The mine didn't used to look like this.
He knew that even inside the dream. He knew the tunnels hadn't been this narrow, nor the darkness this heavy. But dreams don't ask your permission when they decide to lie to you.
The sounds came first.
Screaming. Not only the screaming of pain, but that particular kind that tears out of a person the moment they realize something will never be right again.
Overlapping voices colliding in the narrow tunnels, multiplying until it was impossible to tell who was screaming at whom.
Then the large sound.
Not a sound in the true sense. It was closer to a feeling — as though the entire world drew a deep breath and then decided to stop. The ground beneath him shook. The stone walls around him began to crack. And before he could move his feet—
The weight.
A massive wooden beam collapsed onto his back and pinned him to the ground. The pain wasn't immediate. It arrived a second later, as though his body needed time to understand what had happened before deciding to scream with everything it had.
But the scream didn't come out. The weight on his chest pressed against his lungs until there wasn't enough air left for anything more than a faint whimper.
The sounds around him faded gradually. Some stopped with a speed that was frightening. Others moved away — running feet, voices calling names he didn't know — and then silence.
And then the loneliness.
He remained there, in the true darkness beneath the earth, breathing as much as the weight above him would allow. Dust filled his nose and mouth, and his eyes could still see. That was what he remembered more than anything else. That he could see, and there was nothing to see but stone and blackness.
Hours.
He didn't know how many exactly. But he knew that hunger came, and thirst came after it, and cold came after them both.
Then.
Light.
Faint at first, seeping through a crack in the rubble above him. With it came the sound of movement. Then the sound of stones being shifted. Then something widened that crack further, and in the heart of that light appeared something whose shape he couldn't remember.
A face.
Blurred, as though memory itself had decided to erase the details and leave only the feeling. He didn't know if it was a man or a woman. He didn't know the color of their eyes or the shape of their features. He only knew that someone had looked at him through that gap — and looked at him in a way no one ever had before.
Not pity. Not indifference. Something else entirely.
The face drew closer, slowly, and in that moment — Silas is awake.
Sweat covered his forehead, his neck, his palms. He breathed fast, once and again and again, and the bed beneath him was the only thing telling him he was no longer under the rubble.
But the pain didn't believe that.
The ember behind his sternum — the one he thought had dimmed after yesterday's training — was sharper now. Not an ember anymore. It was closer to something pressing from the inside outward, as though something was swelling in a place that had no room for swelling.
He gripped his chest with both hands and tried to breathe slowly.
The mana inside him was turbulent. He could feel it moving in irregular patterns, surging in multiple directions instead of that quiet flow he had begun to grow used to. As though the dream had woken something that was not meant to wake.
He waited.
A breath. Then another. Then another.
Slowly, the ember began to dim. The mana returned to something closer to stillness. It didn't disappear entirely, but it was no longer screaming.
He let go of his chest and leaned his back against the wall behind the bed.
In the darkness, nothing.
The bed beneath him. The wall behind him. The cane beside him, its tip touching his leg. That was all he knew about this room.
No.
Not all he knew.
He thought.
He had entered this room two days ago. The girl with the red veins had led him to the door and indicated he should go in. The bed had been on the right, directly upon entering.
The door... had been far enough that it took six steps or seven to reach. And the wall he now leaned against was to the right of the bed when he first sat on it.
So the door was on the opposite side.
He drew the room slowly in his mind.
A rectangle. The bed in the right corner near the back wall. The door in the opposite wall, in the middle or somewhere close.
He stood.
He left his cane on the bed.
One step. Then another. His hands in front of him, but slower than usual, as though he were testing the air itself. Three steps. Four. He hit nothing. Five.
His fingers touched wood.
The door.
He stood there for a moment, his open hand flat against the cold wood. He wasn't waiting for anything in particular. He was only... making sure.
Then he wanted to see.
