The tapping came again.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
No voice followed it. No stolen grief. No borrowed mouth wearing someone we loved badly enough to hurt. Just pressure moving through stone, deliberate and cold, striking from somewhere ahead of the dry channel where the Bonepickers’ voices had faded into the dark behind us.
No one moved.
That had become one of our talents.
Freezing.
Rooknest had taught us how to work through fear, complain through fear, eat through fear, and pretend fear was only bad air or a weak ceiling or a foreman with too much attention. The Shellward Expanse was teaching us a new version. Here, fear was not something to push through quickly. Sometimes fear was the only reason your foot did not land in a mouth.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
Sella lifted her head first. Her broken spear lay across her knees, and her injured arm was bound tight to her side with one of Mara’s cloths. Pale burns marked her skin where the white threads had touched her during Rooknest’s fall. She listened with her whole body, ear membranes slightly open, brace-tail still, eyes narrowed toward the cold passage ahead.
Brakka crouched near Split-Tooth, one hand on the calf’s cord. The Skitter calf had stopped clicking. That was never good. I had learned to trust Skitter noise the way I trusted pain: unpleasant, but honest. Silence meant something had noticed us, or the calf had noticed something worse.
Veyrun leaned close to me. “Please tell me that is not another thing using voices.”
“It is not using voices.”
“That avoided the spirit of my request.”
“It is tapping.”
“Many horrible things could learn rhythm.”
Mara coughed into her cloth beside me. The sound was ugly and wet and hers. That helped. She lowered the cloth, saw me looking, and gave me the expression that meant if I treated her like a tragedy in public, she would become one deliberately.
I looked away.
The tapping came again, then shifted into a longer pattern. Sella’s face changed.
“What?” I whispered.
She did not answer immediately. Her gaze dropped to the frost dust near the mouth of the channel. Slowly, with difficulty, she pushed herself upright and limped forward. Brakka hissed a warning, but Sella lifted one hand, not dismissing the danger, only asking for silence.
She crouched beside a print.
At first, I saw nothing except disturbed dust and old shell flakes. Then my eyes adjusted. The mark was narrow, deep at the front, almost clawlike, with two smaller points beside it where something had balanced its weight. Not Bonepicker. Bonepickers dragged and circled. Not Rift Hound. Their tracks looked like hunger pressed flat into the ground.
Sella touched the edge of the print.
“Thren,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
Thren.
The shell-speakers. The one who had warned Rooknest before Avaruun arrived. The one sealed in the wall. The one whose tapping we had heard behind a closed place while everyone else explained warnings into wounds.
A second print sat beside the first.
Then a third.
More than one.
Veyrun swallowed. “Alive Thren?”
Sella did not answer.
From the darkness beyond the channel came a cleaner clicking sound, not the wet little hunger of Bonepickers and not the low shell scrape of something crawling toward meat. This was patterned, deliberate, and spaced with a patience that made my skin prickle.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
I knew that rhythm. Not fully. Not enough to translate. But enough that the back of my neck tightened around the memory of a sealed rest alcove and a voice that should have been rescued before hope arrived wearing a beautiful face.
Closed.
Then another sequence followed, longer and sharper. Sella’s eyes widened.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
The tapping came again, farther away this time. Then from another direction. Then from above the ridge, faint but answering.
There were more of them in the dark.
Sella looked at me. “It means they know another way.”
For one wild second, hope rose in me.
I almost crushed it out of habit.
Almost.
Then I looked down at the print in the frost dust. Fresh. Real. A trace that had not yet become grief.
I closed my injured hand. “Wake Brakka.”
Veyrun stared into the dark. “And if it’s a trap?”
I listened. No borrowed voices called from ahead. No sweetness pressed through the channel. No false mercy warmed the air. There was only clicking in the cold, patterned and patient, waiting beyond the line where we had nearly collapsed from running.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Veyrun sighed. “You have to stop making honesty sound terrifying.”
The tapping changed again. Sella translated under her breath, and the words made the hollow around us feel too small.
“Move before warm root finds old trail.”
Warm root.
Avaruun.
Behind us, far beyond the ridges and channels we had crossed, something faintly warm touched the ground like a hand finding an old footprint. My wrapped palm throbbed. The bitter stone remembered where we had been too clearly: our blood, our ash, our weight, our fear, the places where Mara had coughed and Veyrun had stumbled and Split-Tooth had scraped its plates against stone.
