The stern seam of the winged-fortress husk stood open like a pair of tall barn doors split down the tail-plate.
Ysabet walked up the fern bank behind Pip, with Ashaun and Chaska following a few paces back, while Kiv kept the wolves and Lilt down by the flat stones where the giant shell’s shadow would not spook them. None of them grabbed at Pip’s antlers or shouted for it to stop. After last night’s promise by the grease lamp, trying to fence Pip out of an empty shell with warnings would have been both useless and dishonest.
Pip paused at the threshold, took the mouse’s half-covered box gently from Ysabet’s left hand to set on a dry flat rock outside—since the mouse always hated being jostled when Pip stretched—and stepped inside the hollow fortress.
The interior of the husk was dim and smelled of old ozone and dry horn, like a bell tower after a dry thunderstorm. Because the shed skin here retained a residual mineral charge from the Possibility vents, the empty casing was not dead bark; it answered the presence of a living seed.
As Pip walked forward into the center of the great chest cavity, setting its six feet near the deep pillar-sockets of the husk’s legs, the translucent amber walls began to hum.
