Page 101 of The Hyena’s Guardian

“You know,” Matt started, “there was a version of my life where my biggest concern was whether my landlord would ever fix my air conditioning.”

Theron turned his head toward him. “I do not know what that means.”

Matt sighed. “Honestly? I miss when that was my biggest problem.”

“And now?”

Matt gestured vaguely toward the nightmare crypt surrounding them. “Now I’m apparently participating in the collapse of ancient wolf hell.”

The severity in Theron’s face eased by a fraction and Matt caught it. If Theron could still respond to him down here, then maybe the mountain had not swallowed him entirely yet.

Vale approached again, rifle still raised. “We found the next seal.”

Theron’s expression sharpened instantly. “Where?”

Vale pointed across the chamber.

Behind the crypts stood an enormous circular stone door nearly forty feet high. Symbols pulsed faintly across its surface in slow waves of silver-blue light. Thick fractures had already begun spreading across the center.

Something on the other side was pushing back.

Matt took in the spreading cracks, the surrounding claw marks, and the dozens of open tombs lining the walls. “Nope,” he said.

Vale blinked once. “Nope?”

“I would like the official record to show that I am strongly against opening any more murder doors today.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“I miss having options.”

Theron had already started moving toward the seal. Matt followed beside him automatically.

As they crossed deeper into the chamber, the whispers grew louder again. Matt could finally make out individual voices hidden beneath the overlapping noise: crying, begging, prayers muttered in fractured whispers that dissolved into static before he could fully understand them.

Somewhere among them, something laughed softly in the dark.

Matt’s grip tightened around his knife.

The hyena stirred uneasily beneath his ribs, but fear was not what drove it this time. The feeling resembled recognition, ancient and instinctive, like some buried part of him already knew what waited below the mountain.

Theron slowed beside him. “You feel it,” he said.

Matt looked toward him. “Feel what?”

Theron’s eyes remained fixed ahead on the glowing seal. “The First King reaching through the mountain.”

Matt wished that he did not understand what Theron meant.

The whispers no longer sounded distant. They pressed against the inside of Matt’s skull with unsettling familiarity, as though the mountain had finally turned its attention toward him.

The pressure inside his skull grew until it felt like another heartbeat.

The hyena answered with a low, instinctive growl that existed entirely inside Matt’s mind.

No.

The word wasn’t Matt’s.