Read Chapter 28: The Lie Exposed

The wind had teeth up here. Étienne pressed the folded paper flat against his thigh, the pencil marks Jérémy had scrawled already smudging from the storm’s damp. The arbre de la tour. He’d heard the name once, from his grandfather, a story about monks who hung lanterns in a larch’s branches to guide travelers through the worst of the pass. He’d never known the tree still stood.

“There.” Claire pointed through the sleet. A hundred yards up the slope, a massive larch twisted against the rock, its trunk wider than a cart, its upper branches snapped and bare. At its base, cut into the cliff face behind it, a low stone archway, half-collapsed, blocked by a grate of rusted iron.

François moved past them without a word, his robe dark with meltwater. He gripped the grate’s bars and pulled. The hinges screamed but gave. Beyond, a passage sank into darkness, stone steps worn smooth by centuries of feet.

“I thought you said the monastery was a day’s ride east,” Étienne said.

François didn’t turn. “The monastery is a day’s ride east. This was never the monastery.”

The tunnel opened into a chamber that smelled of old incense and older dust. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with leather-bound volumes, their spines cracked and faded. A stone altar stood at the far end, bare. No candles lit the space. No relics. Just the weight of a place abandoned a long time ago.

Giancarlo lowered himself onto a stone bench, his breath ragged. Claire knelt beside him, pressing a hand to his forehead, then frowned. “We need to get him dry. Fire, at least.”

François busied himself with a rusted stove in the corner, coaxing a flame from dry tinder stored beneath it. When the first sparks caught, he finally spoke, his voice quieter than Étienne had ever heard it.

“I told you the Church sent me. That was the lie.”

Claire’s head snapped up. “What?”

François straightened, turning to face them. The firelight carved his face into something older, wearier. “I was defrocked twenty-three years ago. They stripped my office when I refused to stop hunting this thing. They called it obsession. They called me a heretic for claiming a creature of the old earth could still walk in God’s creation.” He let out a short breath. “They were half right.”

Étienne’s jaw tightened. “You lied to us. From the beginning.”

“I told you what I needed you to believe to get you moving. You would not have followed a disgraced priest and his wild stories. You needed the authority of the Church behind you. So I gave it.”

“And the order? The records? The rite of the alpha?” Étienne took a step forward. “All lies?”

“The order was real.” François’s eyes held his. “The records were real. The rite—the truth behind it—that is real too. What was false was the blessing I claimed to carry. I have no blessing. I have only years of watching, and following, and failing to kill it.”

Claire rose. The movement was slow, deliberate, her hand resting on the knife at her belt. “You knew Gaspard would transform, didn’t you? You knew what the spores would do.”

“I knew what they could do. I didn’t know it would take him.” François’s voice cracked on the name. “I failed him. And I failed another young man before him, in these same mountains, thirty years ago.”

Étienne went cold. The fire popped. Somewhere above them, the wind howled across the pass, but in the chamber, no one breathed.

“What did you say?”

François looked at him directly. “Your brother, Étienne. Luc. I was there the day he fell.”

The words hit like a physical blow. Étienne’s hand went to the shelf beside him, steadying himself. “You weren’t. No one was. He went up alone to check the gullies. I was supposed to go with him. I stayed behind.”

“He went up alone because he didn’t want you near it.” François stepped forward, his voice low and urgent. “He’d seen the tracks the day before. He knew what was hunting that valley. He told me he would lure it away from the village, and he did. I was watching from the ridge. I saw the beast strike him down.”

“He fell. The rope snapped. It was my knot that failed. I tied it wrong.” Étienne’s voice had gone ragged. “I’ve re-tied that knot a thousand times in my head. I loosened it. I didn’t check it.”

“Your knot held.” François’s words fell like stones. “The beast severed the rope with its claws before he hit the rocks. He died because he chose to, to draw it away from you. You were not his failure. You were his triumph. He told me as much before he died, when I reached him in the gully.”

Étienne’s legs gave out. He caught himself on the altar, leaning hard against the cold stone. His chest heaved. Thirty years of guilt, thirty years of nightmares about that knot, that rope, that moment of hesitation—and it had never been his fault. It had never been his fault.

The ground shook.

Dust sifted from the ceiling. The volumes rattled on their shelves. Claire drew her knife in a single motion, scanning the chamber’s shadows. Giancarlo forced himself upright, swaying, his eyes wild.

Then the roar came. It was not the shriek of the broodmother. This was deeper, older, a rumble that seemed to rise from the mountain’s bones, a sound that had not been heard by human ears in centuries.

The chamber’s far wall exploded inward.

Stone and mortar burst into the room. Through the gap, a shape loomed—massive, scaled, its eyes burning with a low, malevolent light. The male beast was larger than the broodmother had been, its horns twisted and black, its tail lashing behind it with a whip-crack that split the air.

François shouted. Claire grabbed Étienne’s arm, hauling him toward the tunnel mouth. Giancarlo lunged for his pack, came up empty, and grabbed a length of iron from the stove instead.

The beast stepped through the wall, its head swiveling, its gaze finding Étienne.

It knew him.

Something ancient and terrible passed between them—a recognition that went deeper than sight. This was the thing that had killed his brother. This was the weight he had carried all his life, given shape and scale and rage.

“Split!” François roared. “It can’t follow us all!”

Claire dragged Étienne through the tunnel’s mouth. Behind them, Giancarlo swung the iron, and the beast’s roar shook the mountain as he and François broke the other direction, into the darkness of the deeper tunnels.

Étienne ran. His shoulder screamed. His brother’s face burned behind his eyes.

But for the first time in thirty years, the weight on his chest was not guilt.

It was grief, clean and sharp as a blade.

And he wanted this thing dead.