Ard had woken up in worse places than nowhere.
He just couldn't remember when.
There was nothing — not darkness exactly, more like the total absence of anything that darkness could be cast against. No floor. No ceiling. No sense of which way he was facing or whether facing was even a concept that applied here. He tried moving his hand and felt something — a faint resistance, like pushing through still water — but couldn't see it. Couldn't see anything.
He tried the obvious thing first.
He blinked.
Nothing changed.
He blinked again, harder, with the focused intent of someone who had decided blinking was going to fix this.
Still nothing.
"Right," he said aloud.
His voice didn't go anywhere. It didn't echo — it just stopped, absorbed instantly, as if the void had decided sound wasn't worth keeping. He stood there for a moment, or floated, or existed in whatever way one existed here, and took stock of his situation with the grim practicality of someone who had learned very early that panicking was a luxury he couldn't afford.
Unknown location. No exits visible. No ground confirmed. Possibly dead.
Probably not dead. He'd been looking forward to being taller.
He tried shouting. Not because he thought it would help — more out of principle.
"Hello?"
Gone. Swallowed whole.
He tried again, louder.
Gone.
He was considering his next move — which was admittedly not a long list — when the voice arrived.
"Hello, child."
It came from everywhere and nowhere, soft and unhurried, carrying the particular ease of someone who had never once been surprised by anything. It was a young voice. Younger than he expected from something that spoke like it knew how the story ended.
Ard's jaw tightened.
"Who's there?"
A giggle. Light and genuine, with just enough mischief in it to be deeply irritating.
"That," the voice said, "is a terrible question."
"I'm going to need you to elaborate."
"Who are you?" she offered instead, with the tone of someone helpfully correcting a child's arithmetic. "That is a better one."
He stared at the nothing. "I know who I am."
"Do you?"
"My name is Ard. I'm seventeen. I live in Brindleford. I clean irrigation ditches and get hit by people larger than me and I was apparently asleep before all of" — he gestured at the void, for nobody — "this. That's who I am."
Silence.
Then: "Sweet child of the First and the Fallen."
He waited to see if more was coming. It wasn't.
"That means nothing to me," he said.
Another giggle. A faint light appeared somewhere in the distance — small, almost negligible, a single point against the dark. He fixed his eyes on it immediately. Something to look at. Something real.
"Would a boy know the height of a peak," the voice said, "without taking a single step?"
"That's not an answer."
"No," she agreed, with the serenity of someone who didn't consider that a problem. "It isn't."
Ard exhaled slowly. He was starting to suspect this was going to be one of those conversations. The kind where the other person said a great many things and communicated very little, and felt good about it.
"Where am I?" he tried.
"With yourself."
"And you're — ?"
"With you."
"That's the same answer."
"Yes."
He pressed his fingers to his face — or where his face should be — and rubbed slowly. The resistance was there again, that subtle pressure, the void acknowledging his hands existed even if it refused to show them to him. Something to focus on. Something that wasn't nothing.
"Are you a god?" he asked.
The giggle returned, quieter this time.
"No?"
"That sounded like a question."
"You are full of questions," she said. The light pulsed faintly — just once, there and gone. "It is a strength of yours. Even now."
"I'd rather have shoes I could feel."
A pause. Then something that might have been a laugh.
"You need to wake up," she said, and her tone shifted slightly — still warm, but threading now with something else. Urgency, or what passed for it. "I hope you see those heights. But you are running out of time, child."
"I'm seventeen," Ard said. "Stop calling me—"
"Open your eyes."
He frowned. "They are open."
"Are they?"
He stopped.
The void stretched around him, vast and total and entirely indifferent. He had been seeing it for however long he had been here — seeing the nothing, navigating by it, treating the absence of light as something his eyes were registering.
He had assumed they were open.
He had not checked.
He thought about that for a long moment, there in the dark. The light in the distance pulsed one more time, gentle and quiet, and then it was gone — and with it the voice, and the giggle, and the presence that had made the nothing feel briefly like somewhere.
Ard stood alone in the void.
Then he opened his eyes.
The barn smelled the way it always smelled: hay going soft with rot, horse sweat, and something underneath both of those things that had no specific name but which Ard associated entirely with waking up. His face announced itself immediately — a dull throb across his cheek and jaw that sharpened the moment his thoughts caught up with it, the bruising from yesterday settling into something more permanent and more earnest overnight.
He raised a hand in front of his face and looked at it. All fingers present. The dream — if it was a dream — receded slowly, the way they did. The voice was already going quiet at the edges.
He dropped the hand. Ribs next — he pressed carefully, assessing.
Three, maybe four that were angry about it. Nothing new.
The stall around him was exactly what it was: a space meant for a horse that had been assigned to him instead, which said a particular thing about how Brindleford valued its livestock versus its farmhands. He had hay, a blanket that had given up being warm some time ago, and a wooden bowl he filled each night from the pump in the yard. It wasn't much. It was, however, a roof, which put it ahead of a memorable fortnight under a tree two winters ago — and the sparrow that had apparently decided sharing was acceptable.
