The torch at the top of the stair had burned through the night and was burning still, its flame low and spent at this hour. Below it, the second bracket held only a dead stub, the pitch at its iron base cold and hardened, untended through the dark hours.
The sergeant saw it. He worked the stub free with two fingers and dropped it. It struck the floor pale and cold.
The two guards who had followed him down from the upper corridor stood at his back. He kept his eyes on the passage ahead. He took his own torch from the wall and held it forward, the flame turning against the cold draft rising from below.
"We go down this morning," he said. "And we count what we find for reinforcements of retrieval."
What we find. The phrase had come out of him before he examined it. He had already, somewhere in his chest, formed a thought about what they would find. The thought had no shape yet. Only weight.
They descended.
The worked stone of the upper stair gave way at the second landing to raw cave. Rough chiseling, the ceiling irregular, the draft growing colder and flatter with each turn, carrying the sealed smell of air that had been underground long enough to stop belonging to the surface above and become something the rock claimed for itself. The passages forked and forked again in the dark below, each branch dropping into its own tunnel, each tunnel opening into its own chamber, the whole of the underground gaol spreading outward and downward through the natural rock in its maze of holds and corridors and deep sections, a place built to house an enormous number of people and built for long use.
They went through all of it.
Chamber by chamber. Passage by passage. Every tunnel they had been given directions to, every hold they knew the route to by memory. The outer sections and the deep ones and the narrow separated alcoves in the old cut. They went through each one with their torches held low, and in each one the floor returned the torchlight in the same way.
Blood. On every floor, in every chamber, in the connecting corridors and in the alcoves and at the bases of the cave walls where it had pooled and dried. Stains spread and stains directional. The pools of those who had stayed long enough in one place and the long drawn lines of those who had moved. In the deepest chamber the wet floor had carried it outward from so many sources that the radii had met and merged, covering the stone mid-section in a continuous dark expanse so wide and so dense that crossing the chamber required stepping in some portion of it.
They went through it all and came back.
They stood at the entrance to the final corridor with three torches between them and the long dark of the passages behind them.
The sergeant looked at his palms. He turned one over and turned it back.
He had worked these gaols for years. Every chamber behind him was a chamber he had entered before, on mornings after a trial commenced, always with a count to make and a reason to make it. He laid both palms against his thighs and looked at the passage ahead and let his eyes move through the torchlight to the dark beyond it. The blood was thorough. The chambers were empty. He kept his face forward. He kept his arms where they were.
He had always found something. In every search, in every sealed chamber, there had always been a count to make. Something to enter into the record. But the chambers were empty and there was blood on every floor behind him, and he had no entry for this.
"Every section," the older guard said.
"Every section," the sergeant said.
"All the holds. The deep chamber. The alcoves in the old cut. Every passage between them."
"Yes."
"Blood on every floor." The water somewhere above ran its thin seep down the corridor wall, too slow to drip, only to move. The older guard kept his eyes on the floor. "And not one body. Not one."
The young guard stood with his back to the passage wall. He was looking at the floor ahead of him, at the clean stone where the corridor ended, at the base of the stair they had come down hours before. He had kept his tongue since the deep chamber.
"They were here," he said. "All of them. The blood is real. The stains in the alcoves are real. There were people here last night and the blood is real and there is not one body in any section of these gaols." He lifted his eyes from the floor. "Hundreds of them. Outworlders." His voice had gone to the flat place where the older guard's voice had been sitting since the outer hold, and reaching it was costing him more than it had cost the older guard. "Hundreds of bodies. Including the monsters. And they are all... gone."
The corridor held their words and gave nothing back.
The deep chamber's ceiling dripped behind them in its long rhythm, once, and the dark received it, and the stained floors held their shapes in the dark with no one there to see them.
Where had all the bodies gone?
The sergeant held the question deep in his chest. He turned his torch forward into a corridor he had already walked twice. The flame moved. He let it move.
-
The corridor leading to the royal family's sleeping quarters faced east, and the morning had already arrived in it. Early illumination through the high casements, pale and unhurried, laying itself across the floor in long flat angles that the hour had not yet deepened to their full color. Pomella moved through these pale panels in the sleeping clothes she wore unchanged from the previous night: a layered garment, the inner layer delicate and pale at her wrists, the outer a deep color that the wash had softened over many uses to something quieter than it had started. Her hair was loose from sleep, unattended. Her feet were in low felt slippers that made no sound on the stone.
