Chapter 372: Sky Is Bleeding [2]

Kane looked at Ragnar.

Rain fell in the colour of a wound, sheeting off both of them.

The quay was a running red mirror.

Thunder stood on the bruise-sky and didn’t move on.

"What happened in the pit?"

Kane’s voice came out rough through the blood in his mouth.

"Why didn’t you make a move for sixty-five years?"

The sky answered with another hard crack. The rain, which had been water tinted by the light, poured thicker now: red enough that where it met the flooded harbour it spread like a sea of blood under the colourless cliffs.

Ragnar’s remaining eye held him.

The dark socket still wept black-gold.

When he spoke, the deep voice was quieter than the storm and clearer than it had any right to be.

"What do you think a ruler is?"

Kane didn’t decorate it.

"Someone who saves others."

Ragnar’s mouth moved.

Not the feeder’s scream-shape.

Something that might once have been a smile on a living Elder’s face.

"Someone willing to take others’ burden."

He shifted his weight in the flood.

The stump of his arm hung useless.

"The pit had nothing to do with it. Not at the start."

Kane went still in the flood, water to his waist, Mjoldr still in hand.

"What?"

"I created the pit."

Ragnar’s gaze didn’t leave his.

"I found the stone’s corruption beginning, carried in from the beast lands, the same family you have been chasing across empires. Warm stones. Circle marks. A patience that does not belong to ordinary death. I had the feeders cut. I had the primary sunk. I told the halls we were throwing enemies and traitors into a dark that would hold them."

Kane listened carefully.

Ragnar continued.

"That was true. It was not the whole truth. I made the mouths to keep the corruption off our posts and out of our children’s eyes."

"But—?"

Kane already knew.

He asked anyway.

"But the corruption got me first."

Ragnar’s single blinking eye dropped to the red water, then lifted again.

"I went down with the warmest of the carriers to shut the door from the inside. The door shut on me instead. I couldn’t let it go free. Could not walk back up and paint the lower halls with what I had become. Could not let everyone die. Especially not my granddaughter."

His remaining eye locked past Kane’s shoulder, up the cut, to where the Stone-Mother stood in the red rain with her hammer and her warders, too far to hear, close enough to be seen.

The heavier tiredness on her face was, for a moment, only a woman’s fear for a shore that would not stop drowning.

"She doesn’t know?" Kane asked.

"She doesn’t."

Ragnar’s voice roughened.

"She was a child when I walked into the primary. She grew into the halls believing Root-Binder died holding a line. That is the only version that doesn’t put the pit’s grammar in her blood by story alone. Let her keep it."

He stood.

The motion cost him.

Black-gold ran from under his jaw where Kane’s spike had gone deep.

One eye burned.

One was dark.

Around them, on the flooded slabs and the lower path, the last scraps of the bone-column still twitched, yellow light guttering, not yet finished.

"Time’s up, barbarian."

Ragnar raised his remaining hand.

Somewhere under the red water, the engraved hammer stirred, then tore free of the flood and slapped into his palm as if the years had never taken it.

"The sky turning red was just the beginning. What answers that light does not sit in a chair. It does not wear an Elder’s face. You have broken a hinge. The heart still drinks. When you go to the primary, you will not find another me. You will find the reason I stayed under for sixty-five years."

Kane didn’t lift Mjoldr.

"You could still climb. Tell her. Let the halls decide."

"And give the pit a voice in the lower rooms?"

Ragnar shook his head once.

"No. I have one useful thing left."

He turned on the drowned quay and walked toward the remaining undead.

Not toward Kane.

Toward the yellow sockets still crawling in the red rain.

The engraved hammer rose and fell: tidy, final, the same refusal he had shown when bone-clusters came too close to his attention on the tide-line.

Each strike ended a light.

Each body that had worn a familiar mark went still for the last time.

"Forgive... me, comrades. Let me rest you in peace."

He didn’t use their names.

He only put the pit’s last climbing scraps down so they would not follow him or turn back toward the children’s ledges while the living were watching the sky.

When the quay was quiet of yellow, Ragnar looked once more at Kane.

"Don’t tell her I made the mouths," he said.

"That is enough truth for a morning like this."

Then he walked into the sea.

The deeper green beyond the bollards, where the Hydra had withdrawn when the sky went wrong.

Red rain sheeted off his shoulders.

The engraved hammer hung in his one hand.

He didn’t run, and he did not hesitate. He waded until the water took his chest, his shoulders, the ruin of his arm, and the yellow of his remaining eye was a single point in a sea that had turned the colour of a wound.

The Hydra came up to meet him.

Not in rage.

In the same flat, domain hunger it had shown the bone-column, only this time the meal walked into the jaw on purpose.

Coils rose.

A head the size of a cart opened.

Ragnar didn’t raise the hammer against it.

He only stood in the red water and let the mouth close.

The sound was brief under the thunder.

Black-gold and ordinary dark mixed in the foam.

The engraved hammer slipped free and sank before anyone on the cut could mark where.

The Hydra’s head shook once, the way it had shaken his hand, and then drove under again, away from the shore, away from the bruise-sky, a god’s dog that had been fed a door and found the meal heavier than bone.

On the cut, the Stone-Mother’s voice broke across the rain.

A name she hadn’t used in the open halls for a long time, raw and unfinished, as if some part of her had felt the hinge finally leave the frame.

Kane stood in the flooding quay with Mjoldr hanging in a burned hand.

The sky had started bleeding.