"A starving wolf does not question the butcher's blade, so long as it falls on another."

I woke to the agonizing sensation of my own heartbeat and the remnants of a splitting headache.

It wasn't just a pulse in my chest; it was a synchronized throb starting from the base of my skull, traveling down the length of both my arms, and pooling in my chest. The Circlet, the Lattice, the Chevrons, the Tetrahedrons, and the Infinite Weave etched into my palm all flared with a dim, rhythmic localized light that did nothing against the dim neon darkness.

I was lying on the hard, resin-coated column just outside Vane-Uru’s segmented body. The air was still thin, smelling of ozone and ancient dust, but the immediate pressure of the sovereign's inner chamber was gone. I tried to sit up, but my muscles felt like they had been soaked in battery acid, making my rise almost bring tears to my eyes. The neurological hijack from the Toxic and Rot Qi absorption had left my central nervous system frayed.

As I shifted my weight, my right hand brushed against something cold, but softer than resin or rock.

It wasn't stone. It was a leather-covered mass of freezing, dense muscle.

Adrenaline spiked through my exhaustion. I recoiled, my back hitting the uneven wall of Vane-Uru's carapace that wrapped the top of the broken column. The violet arrays on my arm flared, giving off no luminescence, causing me to snarl to myself as the memories of yesterday came back.

Pushing away my annoyance, I felt around for my stack of chitin, and fed some Qi into the top plate. A dim light rose from the light bulb image I had etched inside the closed circuit, and I picked it up to move over the massive shape resting less than two feet from where I had been sleeping, and frowned.

It was Vora, but she looked horrible.

The nine-foot-tall scout leader of the Great Gem Cliff was lying on her back, but she was barely breathing; that was far from the worst of it. She was a ruin. The physical reality of a nine-hundred-or-so-pound giant attempting to walk through a sovereign-tier gravity well was written across her anatomy. Her dense, iron-hard femurs had snapped under her own weight, the bone protruding through the pale skin of her thighs. Her massive chest cavity was visibly depressed, her ribs crushed inward by the sheer atmospheric load. Dark, heavy blood had pooled from her ears, nose, and the corners of her mouth.

I stared at her, completely baffled. Why was the giant who had abandoned me to the Wild Hunt lying shattered at the threshold of a forbidden zone? Just what could have been worse than this?

A sharp, dissonant chitter echoed from the shadows near the base of the pillar.

The Tetrahedrons driven into the knuckles of my left hand suddenly vibrated, acting as a biological receiver. The acoustic scraping translated instantly into raspy, disjointed words inside my skull.

“Heavy meat. Good bone. Crushed soft inside.”

Pendra stepped into the dim violet light. Her six-armed, bipedal frame moved with an eerie lack of kinetic friction. She didn't walk; she simply displaced space until she was standing over Vora's head. Her luminous gold eyes tracked the shallow and ragged rise of the giant's shattered chest.

“We eat,” Pendra projected, her head tilting. “High calorie. Good fuel for the core to grow. I dragged it from the crack that is a hole now. You sleep. I hunt.”

"She isn't dead," I rasped, my throat dry. “And since when did calories become part of your speech?”

“I learning. It dying,” Pendra answered, and corrected instantly, the vibration in my knuckles sharp with predatory logic. “Lungs breaking. Heart slow. The heavy crushed it. Waste of protein to wait. I will open the throat.”

She raised one of her bladed, chitinous lower arms.

"Stop." I forced myself to my feet. The Lattice on my wrist pulsed, distributing the kinetic shock of my movement across my dermis in an electrically unsettling way. I grabbed my canvas roll of acupuncture needles from my coat. "She is not food."

Pendra’s mandibles clicked behind her human-like jaw. “Greedy giants. Not kin. Left you to the pig. Meat.”

"She risked this kind of injury to find us," I said, my voice adopting the flat, clinical detachment I needed to survive this environment. "She is the only local variable that didn't immediately try to turn me into a slave or treat me like dirt. I also have a plan I want to try, but we need her alive for it. That makes her a useful tool. We don't eat tools."

Pendra hissed, stepping back slightly, though her golden eyes never left Vora's exposed throat. “Broken tool. The heavy kills it. You cannot lift it. You cannot fight for me. Eat.”

Pendra was entirely correct in her mechanical assessment. Even here, at the periphery of Vane-Uru’s domain, the ambient gravity was still marginally elevated. For my hundred-and-twenty-pound frame, it was an uncomfortable pressure, but I also had a core and densified my bones and muscle. For Vora’s nine-hundred-pound, hyper-dense, but effectively porous Jötnar physiology, it was an executioner. Her own enlarged skeletal mass was acting like a hydraulic press on her internal organs. If I left her here, her heart would stop within ten to twenty minutes. If I tried to drag her out, the friction and internal bleeding would kill her in five.

I unrolled the canvas sleeve after lighting more plates. I had a plan to change the math of her body, but I had to get the flow of Qi started in her system if she was to survive the next ten minutes.

​I knelt beside the giant. My mind raced back to my ethnobotanical research and the theoretical models of cultivation biology I had translated. It was one thing to activate the points on myself, but I had to actively move the energy for her. Vora was unconscious. Her body was failing under the immense pressure of Vane-Uru's domain because, in the cold, mechanical logic of cultivation, she was a structurally leaky vessel.