Two guards followed two paces behind her and held the practiced restraint of men who understood that the interval before full waking was private territory and that accompanying royalty through it required, above all else, the capacity to be irrelevant.
She moved with care. Her body had woken before the faster parts of her had followed. Her eyes were open and direct but the brightness behind them was deferred, set aside for a later hour. She turned at the corridor's junction, took the broad stone staircase that climbed to the upper east wing one landing at a time, her fingers trailing the banister in the easy contact of someone who was not yet entirely herself.
She had planned, last night, to arrive at his entry angry. Something sharp and prepared, something that would make him feel the consequence of last night's display without being cruel. She had rehearsed three opening lines. She remembered none of them now. The anger had not survived the sleep.
At the top of the stair the corridor opened wide, and at its far end stood the portal.
She had always found it excessive. It was the kind of entry that announced rather than merely stood, gilded across its entire face in worked gold, sun-and-horse motifs in relief from the center outward to all four edges, the frame around it equally worked and equally gold, the whole of it catching the morning illumination from the east casements and returning it at a warmer angle. The portal declared things about the person on the other side that a person of subtler taste might have preferred remain undeclared. She had said as much to Eryth, more than once. He had been unmoved.
She set her palm to the handle.
It turned a fraction and caught, the bolt seated fully in its iron housing, the lock engaged from inside. She stood before the portal with her palm still on the handle.
Locked. All right. So he was angry enough to lock it, or careful enough. Those are different things. If he was angry, he's somewhere on the other side of that gold-plated embarrassment sleeping with his feelings on and I can manage that. If he was careful enough to lock it, then he had a reason to be careful, and I don't know what that reason was, and that is a different thing entirely.
She knocked. Three raps with the flat of her knuckle against the gold surface, the sound absorbed oddly by all the ornamentation.
The corridor returned only the distant sounds of the kitchen far below and then nothing at all.
"Eryth." She tilted her head toward the portal's seam. "I know you're still furious about Father's decisions. And I agree, he's being reckless. I'll tell him so myself. But right now we have things to—"
Nothing.
She knocked again. Four raps, harder.
"You know I will stand in this corridor. I have precisely nowhere more important to be and I will remain here for however long it—"
Nothing. The corridor returned its low sounds from the kitchen and nothing of Eryth.
He always answers. Even when he's furious, even when he's performing furious, he answers the entry because leaving someone in the corridor is below his dignity and his dignity is the one thing he won't let go of. He always answers.
She drew her fingers from the handle. She looked at the portal. Then the left corner of her mouth came up, deliberate, the right staying level, the expression her face made when an obstacle had announced itself and she had begun treating it as an interesting problem rather than an honest impediment.
"Don't test me," she told the gold-worked surface, pleasantly. "I am not fully awake and I am not in the mood."
She laid her palm flat against the seam of the portal where it met the frame. She leaned in, her lips close to the gap between wood and stone, and she drew air into her lungs deliberately, once, slow. The magic was always in the precision. She shaped each sound against the seam as though addressing the mechanism within specifically, and she spoke:
"Relmopeiun alcen."
Each syllable measured, placed with the exactness of something made for this specific mechanism. The sounds found the seam and sat in it the way a key finds its cut, and the iron beyond it recognized the address.
A click.
The bolt withdrew. She pressed the handle down and pushed.
Good.
What she saw first was the overturned chair near the far wall, one of the guard posts' chairs, lying on its side with one leg broken at the joint, the split wood pale and new at the break. Then the curtain at the casement to the left, pulled partly free of its rod, the rod hanging at an angle from its one remaining mount, the curtain gathered and twisted below it. Then, because her eyes moved across any new space in the survey habit she had built over years and could not stop, she saw the first guard.
He lay face-down near the anteroom's center. The second was close behind the entry she had just opened, the entry's arc having missed him by a hand's width. The third was against the far wall, on his side, his right arm extended toward his hip and the weapon still in its scabbard, the reach ending before it had arrived. The fourth was behind the writing table, on his back, the table shoved forward at an angle as though someone had been driven into it hard and fast.
She stood in the entryway.
One point of entry. The chair first, nearest the entry, the first point of contact. The curtain means someone went back into the wall, so the third guard, still moving after the first blow. The writing table means the fourth was trying to put something between himself and whatever was coming. Every weapon stayed in its scabbard. Which means whatever came through this entry moved through this anteroom faster than four trained men could respond to, and was already heading for the interior portal before the last of them hit the floor.
One person. Moving fast. Moving straight. Stopping for nothing.
Check for pulses. Pulses first and then think.