He wanted it suddenly and with a strange intensity, with no preamble — to see this wooden door his hands had found. To see its shape, its color, the true distance between it and the bed.
He brought his hand to his face and began to remove the bandages.
They were slightly stiff from sleep.
He unwound them slowly, layer by layer, until they fell into his hand. The air wasn't cold, but when it touched the hollow of his uncovered eyes, Silas felt a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature.
He opened his eyes.
Darkness.
The same darkness. No difference. The wooden door his hands had found didn't appear. The walls didn't appear. The bed behind him didn't appear.
Only the same darkness that had been there before the bandages and after them and at every other moment in between.
He closed his eyes and opened them again.
Nothing.
He didn't cry.
He didn't know why he had expected something different. He didn't know what had made him think removing the bandages would change anything.
But the body sometimes hopes without asking permission from the mind.
He put the bandages back.
He returned to the bed.
He picked up the cane. He sat.
Then he saw it.
In the darkness, far behind the door, a red dot moved slowly toward the room. Dense crimson threads approached in steady steps.
But they stopped.
Not at the door. Just before it. They stood there, motionless, as though listening to something Silas couldn't hear.
Silas gripped the cane with both hands and didn't move.
A second passed. Then another. The red threads neither advanced nor retreated. Just standing there, in that strange space between coming and stopping.
And Silas's heartbeat began to quicken.
Not exactly fear. It was something closer to the feeling of someone staring at you from behind a wall you cannot see.
The silence stretched.
Then, at the moment his heartbeat reached its peak, the door opened.
The red threads entered the room and stopped. And Silas felt a gaze moving through the space, searching, pausing on something then moving to another.
Then it returned to him.
"Follow me."
The voice was different.
Not irritated like yesterday. Not cold. It was something Silas couldn't name quickly enough, so he decided there was no time for that now — and he rose from the bed and took his staff and followed the red threads.
The new room was alive.
That was the only word that came to him when he entered it. Not alive in the sense that it held people or movement.
Alive in the sense that everything in it was visible.
The walls. The floor. The ceiling.
In the darkness he lived in, walls only existed when his hands touched them. The ground only existed when his feet felt it. But here, the mana saturating the room seeped into every surface and every corner, illuminating the edges of things with faint threads that were enough to tell Silas — this is a wall, this is a ceiling, this is a floor.
He paused at the threshold for a moment.
He saw the room.
Not as someone with working eyes would see it. But he saw it in his way. A large rectangle, its walls pulsing with stored mana, and at its center five clusters of colored threads sitting on the floor.
Teal. Orange. Deep blue. Emerald green. And at the far end, those barely visible pink threads that could scarcely be seen at all.
"Sit here."
Eirka guided him to a spot between Liam and Lola. Silas found his way and set his cane aside and sat.
The ground beneath him was faintly warm.
Eirka was silent for a moment before she spoke.
"No one moves from their place until I decide otherwise."
No one answered.
"Your task is one thing only. Feel the mana around you."
She paused again, and when she returned her voice held something different. Not warmer, but less sharp.
"You are nothing but seeds right now."
In the darkness, Silas watched her red threads move slowly as she walked before them.
"For a seed to become a tree, it needs sunlight and drops of water. But more than anything else—"
She stopped.
"Roots."
At that word, Silas felt something move inside him. Not the mana this time. Something closer to recognition. As though the word had touched something he knew from a deep place.
"A tree extends its roots into the earth. It searches. It collects every drop of water it can find. It doesn't wait for the rain to come to it. It goes to the rain."
Eirka walked to the far end of the room and came back.
"This room is saturated with mana. Your task is to extend your roots and draw. Don't think about magic. Don't think about anything else. Think only about the roots."
Then she waved her hands.
"Begin."
Silas tried to understand what was being asked of him.
Roots. The mana in the room. Drawing.
He closed his eyes and searched for that thread in his chest. It was there — he could always feel it now, as though it had become part of his breathing. But instead of pressing on it as he had yesterday, he tried something different.
