#seems to be no end to the ordeal they've been thrust into + they haven't yet put their trust in each other

[gribbo]

omg omg. 32 for silk ♥️

32. dust motes

"What is the worth," asks the lich, "of a single mortal's life?"

Shadowheart sparks a fire in her hand. Vally Dell, self-styled Ranger of Reaching, reaches for her knife. The minstrel who's somehow found himself in such company slides down the wall, his legs giving out halfway, and scrabbles for the music-box he'd dropped. His hand sinks to the wrist in a fur of dust. A cog rolls past his foot and clatters against a loose floorstone.

"I ask again." The wrinkled leather of the lich's face shifts. Its voice is less dry than the rest of it: mild and unhurried, a water-wheel turned by a strange current. "What is the worth—"

"A life is worth its weight in pain," snaps Shadowheart, thrusting the torch of her hand out. Her terror burns behind the minstrel's eye. Even the white flame, leaping high, trembles as it sweeps the shadows from every corner. "Come any closer, monster, and yours will break the scale."

Vally jogs her weight warily from foot to foot. "I'll happen he's already weighed, flower."

He needs that cog, the minstrel thinks. The nature of clockwork: one missing piece, no matter how small, and you’re back to squinting at sundials. It's something Jem had told him once, crawling on her filthy workroom floor after something minuscule and bright; he had knelt too, blacking the knees of his best breeches, and found the sprung spring winking at them under a trolley.

"Depends on the life," Vally's saying to the thing that will finally kill them, "doesn't it?"

The minstrel reaches across the floor. The lilt of Shadowheart's voice—she'd sing in a lovely coloratura, he suspects—muddles with the noise of their thoughts, his and hers and Vally's, and the steady drip of groundwater from the ceiling of the crypt. He misses the cog twice. His head throbs; he'd woken sticky-faced and sick on the riverbank, those hours ago. His eye's scabbed shut. All the blood's crusted his hair into a sort of plaster—

"Thy companions have answered," says the lich, leaning down to him. The eyes that should have putrefied—grave, curious eyes, empty of malice—glint inches from his own. "Wilt thou?"

It's not going to kill them, he understands with a horrible lurch. It means them no harm at all. He'll soon have to get up again.

Shadowheart's not realized it, yet. Her voice rings out harsh and desperate. "Say something."

He has no head for riddles even when his head's on straight. Still, it's a simple one. In a cupped hand fuzzed with crypt-dust, he holds out the cog.

[send me a number, and i'll write a microfic using the word or phrase!]