"So old man, where do you stay?" "Forstfall." "What's that? Some snow world?" "…Yeah. You could say that."
He stopped without warning. Turned around. Stared at me like he'd seen something standing behind my eyes.
"What?" "Nothing."
Then, low — almost to himself. This couldn't be possible.
"What couldn't be—" "Stop asking questions. Walk faster."
The fog came gradually, then all at once.
First it blurred the treeline. Then the path. Then him.
"Stay close," he said.
I did. I thought I did.
But fog doesn't ask permission. It curled around my ankles, climbed my arms, pressed against my face like a hand. And somewhere inside it — sounds I couldn't name. Not wind. Not animals. Something that knew I was there.
"Old man."
Silence.
"Hey — old man."
I reached out. My hand found nothing. Cold air, damp and thick, closed around my fingers like a mouth.
He was gone.
The ground shifted under my next step — no longer soft, no longer snow. Something brittle. Something that gave too easily and made a sound I didn't want to think about.
Then the cave.
It shouldn't have been there. The hillside had been solid a moment ago, and now there was a mouth torn into it — jagged, like something had bitten through from the inside. A blue glow breathed from the dark within. Slow. Rhythmic.
I didn't want to go in.
My feet went in.
His voice came — not from the cave. Not from the fog.
From inside my skull.
"You are finally here."
The egg sat at the centre of the cave like it had been waiting.
The pattern on its shell stopped me cold. I knew it. I didn't know how, didn't know from where — but something in my chest recognised it the way you recognise a word in a language you were never taught.
I should have walked away. I knew, standing there, that touching it was the wrong choice.
I touched it.
The jolt came before the pain — pure electricity, locking my hand to the shell, locking the scream in my throat. I couldn't pull back. Couldn't breathe. My ears didn't ring so much as split, a sound like reality tearing at the seam. My vision strobed. My blood vessels — I felt them go, one by one, pressure building and breaking, something warm tracking down my face from places warmth shouldn't come from.
My knees hit the ground. I hadn't decided to kneel.
The last thing I saw before the black took everything — a crack splitting across the shell. Hair-thin at first. Then wider.
Glowing.
Glowing.
I woke up not knowing I'd been asleep.
One moment nothing. The next — ceiling. Stone. The specific grey of rock that hasn't seen sunlight in a long time.
My mouth was sand. My body had forgotten itself — I had to think about breathing, remind my lungs what they were for, convince my fingers one at a time that they still belonged to me.
I tried to sit up and made a sound.
That sound came back.
I froze. The echo wasn't wrong, exactly — caves echo — but this was too much. Too detailed. I could hear the exact shape of it, the way it bounced off the left wall first, then the ceiling, then died somewhere in the deeper dark behind me. I could hear it dying.
Something had changed.
I turned my head. The egg was gone. Not shattered. Not scattered across the floor in pieces I could collect and examine and use to convince myself this had been real.
Just — gone. Bare stone. Like the cave had exhaled and taken it with.
My hand looked normal. I stared at it for a long time. Same chipped nail. Same ink stain on my middle finger. No burns, no scarring, no proof.
I almost convinced myself.
Then I heard the bird.
Not the way you hear birds — ambient, half-noticed, background. I heard this specific bird. The pause between its calls. The slight scrape of its feet on bark between notes. The echo returning to it off a rockface to the — northeast, I thought, and the certainty of that was deeply unsettling — and it was far. Far enough that I should have heard nothing but a vague chirp, if that.
I held my breath and let it in.
The waterfall came next. Then the leaves — two kinds, I could hear the difference in pitch between them, large flat ones near the cave mouth and smaller denser ones further up the slope. Then underneath everything, thin as thread —
Voices.
Human voices. Too far for words but unmistakably, undeniably there.
It was too much. All of it arriving at once, equally loud, equally urgent, none of it willing to queue. I pressed my palms to my temples and focused — just the waterfall, just that, just —
Everything else stepped back.
Not gone. Turned down. Like a dial I hadn't known I had.
I sat with that for a moment.
Oh, I thought. Okay.
I reached further then, carefully, looking for one specific sound among all the others. Vrisha's voice. That gruff, weathered edge of it. I cast my hearing wide and waited.
Nothing.
I waited longer.
Still nothing.
I let out a slow breath. Sat on the cold cave floor and let the reality of it settle. Alone. Unknown world. Powers I didn't understand. No ancient irritating wizard to follow through the dark.
But — people. I could hear people.
Distant. Directionless. But real.
I stood up.
The smell hit me like a closed fist.
Every detail, delivered without mercy — damp stone, standing water deep in the rock, old ash, something dead nearby, mould, mineral sharpness coating the back of my throat, air that had been sitting still for years. All of it at once. All of it specific.
I did not stay.