He extended it.
He imagined the thread lengthening, leaving his chest slowly like a root splitting earth. Not an explosion like the first time in the alley. Not one sudden burst like yesterday. Something slower and more deliberate, like reaching a hand into darkness not knowing what it would touch.
He felt something.
Very faint. Like moisture in dry air, barely perceptible. But it was there. The mana in the room — the same mana that lit the walls in his sight — touched the tip of that extended thread and began to seep through, very slowly.
Drops. Nothing more.
But they were moving.
He held that feeling with concentration and stayed still, not breathing more than necessary.
Then he saw something.
Or more precisely, he saw something change.
The deep blue threads of Hans to his left looked different. They were no longer flowing in their usual pattern. They were pulling, drawing, taking from the surrounding mana with an efficiency that made Silas's own effort look like someone collecting water in their palms while others used a bucket.
And Hans wasn't alone.
Lola's teal threads to his right were doing the same. With more quiet, at a slightly slower rhythm, but with that same effortlessness that made the whole thing seem as natural as breathing.
And inside the veins of both of them, Silas began to see something he hadn't seen before.
Points. Very small at first, barely visible even to his sight. But they were gathering slowly at the centers of their chests, coiling around themselves in a shape that resembled... something that resembled a star.
Not a real star. But something curling and densifying in one place, as though the mana they drew found a point to settle in and refused to leave.
Silas watched.
And the faint drops he had been collecting slowly continued their seeping, one after another, into that extended thread in his chest.
And the ember behind his sternum didn't disappear.
But he said nothing.
The days resembled each other.
That was the first thing Silas learned about his new life.
True, the bed was better than cold ground. True, food came twice a day instead of having to search for it in the streets.
But beyond that, the days moved with the same repeating rhythm that never changed.
Wake. Eat. Follow the red threads to the glowing room. Sit. Extend that thread in his chest and try. Then return. Then sleep. Then wake again.
Drops. Always drops.
While Hans and Lola drew mana naturally and quietly and without any visible effort. And inside both their chests, those small points grew denser day by day, coiling upon themselves slowly like a seed that had finally decided to sprout.
And Silas collected his drops.
On the fourth night, sleep wouldn't come.
He lay on his back, his cane beside him, the ceiling above invisible as always. The room was silent except for the sounds of children breathing in neighboring rooms.
Then he heard something.
A shift. Then silence. Then another shift.
In the darkness, a faint deep blue point appeared beyond the wall. Liam's and Karin's and Maris's and Lola's threads were quiet and steady with the rhythm of sleep. But that blue point was awake and moving.
Hans.
The voice came softly from behind the thin wall between the two rooms.
"Are you awake?"
Silas didn't answer.
"I know you are," said Hans.
A short silence. Then Silas answered: "What do you want?"
A faint rustle. As though Hans had rearranged himself in his bed.
"Where did you come from?"
"A mine."
No immediate answer came. And Silas added nothing. The word was either enough or it wasn't — either way, he had nothing more to give it.
Then: "I'm from the harbor."
Hans said it as though answering a question that hadn't been asked. And Silas didn't ask, because he didn't know exactly what the harbor meant in the first place.
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Does it hurt?" Hans asked.
"What?"
"Your eyes."
"No."
"Then what about your chest? I see you holding it sometimes."
Silas felt something like caution move inside him. But the caution didn't stop him from saying: "Sometimes."
"Do you want me to tell Eirka?"
"No."
The answer came faster than he intended. Then silence.
Hans didn't ask why. Maybe because the answer was obvious. Or maybe because a child who grew up at the harbor understood that some things are not said to those who hold power over you.
"All right," Hans said simply.
Then neither of them spoke again.
And after a time Silas couldn't measure, the deep blue threads settled back into the quiet rhythm of sleep.
And Silas lay in his darkness, hands on his chest, feeling that pain growing larger day by day.