Every route through the rift and the plateau has a gatekeeper with teeth. Vethsmara, the rift lion, slide through steam with eyes that catch any glint of light, and a single roar can empty a camp before dawn. Their paws are broad enough to leave no sound on wet clay, and the dew that forms on their coats tastes of stone dust, a detail hunters swear helps them taste metal on the air. Watch how the Clearers move through a cave, smoke pots in hand, broad quarrels ready, mapping tunnels the way engineers map bridges. The work feels less like a hunt and more like slow negotiation with a creature that knows the maze better than we do. When a lion falls, Thalen masons measure the skull before they measure the new foundation, a quiet ritual that admits the animal owned that ground first.

Higher on the cliffs the brumath, the cave bear, keep their own courts. A matriarch can sit in a vent warmed cave for decades, and the cliff cities have to build around that fact. Her claws can scoop through the roots of orun mael, the geothermal fern, as if they were peat, and her sense of smell cuts through steam to find grain behind stone. When hunger sends her down to the store caverns, every guild member carries a pike and a prayer, remembering the winters when one bear tore through a quarter and left it empty. Clearing a brumath den is a civic event, expensive and solemn, and no one speaks of sport. The skull mounted above a new doorway serves as both warning and license, proof that the city bargained with the mountain and survived.

Then there are the visitors from the steppe. Ivramor, the steppe mammoth, herds arrive thin and angry, funneled through narrow cuts where predators wait. Their tusks scrape the rock, leaving spiral grooves that guild surveyors use as guide marks for the next Drop. The Thalen Thurimath watch for the first skull in the mud and ready their nets for the Drop, knowing a single missed charge can turn the hunt into a disaster. The Monastiraki migrants watch from the ridges, weighing whether to trade labor for ivory or stay with their thessvara, the plateau horse, farther from the roar. A single ivramor that falls outside the planned cliffs becomes a sacred gift to migrants and a financial loss to Thalen, so the two groups negotiate every carcass with care. These choices ripple into the seasonal maps in Seasons Along the Rift and the stewardship ethic in Stewardship of the Rift, because every path here is negotiated with claw and memory.