The two guards behind her came up and stopped.
She crossed to the nearest guard, the one face-down at the center, and crouched. She pressed two fingers to the side of his neck.
No pulse.
She moved to the second, behind the entry. The same. She kept her crouch, moving from one to the next, her fingers at each neck in turn. Third. Fourth, the one with the reaching arm, the hand that had not quite arrived at the weapon. She held her fingers at the fourth's neck a count longer than the others.
No.
She rose.
All four. Whatever came through here killed all four of them and did it fast enough that the fourth man still had his weapon in its scabbard. Stop. Look at this the way I look at everything else. What do I know. One: all four are dead. Two: one point of entry, moving through rather than engaging. Three: going straight for the interior portal. Four: the interior portal is open.
She looked at the anteroom from her full height and turned in place, taking each detail in sequence. The overturned chair. The pulled curtain. The writing table displaced from its position. The four bodies, where each one lay, the direction each one reached.
"One person," she said, to the anteroom. "Moved through all four of them. Went straight through."
The interior entry, at the anteroom's far end, stood open at a slight angle.
"Eryth?" She raised her voice.
The bedchamber gave back nothing.
She crossed the anteroom in six strides, stepping around the nearest body, and went through the interior entry.
The bed in the disorder of someone who had come off it fast. The sheet dragged from the near side and dropped. The blanket pulled to the floor. The mattress displaced on its frame by the force of the departure. The casement opposite stood open, both panes pulled inward, the morning garden visible through the opening. She looked at the casement. She looked at the bed. She looked at the casement again.
He was in the bed. Something happened in the anteroom. He went through the casement.
He went through the casement.
"Eryth!" Louder.
The bedchamber gave back nothing.
She went to the washroom entry, standing ajar in the far corner. She pushed it fully open and looked in. The basin held undisturbed water from the previous evening. The towel on its rack was still folded. The space carried the quality of a place that had not been entered in hours.
She came back to the bedchamber casement and stood before it.
Below, the castle gardens held their ordinary morning. Two young women in working aprons moved along the near path beside the rose beds, one with a trug on her arm, one bending to her shears. Further along, toward the kitchen garden, a footman carried a crate. The gardens were entirely below her and gave nothing back.
She laid both palms on the casement frame.
The sheet is on the floor. The casement is open. Four guards are dead in the anteroom. Eryth is gone.
I don't know if he's alive.
She drew air through her nose and kept her palms on the frame and watched the gardener bending to her shears below. There was a specific quality to this kind of not-knowing, the kind where the person missing was someone whose face she could still find whenever she needed to find it. The exact angle of his jaw. The way his eyes went sharp and bright and frightened in the same moment. The way his voice had cracked at the end of last night's argument with a brittleness she had not permitted herself to respond to at the time, telling herself it was performance, telling herself he was Eryth and Eryth performed everything.
I should have followed him out that entry last night. I should have said something. Not a strategy. Something that was only me and him in a corridor, the way we used to be before Father started using his name like a tool and Eryth started using his anger like armor.
The argument from the night before returned now as it had been returning at intervals through what remained of the night. The long council table. Her father's face across it carrying the expression it wore when a decision was final and the finality was not open to examination. The council members arranged along the chamber's edges. The specific sound of chairs on stone when a space full of people disagree and none of them can say so directly. Eryth across the table, very still, holding something in. The exchange becoming an argument and the argument filling the chamber all the way to the ceiling.
And then Eryth's voice, stern, final: "I would rather you banished me like how your thrash councils do." And the sound of his chair on stone as he rose, and his boots going to the entry, and the entry.
She had let him go. She had thought: let the night be the night.
She had been wrong.
She took her palms from the casement frame and turned.
The two guards who had followed her stood in the bedchamber entry. The older of the two was looking at the ruined bed. The younger was looking at her.
"Inform the captain of the household guard. Every post, every watch. Eryth is to be found. Start here, extend to the city if they need to. Now."
He moved.
She looked at the younger guard. "My father. Tell him everything. And tell him to gather the councils." She held his eye. "Immediately."
He moved too.
She stood in the bedchamber alone with the open casement and the garden below and the ruined bed behind her. The gardener in the apron had moved along the path and was no longer visible from this angle. The morning continued below without acknowledging what had happened above it.
"One of them," she said, to the bedchamber, to the casement, to the open air above a garden where the maids worked on. "One of them tried to kill him."