Brakka woke before we reached her.
She opened one eye, saw our faces, and sat up with the speed of someone whose dreams had been worse than waking. “What?”
I pointed past the ash line. “Thren.”
Her expression sharpened. Split-Tooth lifted its head and clicked nervously, the sound small enough to be swallowed by the cold. In the darkness beyond camp, unseen shell-speakers tapped their message one final time.
Move. Move. Move.
Brakka stood.
That settled the matter faster than hope could have. Hope made people argue about whether it was safe to trust. Brakka made people gather tools.
“Up,” she said, not loudly. “No shouting. No lights uncovered. Children first into line. Injured near the center. Anyone who drops something noisy leaves it unless it contains food, ash, or your own child.”
A man near the rear clutched a cracked bundle to his chest.
Veyrun leaned toward him. “Please let that not be the sentimental rock.”
The man looked wounded.
Veyrun closed his eyes. “World Below preserve us.”
Mara pushed herself upright slower than the rest. I reached for her elbow. She let me help for half a breath, then shook me off because she enjoyed making sure worry stayed educated.
“I am standing,” she said.
“You are wobbling.”
“Then I am standing with detail.”
Veyrun, moving past us with his scraper in hand, whispered, “I will use that later.”
“You will not,” Mara said.
He looked delighted and frightened. “She heard me through illness.”
“She hears disrespect through stone,” I said.
“That explains so much about you.”
Brakka checked the ash line before we left. One of the Thren, still unseen beyond the dark, tapped twice when Len disturbed the powder with his boot. Len froze. A long staff slid out from the blackvein moss without crossing the line and pushed the ash back into place.
No body followed.
Just the staff.
Len stared. “Thank you?”
The staff withdrew.
Veyrun whispered, “I have been corrected by a stick.”
The Thren did not step into camp.
That was the first thing I noticed when they finally showed themselves. Not their shapes, though those were strange enough. Not their masks. Not the long hooked limbs folded close to their bodies, or the way their shell plates caught the lantern glow like old knives. The first thing I noticed was that they waited beyond the ash line, patient and still, as if crossing into another group’s shelter without permission was a kind of violence.
Or as if they knew the ash line had been placed by frightened people and respected fear more than most people respected law.
There were five of them.
Maybe six.
It was hard to tell because Thren bodies did not stand the way Kharuun bodies stood. They angled, folded, balanced. Their backs arched beneath layered shell mantles, and their long arms ended in narrow tapping claws wrapped with bone rings. Each wore a mask made from pale shell and dark cord, shaped not like a face but like a question no one wanted answered.
The tallest one tapped the ground with a staff.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
Sella listened. Brakka listened too, though her face said she understood less and hated that.
Veyrun leaned close to me. “Are they saying hello or deciding how many of us fit in a stew?”
“Don’t say stew near starving people.”
“I whispered.”
“You whisper loudly.”
“I am gifted.”
The tallest Thren tapped again. This time the rhythm moved through the ground under my feet, not as sound, but as pressure. My ear membranes twitched. Split-Tooth pressed against Brakka’s leg and clicked softly, as if answering without permission.
Brakka tightened the cord around her wrist. “Do not volunteer us.”
The calf clicked again.
All the Thren turned toward it.
Wonderful.
Even our livestock was politically active.
Sella rose slowly, one hand braced against her injured arm. Her face was pale from blood loss and exhaustion, but her eyes stayed sharp.
“They say we have to move.”
Dorrin, who had slept badly or not at all, stood near his daughter with his jaw tight. “Now?”
Sella listened through another set of taps. “Warm root found the old trail.”
The camp changed immediately. Not panic. Worse. Recognition. Everyone looked back the way we had come, though the ridges blocked Rooknest from sight. Avaruun was not visible, but that did not help. Things that wanted you quietly did not need to be seen.
The Thren tapped faster.
Sella frowned. “They say the ground behind us is softening.”
Veyrun looked down at his boots. “I dislike when ground develops opinions.”
One of the Thren turned its mask toward him.
Click. Tap. Click-click.
Veyrun went still.
