Tsuki Usagiri knelt on the packed dirt above the burrow and struck the drum for the ninth time that night. The skin was old moon-hide, stretched over a hoop no living hand had touched in sixty years. She could feel herself thinning at the edges. When she looked down, the grass showed through her knees. No rabbit in the warren below had lifted an ear. The tribe had forgotten the beat that once kept them alive, and a spirit without a listener is only a rumor of itself. She had come back to wake the warren-god. He slept under the hill, coiled in root and stone, and his waking would push new blood into the thinning line of her people. But the drum's sound stopped at the burrow's mouth. The earth swallowed it. She struck harder. The beat traveled a foot, maybe two, then died in the clay. Without a channel to carry the sound down, the god would sleep through her calling, and she would fade before dawn. A small voice spoke behind her. "You're playing into dead ground." Tsuki turned. A fairy stood at the burrow's lip, no taller than her forearm, wings folded flat against a torn dark cloak. Melody Resonance. Tsuki had heard the name whispered on the moon paths. The fairy carried a boxy silver instrument by its strap, two thin antennae rising from its top. "Dirt eats drums," Melody said. "You need a throat for the sound. I have one." Melody set the instrument on the ground beside the burrow's mouth and turned a dial. The runes along its face lit pale blue. Then she pulled a sealed glass jar from inside her cloak. The jar held a soft, shifting light. "Play into this," Melody said, unstopping the lid. "The jar catches the beat. The machine carries it down. The tunnels do the rest." Tsuki hesitated. She did not know this fairy's price. But her hands were already growing clear, and the drum was heavier than it had been an hour ago. She struck the skin once, close to the open jar. The sound went in. Melody sealed the lid and slid the jar into a slot on the instrument's side. She turned the second dial. The beat came out of the antennae changed — deeper, threaded with a low hum that pushed into the earth like water into cracked stone. Tsuki felt the ground answer. A slow shudder rose through her knees. Dust sifted from the burrow's roof. Somewhere far below, something enormous shifted its weight and drew a first, dragging breath. Then the hill groaned. The burrow's mouth cracked wider, and a smell of wet root and old fur climbed out. Melody stepped back, wings tight. "He heard you," she said. "He's waking. And now he knows exactly where we're standing."

The hill shuddered again, and Tsuki heard something else answer the drum. Not below. Above. A thin note slid down the moon paths, the way a knife slides down a shelf. She knew that sound. A hunter walked the paths tonight, drawn by her beat the way a fox is drawn by a kicked pebble. Melody's silver box still hummed at her feet. The jar in its slot pulsed pale blue. Tsuki lifted her ears. Something was already moving toward them, and dawn was hours away. "There's a listener on the paths," she said. "Following the beat back up." Melody's wings twitched flat against her cloak. "Then we stop playing." "If I stop, the god sleeps again." "If you don't, whatever's coming finds us before he's fully awake." A shape parted the grass at the ridge. Tall. Long-eared. Cut from shadow with no face inside it. It moved without sound, one slow step, then another. Tsuki had seen its kind once, from a great distance, hunting a spirit that had grown too loud. It wanted the drum quiet. It would take her hands to make it so. A rustle came from the burrow's mouth. A rabbit climbed out of the dark. He stood on his hind legs, taller than a rabbit should stand, wrapped in bark and ivy. His eyes were lit from inside. "Elder," Tsuki said. He looked at her, then at the shadow on the ridge. "I felt the beat in the roots," he said. "I came up." He did not flinch at the shape climbing down toward them. "You woke him. Now something is hunting you." "Yes." "Then play louder." Tsuki understood. The god was half awake, listening. A living ear was here at last. She dropped to her knees beside the silver box and struck the drum straight into the open jar. Melody sealed it fast and shoved it back in the slot. The antennae threw the beat into the ground and into the air at once. The Burrow Elder planted his feet and did not close his eyes. He heard. He heard every strike. The pale carrots in the patch beside the burrow bent their leaves toward the sound. Tsuki felt herself thicken at the edges. Grass no longer showed through her knees. The shadow reached the flat ground and stopped. The beat pressed against it. Tsuki hit the drum harder, and the Elder spoke a single word into the noise, low and flat. "Down." The earth answered him. The ground under the shadow softened and slumped. It sank to its knees, then its chest. It clawed at the dirt without a sound. The hill swallowed it whole. The soil closed. The ridge was empty. Tsuki lowered the drum. Her hands were solid. The Elder watched her, still and quiet. "He's awake under us," he said. "He knows your face now. So does the warren." He turned back toward the burrow. "Come inside before the next one comes."