Or he ran before they arrived. Or he knew someone was coming and left on his own and the guards encountered something unrelated and I am standing here with the wrong version of events in my head and the right one is somewhere in this anteroom and I cannot find it yet. All these possibilities and I don't know which one is true and I cannot do anything useful until I do.
She looked at the open casement and the illumination coming through it and the ordinary morning below.
I will find you, she thought, at the casement, at the space where her brother should have been. And when I do you are going to explain all of this to me in complete sentences.
-
What came first was white.
Illumination from all sides at once, the kind that lays itself over everything before the dream is ready to show what it came to show, a covering put down while the rest of it is being arranged. Directionless. Sourceless. Complete in the way of things that arrive before intention.
Then the white space.
The space arrived the way spaces arrive in this depth of sleep: complete enough to be a space, the walls present but declining to commit to their exact distance from each other, the ceiling there without pressing its height on anyone. The electric fixture answered no sun, a fitted bulb to the right doing its job without being examined. The floor was there. The walls were there. The rest of it was the softness of a thing the sleeping mind has built past recognition and declined to render further.
He was at a table.
On the table: a notebook, open to a clean page. Beside the notebook, a pen. These things were clear, more present than the space around them, the dream having committed to the table and its objects with more care than it had committed to anything else. Crumpled papers. A few copper coins. Orange bottles with their childproofed caps. At the table's near end, in a clay pot, a plant. Compact. Green. Tended.
He was talking to it.
"I know," he said. His voice was his, but lighter, the quality of a voice released from whatever it carries when other people are within earshot. He picked up a vessel from the table and tipped water carefully toward the plant's soil, watching it find its way in. "I know I've been talking all morning. You've been very patient about it." He set the vessel down and regarded the plant with genuine seriousness. "But I've always talked too much. It's annoying. You can tell me to stop."
The plant gave him only its continued green.
"You're right," he said, to its continued quiet. "Maybe I am going crazy." He leaned forward, both elbows on the table. "Actually, no. Everyone is always going crazy. The whole world has always been going crazy. Has always been crazy. You're the only one in this place who isn't, you know that? Just standing there. Very calmly." He looked at the plant for a count with great seriousness. "I admire that. I really do."
I wonder if the reason I've always talked to plants is because they can't interrupt. Or maybe it's that they don't need anything from the conversation. They just receive it. That seems rare. That seems like an extraordinarily rare quality in anything.
He picked up the pen.
He looked at the open page. The page was blank and he turned the pen in his fingers, once, twice, the pen rotating end over end in the manner of a pen held by someone thinking about what to write rather than writing. His eyes moved from the page to some middle distance above the table that was the wall and the bulb and neither of them specifically.
"I want to leave something," he said, to the table, to the open page. "Something that stays. My name on it is optional. Nothing that anyone would need to point to and say, that, that is his. Just something." He stopped. His brow drew together briefly. Then it released, and he laughed, a short genuine sound, the sound of a person who has caught themselves in something they find honestly funny, and he set the pen down on the open page and leaned back. "I've always wanted to be remembered." The chair received him, the tilting kind, and he tilted back and looked at the ceiling, and then he turned his head to the casement.
Isn't that the most embarrassing thing. I sit here watering a plant and talking to it about leaving something behind. Something that stays. As though the plant is going to write it down. As though wanting to matter is something you can arrange. As though the wanting is different from the doing.
The casement was dark, the electric fixture behind him turning the pane into a mirror of the space, the bulb and the table and the plant all reversed and pale, none of it the outside. He looked at it. The casement gave him the space looking at itself.
"But there's beautiful freedom," he said, to the dark casement, to the space's pale reversal in it. "In being forgotten." He said it the way a person says something interesting, not the way a person says something sad. "Everything ends. It all ends. So isn't there something—" He let the thought arrive where it arrived and stay there. The something remained unnamed. He was content with that.
Isn't there something clean about it. About the idea that a thing can end and the world continues and the world doesn't have to acknowledge what it was carrying. That the river just keeps moving and doesn't name all the stones it passes over. Maybe the stones that mattered are the ones you didn't notice. Maybe that's the whole of it, right there.
He turned his head.
On the wall beside him, a mirror. He was in it. Brown garments, a little loose on him, the collar sitting slightly off-center. His face in the mirror was his face and also slightly imprecise, in the way of reflected faces at this depth of sleep, the specific details softened, the face he knew made into something a little less exact than he knew.