I looked at Sella. “What did they say?”
“They said mouths leak fear.”
Veyrun placed a hand over his chest. “I am being judged by insects.”
Brakka said, “They are not insects.”
“That worsens it.”
The tallest Thren lifted one tapping claw and touched the side of its mask, then its throat, then pointed into the dark. No voice. That meaning was obvious even to me.
Mara, standing with a blood-spotted cloth over her mouth, nodded once. “We leave quietly, then.”
The tallest Thren lowered its head. Not a bow. Agreement, maybe. Respect, maybe. Or perhaps it had looked at my mother and decided arguing would be inefficient.
Reasonable creature.
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The camp began waking in broken pieces. Children were shaken gently. Packs were tightened. Moss cakes were wrapped. Ash jars were counted again, which took less time than before because there were fewer to count. The cracked lanterns were shielded. Brakka checked Split-Tooth’s leg where the Bonepicker had clung to it. The calf tried to bite her sleeve, so she tapped it once on the snout, and it looked offended enough to survive out of spite.
“You’re alive because I keep preventing your personality,” Brakka muttered.
Split-Tooth clicked.
Veyrun crouched nearby. “I think it disagrees with your leadership style.”
Brakka did not look at him. “So did Vekk.”
The name dropped between us.
No one stepped on it.
Vekk.
For a moment, I heard him in my head. Not as a Bonepicker voice. Not as Avaruun’s softness. Just memory, sharp and unpleasant enough to be trusted.
Stop standing around like grief pays rent.
I almost laughed. It hurt too much, so I did not.
The Thren watched us prepare. They did not help in the way Rooknest helped, by grabbing, shoving, shouting, and insulting the shape of your hands. At first, I thought that was cold. Then I saw one adjust the ash line without crossing it, using the end of a long staff to push disturbed powder back into place while a child tied her boot. Another tapped warning near a loose shell plate before Len stepped on it. A third lowered a cord ladder from the ridge without touching anyone.
They helped without entering.
Their kindness had distance.
That made sense.
Too much closeness had ruined us recently.
When we were ready, the tallest Thren tapped its staff three times and turned toward the dark ridge. Sella moved after it. Brakka followed. Then the children. Then the rest of us. No one asked where we were going. That was how far we had fallen: a masked shell-speaker appeared out of the dark, tapped at us, and suddenly that counted as a plan.
The path they chose did not look like a path.
Of course it did not.
Good paths in the Shellward Expanse apparently felt rude to announce themselves. This one slipped between two leaning plates, dipped beneath a curtain of stiff frost moss, crossed a slanted stretch of brittle shell, then climbed around a ridge so narrow that everyone had to turn sideways and pretend the drop was a rumor. The Thren moved over it like they had been poured through the cracks. We followed like frightened furniture with knees.
Veyrun pressed close behind me. “I want to apologize to all stairs I ever insulted.”
“They can’t hear you.”
“That is why I feel safe being sincere.”
Mara coughed ahead of me. I reached toward her without thinking.
She lifted two fingers.
Wait.
I waited.
The cough passed, but slowly. When she lowered the cloth, I saw new red spots.
Dorrin’s daughter saw them too and went quiet.
Mara noticed. Of course she did. “Do not stare at blood like it is wiser than you.”
The girl blinked. “Sorry.”
“Better. Now watch your feet.”
The girl watched her feet.
So did three adults nearby.
Mara had that effect.
Behind us, faint warmth moved through the old trail we had left. Not close enough to touch the back of my neck, but close enough that my palm kept throbbing beneath its wrap. Every so often I felt the ground behind us soften in memory, like old footprints were being pressed open one by one.
Avaruun was not chasing our bodies.
He was following where our lives had touched the world.
I hated that more than teeth.
After a while, Thren markings appeared along the walls: small chips arranged in clusters, bone beads hanging from cracks, strings of hollow shell pieces that trembled when we passed. They were not decorations. I understood that before Sella translated anything. Warnings, prayers, maps, and names all at once, made for hands and ground instead of mouths.
The lead Thren stopped before a narrow opening beneath a leaning slab. The entrance was half-hidden by black cord and hanging shell chimes. No light came from inside.
The Thren tapped the slab once.
The chimes answered.
Not by swinging.
