Ty counted the golem's steps; the alternative was watching the sky stay silver despite the time of day.
At fifteen steps, the wind on the side of his face thinned. At twenty-two steps, it cut out entirely, and the air in the corridor settled into a dryness only old moss could produce.
The golem walked at a pace the cracked leg dictated. Sapphire light from his core pooled on the walls in patches and threw its shadow long against the stone.
No one spoke for the first hundred meters.
The golem stopped before the corridor curved, and Ty looked up at the great stone face above him.
"What now?"
"The tiny things."
Twenty meters back at the cave mouth, the three slimes were wobbling toward them in a frantic single file, the smallest leading by half a body length. They had been keeping pace since the river, and they had no intention of being left behind.
"The fairy adores them. We shall wait."
Fuka sat up so fast that the cloak slipped half off her shoulder. "Boop! Boppy! Boopsie!" Her voice went thin and bright. She slid out of his lap and dropped to the floor of the corridor. She crouched and the slimes piled into her cupped arms in a wobbling heap.
She came back with all three of them stacked against her chest, her purple eyes ogling at their slimy bodies.
"I can walk the rest of the way," Fuka said, already walking past the golem.
"Mind your distance, little fairy. I would not want to crush you."
✦✦✦
The dampening reached him a few minutes later. Rather, it came in behind the eyes.
His eyes remained active, but the clarity became a blur like he'd been awake for days on end.
In other words, the cave was a mana suppressor.
Fuka's wings had folded flat against her back. The translucent membrane that usually caught moonlight had gone the color of ash.
Even the slimes had dimmed.
"The veins in the stone drink the song," the golem said. "Mana moves in here, but it does not announce itself."
"That's convenient."
"For us, yes. For other things, also yes."
No one outside this cave can see us.
"Why were you buried in the dirt back at the river?" Ty said. "I don't believe that hibernation shit."
The golem's eyes flicked back to him for the first time since they had entered the cave. They were amused in an old, dry way.
"The river replenishes me. The water carries old song from the mountains where my kind were carved, and I sleep in the bed of it when there is nothing to guard, and when I wake the song is in me again. I have done this for a long time."
"How long this time?"
"Two stones. For you, human, two centuries."
Fuka had gone quiet again.
Whatever was ahead of them, she already knew it.
The corridor widened, the light going from patches to a steady wash, sapphire and blue. The ceiling lifted out of reach in a vault that had no echo to it. The stone underfoot turned smoother; marble without the shine.
The hall they were entering had not been built exactly.
It had been grown in spirals dictated by something other than purpose.
The big one built this.
Six small lights at the far end of the hall resolved as eyes. The children were already there. They had been waiting in the deeper dark the whole time.
Three of the eldest's brothers stood in a half-circle at the back of the chamber. Two more leaned against the right-hand wall in poses that almost looked human, not quite convincingly.
Little Rock, the youngest, sat alone beside a low pool of sapphire light, the pool pulsing at the same rate as the father's core.
The golem stopped at the center of the hall. He lowered his hand, and the stone palm tilted just enough for Ty to step off the edge of it.
His boots met the floor without sound.
The pool of sapphire light at the center of the hall had been pulsing at a steady rhythm since they walked in. The rhythm slowed now. It slowed to match the father's body as the father settled, and when the father stopped moving the pulse was a long deep breath, and the hall around it waited.
"My eldest," the golem said.
The eldest stepped forward.
"My grievance is remembered," the eldest said. "I have not forgotten the smallest of us, nor what was done."
"Nor have I, my son. The grievance will not pass unanswered. But I made a second oath, long before the first was sworn, and you will permit me to honor it before I honor yours."
The eldest stole a glance at Ty. Its blue eyes were still visibly shaking.
It had already decided.
"I will permit it."
"Sit, then."
The father lowered himself onto the floor in stages, the cracked leg first and the good leg after, and the great body settled around the central pool of light in discrete heavy periods, each one a separate decision.
"There is a story I owe my sons that I have never told them in full. I will tell it once. The telling will not be repeated." It looked at Ty and Fuka. "And these guests shall honor it all the same."
Fuka let go of the slimes and they started bouncing in place. "Mister, I'm gonna die of boredom."
"Be quiet."
"There were dwarves once," the father began.
"Dwarves!" Fuka chimed. "They're so cute and tiny."
Ty flicked her forehead with his finger.
"You will not have heard of them," the golem continued, ignoring Fuka's bickering. "They did not last in the form they had when we shared the world with them. They have not been spoken of in the kingdoms in some time. Lady Eris saw to that."
He turned his head slowly toward the eastern wall, looking through it at something only it could see.
"The dwarves mined us. Not the way one mines stone for stone, but the way one cracks open a thing for what is inside it. They wanted our cores. The cores fueled their forges and their cities and their machines, and a single core kept a great furnace lit for a hundred years, and they had a great many furnaces."
"Or light up once for a big bang," Ty interjected.
The golem sank its chin. "Correct."
"So how many?"
"More than we could count. We did not count well in those days. We had not been built for counting losses, because we had not been built to lose."
Its words failed to echo through the dampened hall. The children didn't move an inch.
"For nearly two thousand years they got better at finding us, and we did not get better at hiding. They learned the shapes of our valleys, the patterns of our river beds, the songs we made in our sleep. They built tools that listened for our cores, and every century the tools improved."
"Did you fight them?"
"In the way a great old tree fights a hatchet, yes, we fought them. We crushed cities when there were cities in reach. We broke their tools when we could find the tools. We killed a number of them that should have meant something and did not. There were many more of them than there were of us, and the many more of them got better at killing us as the centuries went, and the centuries went."
"How many of you were left when it changed?"
"In my region, six. There had been three hundred."
Ty kicked a pebble on the marble floor.
"But something happened."
"We are the same, human. Under the eyes of a goddess, we are but a stone in the river. And a goddess seeks to throw us under the water all the same."
"I'm not following."
"She came walking down the river," it whispered, however stone golems can whisper, "offering a pact of blood."
"My m-master?" Fuka's voice was tiny again.
"Indeed." The golem's eyes move to Fuka. "You must have heard the beginning of this story. I will tell you the rest."
Then it looked back at Ty.
"She was the Goddess of Mischief, and in that day of age, she held a different name."
"Discordia," Fuka whispered.
"Yes, little fairy. The goddess who started the first holy war."