He reached to the table. His fingers closed on a flat rectangle, the phone, its face dark, the surface unreflective of anything except, at close distance, a face. He held it without waking it, resting in his open palm, and he looked at the dark surface. The surface gave him his face in a reduced and less exact version than the mirror had, the features blurred, the impression of a face more than the face itself.
He looked at the impression of himself.
Isn't it interesting. The probability of either one. Being remembered or being forgotten. Completely out of your hands. You just go. And the world decides what to do with the going.
The white came back.
It came from all sides, the way it had first arrived, covering the table and the pen and the open page and the plant and the fitted bulb and the dark casement's reversal and the mirror and the face in the phone's dark surface, one by one and then all at once, until only white remained, directionless and sourceless, laying itself across everything for the last time.
"A dream." His voice carried low in the close confines. "What was that?"
The images came before the full recognition of the space, arriving in a rush already thinning at its edges: a forest, dead Outworlders around him, a sacrifice made with words rather than screams, something called by a name he could almost hold but the holding was already going. The details ran thin the way heat leaves a surface once the source withdraws, and what remained were impressions rather than the precise grain of facts, the texture of what it had felt like to stand inside that dark.
He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. The ceiling held.
The illumination entering from his left had the quality of light that arrives after traveling through many things, leaves and distance and the patience of air moving through forest at an early hour, and what reached him was slow and uneven and alive in the way that illumination through moving things is alive. The space breathed with it. His eyes were open and the ceiling was there and for some time this was enough.
He took his body in pieces.
Left ribs first: a pulling tightness that deepened on the full inhale and returned on the exhale, patient, located. Left arm from the elbow down: the weight of a limb that has been held in one position too long, the weight originating from inside rather than pressing from without. His mouth was dry. The back of his throat held something bitter and green-dark, medicinal in a specific way, the taste of things prepared from plant matter and placed there with intention, the bitterness clinging to the roof of his mouth with the persistence of something deposited deliberately and in no hurry to leave.
He turned his head.
The space was truly confined, made entirely of wood, walls and floor and ceiling all the same pale close-grained boards running horizontally, the seams between them a slightly darker color. One opening where a casement would be, no pane, a wooden shutter propped open on its peg, the leaf-filtered illumination entering through the full width of it. A table near the foot of the bed, low, plain, no finish on it, the wood raw and smooth from use rather than treatment. At the table's side, a stool. On the floor beside the stool, a wide flat clay vessel with dried gray-green paste at its rim. A narrow tall vessel beside it with a wooden stopper.
His clothes were on the table.
He knew them by the colors before he read the details. The rose-cream and the faded hues of pale cyan and red and the gold of that one patch near the left side that caught the available illumination differently from the surrounding patches, always, regardless of the quality of the light. The patchwork. His.
But they were dark. Folded, and dark.
That's a lot of blood.
The folding was careful, each piece set on the last, the edges aligned, creases driven in at the fold lines by deliberate hands. The precision of the folding made the darkness of the fabric worse rather than better, someone's attention applied to something beyond attention's help. The lighter patches had taken the staining hardest. Rose-cream had become deep rust. The gold had gone brown. The blood had dried to different depths on different fabrics, the stiffer pieces having absorbed more, the lighter pieces carrying it on their surface as a crust.
He looked at the stack for a long time and left it where it was.
Someone dressed me. Someone folded those clothes and dressed me in different ones and put me in a bed. Which means I was found. Which means someone found me and decided the finding was worth the effort, which means I owe someone something. Or they decided what they wanted before the finding happened, which is a different kind of owing.
I'm going to hope it was the first one.
He looked at himself instead. Dark brown and green, what he wore now. Rough-woven, a little loose at the shoulder. He turned his right hand palm-up and looked at it, the lines of the palm, the way the skin folded at the base of each finger, the scar at the base of his thumb that had always been there without a story attached to it. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the pad of his index finger and held the pressure. Skin against skin, warm, solid, present. He released it.
He laid his palm flat against the mattress beneath him and held it against the firmness of the surface and the slight give of the straw inside it, and he drew air through his nose, and the ache in his left side marked the inhale and marked the exhale.
He stood.
He stood on his legs and they held him and he let them hold him for a count of three, the faint unsteadiness at the edges of his vision thinning and settling. He crossed to the table.
He stood beside the folded stack and looked at it from close, the rust-dark patches, the way the blood had taken differently to each fabric, the precision of the creases driven into something beyond precision's help. He looked at the corner of the topmost fold that had not quite held, turning slightly away from its crease line, leaving a slight irregular lift. He looked at all of it the way a thing in a space is looked at, the thing in its place, complete in itself, requiring nothing from him right now.