By vibrating.
A pattern moved through the cord. Somewhere inside, something tapped back. The guide waited. No one spoke. Even Veyrun managed, though his face suggested the effort was costing him years of life.
The chimes trembled again.
The guide turned to Sella and tapped.
Sella exhaled. “They will let us through the under-road.”
A few survivors sagged with relief.
Then Sella continued, “Not into their home.”
The relief stopped.
Dorrin’s daughter clutched his sleeve. Dorrin said, “Why not?”
The Thren guide’s mask turned toward him. It did not tap. It looked at the group: our blood, ash, wounds, soft-touched grief, trembling mouths, and all the names we had not yet dared to count. Then it tapped once.
Sella translated quietly. “Too many voices.”
No one argued.
Not because it felt fair.
Because it felt true.
We were full of voices. Dead voices. Borrowed voices. Avaruun’s voice. Vekk’s last order. Saint Rook’s last pulse. The names we did not say because saying them might make the losses too real to carry.
The guide tapped again.
“They will guide us to an old crossing beneath the Scar Roads,” Sella said. “From there, they say we can reach Last Molt or Ashpost.”
Brakka’s head lifted at Last Molt.
“You know it?” I asked.
She gave a short nod. “Handler post. Outcasts. Skitter shells. Bad smell. Better rules than most proper places.”
Veyrun blinked. “Better rules includes bad smell?”
“Bad smell means fewer parasites.”
“Every lesson outside is awful.”
The Thren guide stepped toward the opening, then stopped and turned back to us. It tapped slowly this time, each strike entering the ground with a weight that made even the children still.
Sella translated, but her voice changed as she did, softer, like she was repeating something sacred and did not want to damage it with a mouth.
“The shell bears what mouths deny. The path remembers what names forget. The warm root speaks kindly because it cannot walk where truth is kept cold.”
The guide touched its mask, then touched the ground, then entered the dark.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then Mara took one step after it.
Of course.
My mother had never worshiped caution when forward was required.
We followed.
The under-road was lower than a tunnel and narrower than comfort. It ran beneath the Shellward Expanse like a vein that had dried but not died. The walls were covered in tap marks, some fresh, some ancient, some carved so deeply they looked like wounds. As we entered, the shell chimes behind us shivered, and the opening closed with hanging slabs lowered by hidden cords.
Darkness took us.
Then sound arrived.
Tap. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.
From ahead. From behind. From the walls.
Thren messages passed through stone around us and beneath us. No voices. No borrowed grief. No sweet mercy. Only pressure, rhythm, and contact. For the first time since Rooknest fell, the dark did not feel empty. It felt occupied by people who had survived by refusing to be easy to steal.
Veyrun walked close enough that his shoulder brushed mine. “I still feel judged.”
“You are.”
“Good. Consistency helps.”
I almost smiled.
My wrapped hand throbbed, and I kept it against my chest. The ground below us was cold and hard. No soft warmth. No sweetness. But every step left a mark, and I could feel them now if I let myself: children dragging tired feet, Mara’s uneven weight, Veyrun’s nervous corrections, Brakka’s steady lead, Split-Tooth’s many sharp little prints, Sella’s guarded limp, Dorrin and his daughter walking close.
All of us passing through the Thren under-road like a wound trying not to reopen.
I listened.
Not deeply.
Not enough to drown.
Just enough.
Ahead, the Thren taps shifted.
Warning.
The guide stopped. Everyone halted behind it, and the under-road compressed around us with the particular misery of too many frightened bodies in a passage designed by people who apparently disliked shoulders.
From somewhere above the under-road came a faint sound.
Not tapping.
Not clicking.
A voice.
Very far. Very soft.
“Khern.”
My whole body went cold.
The Thren guide turned slowly toward me. For the first time, I saw anger in the way its shell plates lifted. Not fear. Anger.
It tapped once.
Hard.
The whole under-road answered.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
All around us, hidden Thren struck stone in the same rhythm, thousands of tiny impacts moving through the dark. The voice above faded, not gone forever, but pushed back.
The guide leaned close enough that I saw myself reflected in its blank shell mask. Then it tapped against the wall beside my head.
Sella translated from behind me. “They say the False Prophet has found your blood-sound.”
My mouth went dry.
