They descended toward a ridge where moss blanketed stone in glimmering coils. The landing site looked almost prepared, a shallow bowl of rock softened by living green, as though the grove had learned where heavy things preferred to rest.
Khalen set his palm to the console. "Easy," he murmured.
The Valkyrie obeyed, drifting down with the careful grace of something that knew it was being watched.
The moment the first landing strut kissed the moss, everything changed.
Not with a strike.
With a quiet.
The Valkyrie's runes blinked once, then sank into darkness. Glyphs along the hull faded in a smooth cascade, line by line, until even the faint under-veins of Breathlight vanished. The ship did not shudder. She did not resist. She simply went still, as if someone had laid a hand over her eyes.
Khalen felt it like a rope going slack in his grip.
He moved without thinking, palm to the helm console. "Valkyrie," he said under his breath. "Answer."
Nothing.
No answering hum. No subtle lean into his voice. The deck stopped making those tiny adjustments it always made, the quiet kindnesses he never admitted he relied on. The ship became weight and wood and silence.
Lys's head snapped toward the hull. Her eyes went to the darkened runes, then to Khalen's hand.
"Khalen," she said, low. Not alarm, not accusation. A status report. "She's down."
Therrin was already crouched, fingers pressed to the deck, eyes unfocused like he was listening with bone instead of ear. "Not down," he murmured. "Suppressed. Clean. Like… like someone asked her to sleep, and she agreed."
OH's light dimmed at Khalen's belt, the skull's seams pulling inward as if the grove had put a veil over sound itself.
"Oh," OH said, very quietly.
Khalen didn't like that sound.
He stepped to the rail.
The grove below had brightened, the mosslight thickening until it looked less like glow and more like intent. Spores swelled in the air, slow-floating beads now, each one pulsing like a heartbeat you could see.
Then the canopy moved.
Fast enough that his eyes had to chase it. Branches folded overhead in layered arcs. Vines cinched like sinew. Whole sections of luminous crown slid together until the opening they'd come through became a sealed roof of green and shadow, laced with spores like suspended stars.
The last slit of open night vanished.
They were inside now.
Enclosed.
And the air itself pressed back when Khalen tried to draw a full breath, as if the grove had put an ear to his lungs and decided how loud he was allowed to be.
Khalen's first instinct was to lift off anyway, to rip free on raw will and panic and whatever fire he had left in him.
His second instinct, the one that kept people alive, was colder.
She's asleep.
You don't abandon your ship. Not even if you can, and right now you can't.
He swallowed. The taste was suddenly bitter, like memory. Prison colony instincts, snapped back into place. You didn't win every trap by fighting it. Some traps were built to make fighting feel like the only clean answer.
He'd gotten comfortable, and the regret bit clean.
Emberfields had offered ash and food. Mirror Vale had offered ritual and edges. Every settlement so far had looked up at them like the sky itself had chosen a side. It had been easy to start believing the Valkyrie made them untouchable.
Easy to forget that the most lethal snares were the ones you walked into willingly.
Below the hull, the grove's light climbed the landing struts in slow bands, testing, tasting. Not hunger exactly. Assessment.
Then the grove armed itself.
Branches pushed out from the surrounding trunks in a sudden, coordinated bloom, not frantic, not wild. Spears. Hundreds, then thousands, sliding into place around the Valkyrie in widening rings. Tips sharpened from wood into something closer to bone, angled just right to pin hull and wing if she tried to rise.
The Valkyrie's runes sank further still, as if whatever had closed her eyes had pressed down harder. The deck under Khalen's boots stayed dead quiet. No answering pulse. No familiar accommodation.
Lys shifted half a step, keeping her crossbow low, her hands open around it like it was just another strap. Therrin didn't reach for a tool. He only looked, measuring the geometry of the threat with a scholar's dread.
Khalen lifted his right hand, palm out, slow. He kept his voice calm on purpose, because panic was contagious and he was the only one who could afford none of it.
"Hands open," he said, not as an order, but as an anchor. "No sudden Breath. No weapons up."
He glanced at the spears ringed around the hull, the sealed canopy above, the sleeping ship under his feet.
