour of old bruises under daylight.

Then a head, then shoulders that had once been a Giant’s and were still almost the right shape if you did not look at how the bones moved under the flesh.

Yellow eyes. Flat. Bright.

The same wrong gold the Sylvander gate had learned in a morning.

Someone in the front rank knew the face.

"Givan—?"

The thing that had been Givan, the ridge-runner, the carrier, the one the Stone-Mother had said they killed, hauled the rest of itself over the cut’s lip and stood on the lower path as if the grave had been a minor inconvenience.

It smiled with a mouth that remembered how.

Then it moved.

The first Giant to meet it got a hammer into its ribs hard enough to stagger a living body.

Givan took the blow, folded around it, and bit.

Teeth found the gap under the jaw-wrap.

"AGH!"

The sound was wet and simple.

The struck Giant screamed once, short, and went down thrashing.

By the time two others dragged him back, his eyes were already changing, gold bleeding in from the edges, breath hitching into the wrong rhythm.

"Don’t let it touch skin!" Kane shouted.

"Cut the limbs if you have to—do not wrestle it!"

Kessa was already past him, gauntlets up, a snarl tearing out of her throat.

She hit Givan’s reaching arm with a blow meant to break a joint, not bruise.

Something cracked.

The arm kept coming.

She twisted away from the mouth and put her second strike into the knee.

"It does not care about the break—!"

"I noticed!"

Griselda’s wings snapped open.

She dumped a searing flare into Givan’s face at close range.

The body reeled, not from pain, but from interrupted aim, and Kane stepped in with Mjoldr.

The axe took the damaged arm at the elbow and sheared through.

Black-tinged fluid sprayed the stone.

Givan’s remaining hand found a second Giant’s wrist, yanked, and bit down into the meat of the forearm before anyone could sever the contact.

That Giant went to one knee, already shaking, already fighting his own breath.

"Hold him!" the Stone-Mother’s voice cracked across the cut.

"If the eyes go, end it—do not wait for the full turn!"

Horror moved through the ranks in a visible wave.

These were people who had been fighting turned beasts and wrong-eyed scouts for weeks.

This was one of their own: named, killed, thrown into the dark with the stones he had carried—climbing back up the ridge with a smile and a hunger that used their faces against them.

More shapes appeared at the cut’s lip.

Not as complete as Givan.

Half-formed. Ridge-dirt and shaft-dark still on them.

Some wore the remnants of lower-tier wraps.

Some wore nothing the living wanted to recognise.

The secondary shafts and the primary’s breath had sent up what they had been feeding.

Thora’s bracelet strobed against her ankle.

"Kane—behind the first rank—there are more in the scree—"

"I see them."

He didn’t use full Rage.

Not yet.

Hybrid Lock sat quiet under his skin, a locked door waiting for an overwrite that had not touched him.

He put Mjoldr through a second climber’s neck and kicked the body back into the drop.

"Kessa, left flank! Griselda, eyes and mouths, do not let them close! Firlia, stay off the bite line, mark the ones who are only wounded!"

Misha had already pulled the elven commanders into a tight defensive knot at the path’s choke, brief forgotten, voice sharp with the same clarity she used on failing supply chains.

"No one runs for the cottage alone! If the lower tier paths open, we fall back to the hall doors, and we hold there—Stone-Mother’s order stands!"

A Giant to Kane’s right, the lower-tier fighter from the night talk, swung a hammer into Givan’s hip and bellowed,

"We killed you! We put you in the dark with your damned stones!"

Givan’s head turned.

The mouth worked around a shape that might once have been a name, or a laugh, or only the memory of breath.

Then it lunged again, faster than the broken knee should have allowed, and took a third bite out of a shield-arm that had come in too close.