Mara’s hand closed around my shoulder. Veyrun whispered something that was probably a prayer or a complaint. With him, the difference was cultural.
The guide tapped again.
Sella’s voice lowered. “They can hide us for a while. Not forever.”
I looked down at my wrapped hand. Blood had soaked through the cloth again where Old Jim’s tag had cut into me and where the ground kept asking for more of my attention than I knew how to give.
“My blood-sound,” I said.
Sella listened to another pattern. “Not only blood. Step. Weight. Fear. The shape you leave when you move. Thren do not use mouths for it.”
Veyrun looked at me. “Can we stop discovering new ways you are trackable?”
“I would love that.”
Mara’s fingers tightened once, then released. “Can it be covered?”
The Thren guide answered before Sella finished asking. The taps came quick, clipped, practical.
“Ash helps,” Sella said. “Cold helps. Thren roads help. Silence helps. But he tasted the trail before we reached them.”
Tasted.
Old Jim’s last whisper returned to me so sharply I had to close my eyes.
It’s tasting us.
I opened them again because closing my eyes in the Shellward Expanse felt like volunteering to become educational.
Brakka stepped closer. “Then we keep moving.”
The Thren guide tapped once, approving or impatient. With Thren, the difference seemed narrow.
The line moved again. The under-road sloped deeper. The air sharpened. Walls brushed our shoulders. Shell cords trembled when we passed, carrying messages ahead of us faster than feet could move. Somewhere in the dark, hidden Thren shifted routes, lowered screens, opened cracks, sealed others. We never saw most of them. We felt them through the ground, through the tiny changes in pressure, through the way danger kept being redirected before it reached our throats.
I began to understand why the Bonepickers had not worn Thren voices.
Maybe they could not steal what was not kept in a mouth.
After a while, the passage widened into a low chamber lit by pale lichen covered with thin shell screens. The light did not soothe. It revealed. That was better. The walls were full of hanging cords, carved plates, bone rings, and little shelves holding shell fragments marked with tap patterns. No one sat fully inside the chamber. Even here, the Thren stayed near edges, half-hidden behind screens and hanging masks.
They did not invite us to rest.
They let us stop.
That was different.
Brakka understood immediately. “Water. Small bites. Check feet. No sleeping.”
Several people groaned.
Mara sat on a low stone lip and coughed into her cloth until her shoulders shook. I crouched beside her and offered the water skin. She drank one careful mouthful, then handed it back.
“You should take more,” I said.
“So should everyone.”
“You are everyone.”
“That is a very poor argument.”
“It was the only one I had ready.”
“Prepare better.”
Veyrun slid down the wall near us. “I miss when adults pretended to make sense.”
Mara looked at him. “You never believed that.”
“No, but I miss the performance.”
A small Thren crouched near Split-Tooth, watching the calf with unsettling attention. Split-Tooth watched back, equally suspicious. The Thren tapped once. The calf clicked. The Thren tapped again. The calf clicked twice.
Brakka stared at both of them. “No.”
Veyrun perked up. “What did they agree to?”
“I do not know. That is why I said no.”
Sella listened, then rubbed one hand over her face. “The Thren says the calf walks loudly for something with so many feet.”
Split-Tooth clicked in offense.
“Accurate,” Brakka said.
The calf looked betrayed.
The tiny exchange loosened something in the chamber. Not much. Enough for a child to take a bite of moss cake. Enough for Dorrin to drink. Enough for Len to sit down before his knees decided for him. Enough for me to breathe without measuring the air for sweetness every second.
Comfort never stayed long unless it wanted something.
But not every pause was comfort.
Some pauses were only the body refusing to fall apart until the next command.
The lead Thren came to the center of the chamber and tapped its staff against the floor. Sella straightened to translate. The guide pointed to the walls, then to the route behind us, then to the route ahead. Its taps carried through the chamber with clear, hard purpose.
“They say Avaruun is not a Saint,” Sella said.
The name made several survivors flinch.
Mara looked up sharply. “What is he?”
The guide tapped again, but Sella hesitated before translating. “They call him Grafter.”
No one spoke.
The word felt too small at first. Ugly, but practical. Something a worker might do to a plant or damaged shell. Then I thought of pale threads sliding through Saint Rook’s roots, of my mother’s wrong breathing cloths, of missing corpse tags, of walls sealing over people, of relief binding itself to need.
