Not a single sound escaped from him.

The amphitheatre breathed around him like the throat of a buried organ, each pulse of the lull-tone rolling up through the ribs and across his chest. Every sealed bulb flickered faintly, wet skins sweating with resin light. Pale shapes turned from inside their sacs—curled and dreaming, suspended between life and stone.

Riven's voice coiled through again, 'It looks like hundreds… maybe more…'

'If this chamber wakes, it will drown us,' Ash replied as he waited through three pulses and counted the quiet between them.

Three soft contractions, one long drain, then the breath where the stone forgot itself. Beneath, the sacs made a tiny, wet settling—like a thousand mouths rolling their sleep from cheek to cheek. The lull tunneled through the ward like a thin saw.

Ash lowered his head and watched the nearest bulbs on the beat. Each skin drew in a hair, then relaxed—breath without lungs, a peristaltic hush that moved mix along unseen threads. Condensation beaded at two rims and not at others; where droplets clung, the light inside ran warmer, syrup-thick, and the faint smell of burnt milk rode above the lacteal sweet.

'Old place,' Riven murmured, 'but not dead. See that cup? Fresh wet, not chalk.'

Ash tracked the cup-lips along the tier. Some were furred with dull, gray powder—years of salt and air. Others showed a thin, glassy sheen, a skin only just set.

On those, crystalline crusts were rounded, not knife-edged; the kind that form fast on new mix. Fortifier glitter picked out tally-seams where hands—or mandibles—had measured doses by habit.

He skimmed a pad along a feeding groove. Dust sloughed downhill in a fine ribbon, then caught at a shallow burr where resin had been dragged recently across the grain. The scent there was layered: old stone, old sap—and above it, a bright mineral bite that hadn't had time to go flat.

'Sleeping larvae can last a while if the shells stay sealed and it's humid,' Riven said. 'But this many, this even… if they were starving you'd see thin bands on their bellies.'

Ash looked. The nearest husks-in-waiting were opaline, bellies faintly banded by mix that had settled rather than failed. No puncture wounds. No gnawing. The lull's cadence smoothed tiny spasms when they spiked, as if a hand were always there to quiet them.

'That is weird... The tunnel outside looked as if there had been no activity for months too...' Ash thought as he began to brainstorm.

'Something must be taking care of them. Feeding them,' he said softly, 'Or keeping their heat correct. Or both.'

Riven counted the pattern again—three, one, the breath—and timed the glimmer that ran along the siphon scars in the wall, 'Something is pushing mix behind the ribs—maybe a pump, maybe a stone tuned to the lull. Some channels are closed; others are still wet. Someone's been working here.'

Ash angled an ear toward the floor.

The deep thrum wasn't a footfall. It was a cycle. On the long note, the troughs at the ward's base brightened a fraction and a film crept over resin panes like frost in reverse, hurrying, then stilling.

'Either a warden is still working down here,' Riven said, 'or someone else learned the routine and keeps it going.'

Ash breathed in through his teeth again. The top note of mineral burned clearer the closer he leaned to certain rims; on others it lay dull, long-spent. His gaze went to the tally-cuts between grooves. Deep, old scars sat beside newer, shallow increments that hadn't darkened. A few were crooked, as if the hand that made them wasn't born to carve here.

He bared a tooth in thought, 'If time alone were keeping them, we'd see patchwork—some rings failing, some thriving. Instead we've got uniform flex. Someone—something—is minding the ratios.'

'So?' Riven asked.

'Someone's been tending them,' Ash said, low. 'Feeding or warming them on a schedule. We find who—or what—and stop it.'

Along the inner groove, something shone wrong under the lichen—a fresh smear across fortifier salts, not cut by mandible. It broke on a broad ridge and dragged, leaving a shallow crescent as if a flat thumb had stuttered mid‑swipe.

Not beetle.

Ash ghosted nearer, belly low, and touched the crescent with the edge of a claw. Salt hissed faintly against damp and left a chalk tingle on his pad.

'It's been tended to,' Riven said, voice dry, 'Two‑legged. Small hand. Recent.'

He drew breath slow through his teeth. The air tasted lacteal‑sweet and old, with a burnt‑milk top note where the lull fattened.

