Bonded By Stone & Blood

1. Sabine

SABINE

The mountain doesn't want me here.

It never does, but today it's making its feelings known with particular spite. It slams into me before I clear the first switchback above the valley, my eyes water, instantly freezing the tears in my eyes before they reach my jaw. I tighten the canvas tool bag on my shoulder and keep climbing.

Spring thaw comes in three to four weeks.

When it does, runoff from the upper slopes tears down the mountain carrying soil, debris, and, if I don't do my job, even the dead.

Coffins have surfaced before. Father Corren once told me about a winter when a grave marker washed into the lower fields and a farmer found a femur tangled in his fence by morning.

The valley never forgot it. Neither did I.

The cemetery sits just below the ruined cathedral on a flat ledge where the mountain briefly levels out.

No one visits. No one maintains it except me.

The graves belong to people whose families are gone, moved away, or stopped caring long ago.

I keep it clean because someone has to, and the small parish stipend plays a part in keeping me and my brother Leif fed.

Sentiment doesn’t matter here. Upright headstones are just work.

The path narrows where the fog thickens.

Up here the mist sits too heavy, unlike the valley, like it's been poured into the crevices of the rock and left to set.

The cathedral ruins are invisible above me somewhere.

In my entire life I don't think I've seen the upper tower clearly; there's always something between it and the sky.

I hear them before I see them.

"Sabine." Velka's voice carries even against the wind.

She's standing on the path below the cemetery gate, arms crossed, fur-lined collar pulled up to her chin.

Beside her, Father Corren holds his cedar cane with both hands like he needs it to stay upright against the gusts.

He looks too old to be out in weather like this.

"You're both going to catch something standing here," I say, not slowing down.

"The mountain is restless." Father Corren says it simply, like he's remarking on the temperature. His blue eyes find mine and stay there. "I thought you should hear it from someone who means it."

"The mountain is always restless. It's a mountain."

"Three sheep gone from Aelan's farm." Velka steps closer, dropping her voice even though there's no one around to hear it. "Not predator kills, Sabine. No blood, no tracks near the old cathedral road."

I stop walking.

"When?"

"Two nights back." Her dark eyes are steady, which is worse than if she looked frightened. Velka Mire doesn't scare easily. "Harren's dog won't go past the first marker post anymore. Sits at the base of the path and howls until someone drags it inside."

Goosebumps rise from my skin in an instinct older than thought. Everyone raised in Blackstone Valley carries some version of it—a bone-deep unease around the ruined cathedral, an instinct that says don't look up, don't climb higher. I've spent twenty-six years ignoring it.

"The graves need repair before the thaw," I say. "If I don't pack the soil now, the runoff will shift the markers and I'll lose half the plot to erosion."

Father Corren's expression doesn't change. "Sabine—"

"I'll be down before dark."

I walk past them.

The cemetery is exactly as bad as I expected.

Two markers have already listed hard to the left where the freeze-thaw cycle has worked the soil loose beneath them.

A third has fallen entirely. I set down my bag and get to work, wedging an iron packing bar beneath the leaning stones to correct the angle before pouring a quick dry-set mortar mix into the gap.

My fingers go numb. I keep working anyway.

The air here moves at angles that don't match the path below. Twice I hear what might be a groan from somewhere above me in the ruins, deep and structural, like old masonry settling under the weight of the storm. I tell myself that's what it is.

I'm resetting the fallen marker when I see the crypt.

The entrance is set low into the rock face at the far edge of the cemetery plot—a narrow archway filled years ago with rubble and old growth lichen.

I've passed it a hundred times. I know what it looks like.

Today it looks different, the rubble in front has been disturbed, and not by weather because there are marks left behind.

I crouch down. The gouges are cut directly into the granite face of a coffin half-embedded in the earth beside the crypt entrance.

Four parallel lines, each one finger-wide and sunk nearly an inch into solid stone.

They're carved with the kind of force that would shear the tips off iron tools and leave them as shavings on the ground.

I press my fingertips to the grooves. The stone is cold, the kind that doesn't fluctuate with the seasons. And the edges of the gouges look recent. I hear the groan again, louder now, and from directly beneath my feet. I stand up fast. Then the world moves.

It doesn’t happen the way imagination does.

The ground simply goes, the ledge giving way, collapsing in a roar of stone and earth that I feel physically and in my back teeth.

Snow and black soil and chunks of cathedral wall come down together and I'm inside it before I've processed that I'm falling, the sky gone.

My body lands on rubble and my ankle throbs with the sharp pain of a bone taking a bad impact, and then it all stops with a deafening silence.

I don't know how long I was out but the cold brings me back.

I'm on my back on a slope of rubble, and above me, very far above, there's a hole. Jagged at the edges where the cathedral floor gave way. Through it, the storm sky is a pale, sickly silver. It gives barely enough light to see by.

I'm inside the mountain. The cavern is vast. I feel the size of it all around me before my eyes adjust, the way the dark opens outward in every direction, ceilings too high to find.

Stone pillars rise around me, unnaturally formed, twisted slightly as they climb, carved by something that wasn't working to human proportion.

And among them, half-buried in debris and thick with centuries of sediment, stand the figures.

Enormous. Obsidian and granite, wings folded tight against massive shoulders, faces bowed. Dozens of them in every direction, filling the dark in absolute stillness. Not statues, my body tells me before my mind catches up. My body understands something my eyes haven't confirmed yet.

I drag myself upright. My ankle screams. I bite down on it and start moving. There's no exit at ground level. Nothing but rock. If I can get to that hole—

The tallest pillar near the center has partially collapsed against another, creating a rough angle I can scale.

I crawl toward it, haul myself up, and start climbing.

The stone is slick with moisture and grit.

My hands are bleeding from smaller cuts by the time I'm halfway up, the warmth of it pressing against the cold, the slickness changing my grip.

Near the top, I slip. I slam my palm down against the figure carved deepest into the cathedral floor—the largest, the one that makes the others look small by comparison, its face turned slightly upward like it died mid-breath.

My blood smears across its cheek, a bright, almost obscene red against the dull black stone. I freeze, muscles wired shut, caught in a liminal state that won’t let me move. Beneath my palm, the stone is warm.