Grafter.
The guide tapped more, and Sella’s voice grew careful. “A Grafter steals what should pass through pain, grief, hunger, fear, and need. Then he makes the stolen thing obey him.”
Mara’s face did not change, but her fingers tightened around the water skin.
Because he had taken her pain.
Because part of me still missed what he took from her.
The guide tapped again.
“A strong Grafter becomes beautiful enough to be mistaken for blessing,” Sella said.
That was enough explanation.
Maybe too much.
My head felt full. Saint. Prophet. Grafter. Warm root. Blood-sound. No ranks, no neat answers, no comforting chart that turned horror into a lesson. Just enough to make every strange thing worse.
The lead Thren stood. The others began covering lichen lights with shell screens.
Rest was over.
Of course it was.
Mara stood slowly. I tried not to help and failed halfway. She let me touch her elbow for three steps, then shook me off.
Progress.
Brakka tightened the cord around Split-Tooth. The calf had apparently found something on the floor and looked proud. Brakka pried its mouth open, removed a shell bead, and placed it back on the wall.
The lead Thren stared.
Brakka pointed at the calf. “It is young.”
The Thren tapped once.
Sella translated dryly. “They say theft begins young.”
Veyrun whispered, “Powerful cultural exchange.”
We formed the line again. This time, the Thren placed us differently: children center, injured close to the wall, Brakka near the front, Sella near me, Mara behind me, Veyrun beside me. I noticed.
“So you’re watching me now?” I asked.
Veyrun lifted his scraper. “I was assigned by the dead foreman and your frightening mother.”
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“Historically false.”
The Thren guide tapped three times. The under-road ahead opened into a narrow descent. Cold air breathed up from below, not poisoned, not sweet, only cold and clean enough. The guide stepped down first.
We followed.
As I passed the chamber wall, one of the hanging shell cords brushed my shoulder. A trace moved through me: not a memory, not mine exactly, but a Thren hand tying the cord, a warning carried from a ruined nest, a small body wrapped in shell cloth, tapping that continued after voices stopped.
I flinched.
But I did not reach.
I let it pass.
Listening comes before knowing.
The trace faded. My palm throbbed once, quietly enough that I could keep walking.
Good.
The under-road sloped deeper. Behind us, the chamber darkened as Thren covered the moss lights one by one. Ahead, the taps continued without voices, without sweetness, only rhythm passing through cold stone.
After a while, Veyrun whispered, “So. Grafter.”
“Don’t.”
“I was only going to say it sounds less terrifying than Hollow Prophet.”
“Does it?”
“No.”
“Then why say it?”
“I hoped hearing it aloud would improve it.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
We walked a few more steps before he spoke again, quieter this time. “You’re still you, right?”
I looked at him.
His eyes stayed fixed ahead, as if he did not want me to see the question fully. My first instinct was to joke. My second was to lie. My third was to touch the ground and see if it knew.
I hated the third most.
So I answered with the only thing I had. “I think so.”
Veyrun nodded. “Good enough for now.”
Mara’s voice came from behind us. “It is.”
The air sharpened. The taps ahead quickened suddenly. Every Thren stopped.
A warning came through the stone.
Tap-tap-tap. Pause. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Sella’s face changed.
“What?” I whispered.
She did not answer at first. The warning repeated, harder. The lead Thren turned toward us, shell plates lifting along its back.
From somewhere far ahead came another sound.
Not tapping.
Not voice.
A low clicking scrape, many legs moving over shell.
Split-Tooth stiffened, then lowered its head and made a terrified sound.
Brakka whispered one word.
“Molters.”
Veyrun gripped his scraper. “I know I will regret asking, but what are Molters?”
The answer came from the dark ahead: a wet crack, then another, like shells opening under pressure.
Brakka lifted her hook. “Things that wear what others shed.”
The Thren guide struck the wall hard, and the entire under-road answered with alarm. Behind us, far above and far away, warmth pressed against old stone, still searching for our muted trail. Ahead, the under-road filled with the sound of borrowed shells waking, and I realized the Shellward Expanse did not need Avaruun to be horrifying. It had been practicing long before he arrived.