He got up. This took longer than it should have.
By the time he was standing, the barn door was already rattling.
It didn't open so much as arrive — slamming inward with the full commitment of someone who had never once considered knocking, the frayed rope hinge taking the impact with a dry tearing sound before Chubs grabbed it mid-fall and wrestled it roughly back into place, retying it in a knot that wouldn't survive the week.
"Ard—"
"Don't," Ard said.
"—you look like someone dropped a cart on your face."
"I know."
"Both wheels."
"Thank you, Chubs."
Chubs stood in the doorway, broad and sun-lit and infuriatingly awake for this hour, his blonde hair doing something unstructured and his auburn eyes already moving — taking in the state of the stall, the state of Ard, running the arithmetic with the particular efficiency of someone who had been doing this calculation for years and had learned to keep his reaction mostly internal.
Mostly.
"Jack?" he asked.
"More or less."
Chubs nodded, accepting this the way one accepted weather. "You're late."
"I'm aware."
"Ferrin said—"
"I know what Ferrin said."
"He means it this time."
"He always means it." Ard found his boots. One was under the hay. The other had made a bid for freedom and gotten as far as the stall divider. "He just also wants the irrigation lines cleared, so."
Chubs tossed him the second boot. "You're walking like you're old."
"I feel old."
"You're seventeen."
"Exactly."
They went out into the morning. The farm spread wide before them — fields, furrows, the same paths worn by the same boots in the same order for as long as either of them could remember. The sun was already pressing down with the particular enthusiasm of a summer not quite turning, the air thick with dew and the smell of turned earth. Workers moved in the distance, bent to their tasks. The mountain watched from the edge of the valley, the way it always did.
Chubs fell into step beside him.
"So," he said.
"No."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to say something."
Chubs considered this. "I was going to ask if you were alright."
"I'm fine."
"You're clearly not fine."
"I'm functionally fine. That's different." Ard squinted against the light. "Pass me the water."
Chubs handed over the flask without comment. They walked for a while in the easy silence of people who had run out of new things to be uncomfortable about years ago.
"You ever think about leaving?" Chubs asked eventually.
Ard drank. "All the time."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Me too." Chubs kicked a stone off the path. "Not just Marth. Further. Somewhere with towers. Markets. People who don't know my name."
"You'd get lost."
"I would not."
"Within a week."
Chubs paused. "Maybe a little lost," he admitted.
The irrigation line came into view — long shallow channels cut through the earth, some flowing, some choked with mud and growth. They dropped into it without ceremony. Ard winced as he crouched. Chubs pretended not to notice.
"I had a strange dream," Ard said, without particularly meaning to.
"Strange how?"
"Strange like—" He paused. Scooped out a clump of mud and tossed it aside. "A voice. In the dark. Telling me nothing in a very confident way."
Chubs looked at him sideways. "That does sound like a dream."
"She called me a child."
"How old was she?"
"Didn't sound older than us."
Chubs made a face. "Rude."
"I'm turning eighteen in a month," Ard said, more to himself than anyone. He worked the line in silence for a moment. "It changes things."
Chubs slowed beside him. "The ceremony."
"The ceremony."
The word sat there between them with a weight neither of them addressed directly. Eighteen meant choice. Choice meant the path forward became something other than what it currently was — which was nothing, or close enough to it. The temple. Sylvan. The long, patient work of binding yourself to something larger and being made useful by it.
Ard stared at the water slowly clearing in the channel.
Better. It was better. He had told himself that enough times to have worn a groove in the thought.
"You think it changes anything?" Chubs asked. "Actually changes it, I mean."
Ard didn't answer immediately.
Down the field, one of the older farmers had stopped at his morning rite — hands raised, head lowered, the soft green light gathering around him in quiet drifts, filtering down into the water buckets at his feet. A purification blessing. Small and steady and entirely dependent on something above it saying yes.
He watched it for a moment.
"It has to," he said.
Chubs followed his gaze. Didn't say anything for a while.
"My dad said turning eighteen is when life really starts," he offered, eventually. "Like everything before is just — waiting."
"Smart man."
"He was." Chubs cleared a section of the line with a long pull. "I used to believe it. Thought I'd wake up different."
The sun climbed. The work continued. The mountain watched.
"Is it enough?" Chubs asked.
Ard didn't answer that one either. Not because he didn't have an answer — he had thought about it enough, in the hours between sleep and the farm bell, lying in the hay with the bruises settling in and the same walls on every side.
He just didn't want to say it out loud yet.
There was more out there. He believed that the way people believed in things they had no proof of and needed to be true regardless. The branch worlds. The gates. The kind of life that existed past the edge of what he could currently see from any point in Brindleford's flat, quiet valley.
He would get there.
He had to.
"Come on," he said instead. "We've got three more sections before midday."
Chubs groaned and shoved his hands back into the mud.
Above them, the mountain said nothing. It never did.