Chapter Four: Liquid Stone
The tunnels breathed. Koric had been underground long enough now that he could no longer deny this truth. The air moved in slow pulses, like something vast drawing breath in the darkness beyond his lamp’s reach. Each exhalation carried whispers that almost made sense, almost formed words.
He’d lost Echo’s trail an hour ago, at a junction where the tunnel split like a wound in the earth. One path led down, descending at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible given Arcmire’s foundations. The other curved gently upward, and from it came the sound of humming—a child’s voice singing a tune that made Koric’s teeth ache.
He took the upper path. The walls here were different, smoother than they should be, as if the stone had melted and reformed. His lamp’s light seemed to stop a few feet ahead, consumed by shadows that moved against the air currents.
“Tam?” he called, hating how his voice shook. “Echo?”
The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, Koric could have sworn he heard the arena crowd again, their bloodlust a distant roar. But underneath it was something else—a deeper sound, like stone remembering how to be liquid.
Marcus sat there in the market, staring at the pattern Tam’s belongings had formed in the sand. The old gladiator’s hands trembled as he traced the air above the design.
“The songs,” he said without looking up. “Not just whispers anymore. Arena songs from the old days, but twisted, distorted. And I’m not the only fighter hearing them.” His eyes met Raven’s, fever-bright. “It knows us, Raven. Whatever’s down there remembers what we did. The blood we spilled.”
A child’s laugh echoed through the arena—not from below this time, but from the upper levels. It sounded like Tam, but warped, as if heard underwater. Raven looked up to see shadows moving against the morning sun, bending in ways that defied nature.
The humming led Koric to a chamber he’d never seen before, though he’d once prided himself on knowing every tunnel beneath Arcmire. The space was perfectly circular, its walls rippling like disturbed water despite being solid stone. And in its center, Tam sat cross-legged, drawing patterns in the dust that matched the marks on the walls.
“Tam?” Koric kept his voice soft, fighting the urge to run. Something was unnatural about the air here, about the way it moved around the boy.
Tam looked up, and Koric’s heart stuttered. The boy’s eyes were the same brown they’d always been, but there was something behind them now, something that knew things a child shouldn’t know.
“The other one went deeper,” Tam said, his voice harmonizing with whispers that came from the stone itself. “Where the old hunger lives. But I had to stay. Had to prepare.”
“Prepare for what?” Koric’s hand found his daughter’s locket, clutching it like a shield.
Tam’s smile was his own, but the words that came out weren’t. “For the rising. For the remembering. The arena never really died, you know. It just… changed. Like we’re all going to change.”
Raven spotted them first—two figures emerging from the tunnel entrance near the old holding cells. Koric supporting Tam, the boy’s feet dragging slightly as if he’d forgotten how to walk properly.
She reached them just as Tam’s mother did. Leta’s cry of relief turned to something else when her son turned to look at her. Raven caught the woman’s arm, holding her back on instinct.
“I couldn’t find Echo,” Koric said quietly to Raven. “The tunnels… they go deeper than they should. Something’s transformed down there. Something’s still transforming.”
Tam spoke then, his voice carrying across the growing crowd of merchants, families, and former gladiators who had gathered. His words echoed oddly, as if multiple people were speaking just out of sync.
“It remembers,” he said, his gaze lingering on the old fighters in the crowd. “The blood you spilled. The death you dealt. But that was just practice for what’s coming. For what’s rising.” His eyes swept over the others. “All of you. All of Arcmire. It remembers everything.”
Above them, shadows stretched like spilled ink across Arcmire’s walls, forming patterns that matched the marks in the tunnels below. And in those patterns, something moved—something that had no form yet, but was learning how to wear the shapes of those it touched.
Koric and Raven shared a look of understanding. They hadn’t saved Tam. They’d only helped something else find its way closer to the surface.
And somewhere in the deep dark below, where Echo’s trail led down into impossibility, ancient hungers were stirring. The games were changing. And this time, the arena itself would be keeping score.
In the circular chamber far below, the dust where Tam had sat was settling into new patterns. The marks he’d drawn pulsed with a dim light that had nothing to do with physics or sanity. And in the deepest tunnel, where the stone remembered how to flow, Echo’s torch still burned—a tiny point of light being drawn ever downward, into the hungry dark.