The amphitheatre stepped downward in rings around a sunken well; each tier lipped with grooves glossed by years of resin and touch. Thin inspection rails—shiny runnels—threaded the ribs like veins. He traced one with his eyes to where it vanished into a side siphon.

The rail sang before the beetle showed—a high, precise note like a glass edge, quickening as something heavy and careful rode the curve.

Ash sank into stillness.

He let it settle, then moved. Ash ghosted one ring deeper, pads kissing glossy groove, leaving a thin line of breath on the cold.

He pressed another resin bead low on a rib—breadcrumb—and went on. The lull worked through the ward in easy breaths and he counted, not with numbers but with steps—seven to the next perch, four perches to the bend.

Signs gathered if you knew where to look. A patch of salt on the railhead brushed clean in two ovals, the size of ankle cups. A faint smear where a paddle edge had nipped a cup's rim and left milk‑pale sap that hadn't yet skinned. A curl of gray chaff caught in a groove, still springy when he touched it. The air got a shade warmer, a humid warmth that clung to the tongue, and the burnt‑milk note rode higher over the sweet.

Riven's thought stayed close and plain, 'Fresh.'

Ash angled an ear to the stone. The thrum wasn't walking; it was the place itself. Under it, a thinner thread lived: a body-hum tuned to the lull, not born of rock. It came and went in the spaces between cycles, faint as breath behind a door.

He followed sign the way he would follow blood in dust. On one rib, salt glitter rubbed into a crescent where a joint had leaned to pivot. On another, two straight slides lay side by side—tool marks—ending in a neat lift without wobble. Ahead, the inspection rail shone brighter where weight had ridden it again and again; just off it, resin scuffed to old‑milk.

'It loops here,' Riven said. 'Turns this ring. Often.' The lull shifted a hair the way it does when a cup is touched with care. Somewhere ahead, a cup sang back. Sacs near him turned their skins a fraction toward the sound, listening in sleep.

He kept to the inner shadow where ribs threw a long band of dark across floor and wall.

What came first was not a body but an effect. Cups along the next ring leaned by a hair as if a hand had passed over them; skins calmed, the lull smoothed, and a fine fall of salt lifted in a hush and settled again. A pale thread of milk dripped from around the bend, hung, and snapped.

Then the tool appeared—just the edge—nosing ahead of its owner: a resin paddle thin as frost, its lip scored by old use.

The forelimbs followed, fused like a cradle around the paddle's waist. After them, the keeper itself arranged the corridor as it entered—tuning the air, straightening the lull—so that when its lacquered plates finally took the lichen's blue, they seemed less to arrive than to be revealed. Long and low, broader than a Worker by half, it did not simply glide from the siphon; it set the room to its key as it came on.

Salt packed the hollows of its ankles like pale frost. Where it touched the rail, the note flattened to perfect. Under the plates, ropey tendons tightened and eased in ripples that kept time with the ward's breath; membranes within quivered a fraction, catching the tone and feeding it back until the bulbs nearest them sighed toward quiet.

It hummed as it moved.

Not a throat's sound—its whole body kept time, the carapace resonant. When it slid past a lull cup, the note aligned and the skin of the nearest bulb shivered, calmed, and sighed toward quiet.

Ash's hackles lifted. The thing's intent was clean and terrible: measure, soothe, correct, repeat. Care sharpened to blade.

It slowed at the ring where he had leaned. The lacquer of its head tilted with a soft clack. Mandibles parted. The paddle rose, hovering a thumb above a lull cup. The lull deepened a hair. Sacs along that tier tipped, a fraction inward, toward the tool.

It knows the cups, he marked. It can turn a thousand stomachs with one inch of wood.

'A nurse beetle?'

Sap tack kissed his nearer paw where he'd set it too close to the groove. He eased back, neck flat. His breath pushed wrong against the beat and the lull caught a burr at the edge of hearing.

A dozen sacs within his arc turned toward him as one.

'It sees you,' Riven said.

The Nurse's head turned toward him. It angled slowly, reading. The paddle dipped and hovered a thumb above the rail instead of striking, and the Warden eased along the curve toward Ash in small, careful shifts. Each glide smoothed the lull by a hair; cups leaned and settled, as if the room held its breath. The Warden kept coming, measured and quiet, intent unreadable, as if deciding whether to soothe or to break.

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