They could cut them down, maybe. Burn a path, maybe. But not without burning the grove with it, and not without leaving the Valkyrie here like a gutted miracle.
So far, every settlement had watched them descend and decided it was safer to smile.
He'd started believing that was what power bought you.
He'd forgotten the traps you walked into willingly, because they looked like hospitality until they closed.
Movement stirred ahead, silent and controlled. The villagers parted without hurrying.
A man stepped out of the moss-shadow, tall enough that the canopy light caught his shoulders first. Seven feet of slow certainty, wrapped in fungal silk that drank the glow and returned it muted. A band of colourful crystal ribs circled his brow, threaded with spore-silk and fine ward-etching. It flexed once with his breath, almost like the grove listened through it.
His eyes stayed on Khalen, not on the ship, not on the skull, not on the weapons.
"You fell into our sky," he said.
Ned's gaze flicked once, up the hull, up the folded wings, up the runes gone dull.
"A ship that walks the air," he said, almost to himself, like naming a new species.
Then his eyes returned to Khalen, and the softness was gone.
"And you brought it here."
Khalen held his palm steady. He forced his lungs to keep their pace.
"We didn't come to take," he said.
He let the next truth out carefully, because lying fast was how people died here. "We can leave."
Ned's eyes slid to the Valkyrie's darkened glyphs. To the spear-thicket braced under her belly, patient and ready.
"You can," Ned agreed.
He didn't gesture to open the canopy. He didn't signal the spears to lower. He didn't reassure them the ship would wake. He simply let the silence do its work.
Lys lifted her chin slightly. "We're not Bastion."
Ned didn't blink. "Good."
The single word landed heavier than any warning.
Khalen frowned. "You've had trouble with them."
Ned's mouth barely moved, not a smile, not quite contempt. "Bastion had trouble with us."
His fingers touched the colourful crystal ribs at his brow, a soft tap, like someone checking a pulse. The grove's hum shifted a fraction, and the spear-thicket answered with the smallest adjustment, points angling a hair closer again, reminding everyone whose patience this was.
"Once," Ned said, eyes on Khalen, "they sent their little archivists."
Therrin's breath caught. He didn't move, but Khalen felt him go taut beside the hatch.
"They asked questions," Ned continued. "They wrote. They promised trade. They promised understanding." His gaze flicked toward Therrin's notebook without needing to see it clearly. "They promised they were not here to take."
Khalen kept his hand open. "We aren't."
Ned's stare didn't change. "They did not go back the way they came."
Silence tightened. The spores above them pulsed once, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat measured by something that didn't rush.
Khalen forced his voice to stay level. "We don't know what happened to them."
Ned's eyes stayed on him. "Maybe they learned something," he said softly. "Maybe they were taken for the same reason they came."
He let that sit. He did not explain whether it was threat, history, or warning. In the grove, it could be all three.
Then Ned lifted his chin a fraction, and the only gift he offered was a question.
"Who are you," he asked, "and why did you choose this ridge."
Khalen answered with the truth he could afford. "We're exiles. We trade to survive. We heard the grove holds clean water and safe passage, and we came to ask, not to demand."
Ned listened without giving anything back. No nod. No softness. Just taking the shape of the answer and deciding where it would split.
"And the voice," Ned said, eyes dropping to Khalen's belt, to the dim skull, "that hides its light."
OH stayed quiet.
Khalen didn't touch him. He didn't look down either, because any movement toward the skull could be misread as a signal. "He's old," Khalen said carefully. "He helps us stay alive."
Ned's gaze moved from Khalen to Lys to Therrin, then back. Cross-referencing already, without saying he was.
"Old things," Ned murmured, "always claim they help."
He lifted two fingers and tapped the Root-Tongue Diadem again.
The grove answered.
Not with words, but with enforcement: the gangway's glow dimmed. The landing moss thickened at the edge, not rising like an animal, but settling like wet stone, heavy enough to make running feel stupid. The spear-thicket tightened its circle by the width of a breath.
Khalen felt the option of speed leave the air.
Ned lowered his hand.
"Come," he said.
No promise of food. No stated rules. No explanation of where.
Just an instruction, delivered like refusing it had already been accounted for.
He turned and began to walk, not checking whether they followed.
Because the grove had already decided they would.