These are my clothes. I want to put them on. But I also understand that they are covered in blood. I'll leave them.
He turned from the table.
He crossed to the entry and opened it, and the illumination came through immediately, and his arm came up before any decision was made about it, the reflex, and he stood in the entryway with his arm raised until his eyes finished their adjustment and the white resolved into something specific.
A platform. Broad, round, built of close-fitted timber planks encircling a trunk. He reached toward the trunk and the trunk was far enough from the platform's rail that his arm extended fully and his fingers fell short of the bark. He tilted his head back.
The tree went up. It went up without arriving anywhere for longer than looking up should require, the trunk running at its full girth straight above him, and the canopy it eventually reached was dense and closed, leaf against leaf, branch pressing against branch, the whole of it forming a ceiling at a height that made the word ceiling feel approximate. The sky behind it was a matter of conviction rather than sight.
He lowered his head and gripped the rail.
Below: air. The distance of it open and present. The ground was down there, findable if he looked specifically for it, the brown earth and the spread of root-mass and the bases of the great trunks going down into it, but the distance between the platform's floor and that earth was the kind of distance best understood by how long a stone would take to arrive. He looked at the ground and let himself understand the distance.
That's a long way down.
That is a very long way down.
Then he looked out.
The trunks stood in every direction. The nearest were close enough that he could read the ridges of their bark from the platform rail, the bark running in long corrugated lines, dark and thick, the surfaces of the ridges worn pale between them where the deeper wood showed through. The further trunks resolved into columns and then into vertical presences at the limit of what the forest allowed him to see. Between them, and between the unreachable ground and the unreachable canopy, the rest of it hung.
Walkways of wood and rope ran from trunk to trunk in every direction. Some narrow, barely a person's width, the planks worn pale at their centers where feet had been going. Others broad enough for two. Rope bridges strung between trunks fifty feet apart and more, their midpoint sagging gently and rising to the far platform, the rope at the rails smooth-worn at each handhold, the timber planks of the walkway dark with age and use. At each trunk, a circular platform, some at his height, some above, some far below, each one built around its tree, each one carrying a compact wooden structure pressed against the trunk, a dwelling, its walls the same pale aging wood, its sloped roof worn gray, fitted close against the bark as though grown there rather than built.
More platforms above those. More bridges above those. The whole of it occupied the full height of the living trunks, level above level above level, each connected to the one above and the one below by short walkways and angled ramps and rope ladders whose rungs had been worn smooth by the same repeated use that had worn everything else smooth here.
A tall figure moved on a walkway far below, its shape visible at that distance, carrying something long over one shoulder, crossing the bridge planks at a pace that had no concern for the distance below. The planks took the weight without sound. On the platform two levels above, another figure stood at the rail with its back to him, looking out into the trunks.
He watched the lower figure pass behind a trunk and disappear.
I'm in the trees. I'm in a tree-city and these dwellings are lived-in. Look at the wear on those planks, the smoothness of that rope, the color of that wood. These have been up here a long time and people have been living in them for that long. Which means I'm somewhere that exists and I've simply never encountered it, or I was unconscious for longer than I think.
Either way, someone who lives here chose to bring me in?
I should probably figure out how to find that person. I should probably figure out a great many things.
The morning illumination came down through the canopy in long broken shafts, each shaft arriving at its own angle and carrying its own freight of fine particulate, the slow morning air becoming visible by what it caught. The air was cool and damp and carried the green smell of the forest and beneath it the older smell of wood that has been up in the air a long time and has begun to become part of the air.
My ribs hurt. I don't know where I am. My clothes are covered in blood. There are people nearby who I haven't spoken to yet and I don't know if they're going to be kind or not.
Those shafts coming through all those leaves are something though. That's actually quite beautiful.
He kept his grip on the rail.
He had nowhere to be right now. He had no clear awareness of how he had come to be here. The patchwork clothes on the table behind him were dark with something he was not yet ready to examine, and his ribs ached, and the morning was cool and very large, and all of this was true at once.
The forest held its height around him, patient and enormous, the trees doing what they had been doing for longer than any name he carried, which was simply to stand and grow and be very tall.
The figure above him continued looking out into the trunks. Somewhere far below, another footstep crossed a bridge in the ordinary rhythm of a morning already well underway.
What happened, he thought, at the rail, at the cool air, at the shapes of a place he had not yet learned the name of.
He let the question settle where it was. It could wait. There was, at this moment, nothing else the question could do.