Eren was still going.
"I know I'm a lot. People tell me that. But I bore easily, and there are only so many times you can count the cracks in the wall before you lose your mind entirely."
He paused.
"Anyway, Apex said we can leave whenever we want, so at least there's—"
"We can leave?"
Paul's voice cut from his corner. He stood.
"Leave?"
A short, dry laugh. The kind that isn't.
"Filling that fool's head with your little ideas again."
He crossed the room and stopped in front of them, looking down.
"Let me be clear with the pair of you, since you're evidently still laboring under some impression about this place. We are not workers. We are not citizens. We are clearly not guests."
Paul pointed at the floor.
"We are prisoners. They feed us and give us this room because a dead slave can't dig. That's the entire reason. Nothing more."
Eren looked up at him.
"You don't actually know that—"
"Don't I?"
Paul folded his arms.
"You think it was an accident that those horrors hit your settlement at the exact moment Captain Matthew's ship happened to be close enough to collect survivors? You think that timing is coincidence?"
He looked at Ash.
"Do you, red-eyes?"
One of the other men spoke from across the room.
"They put us in chains, Paul."
"I'm aware."
The room broke into noise. Arguments, grievances, someone raising something that had clearly festered for weeks.
"Enough!"
The room went quiet. Paul regarded Eren and Ash a moment longer, took Ash's bowl, and walked away.
"Here's my advice, since you're both still young enough for it to matter."
He didn't turn around.
"Stop waiting to feel ready. Start thinking about how you get out. You're free to leave whenever you wish... they said so themselves."
A pause.
"Funny thing to say to someone in chains."
He settled back into his corner with Ash's bowl.
Ash watched the food disappear.
'I didn't want it anyway.'
His stomach disagreed, loud enough that Eren heard it. Eren looked at the empty space where the bowl had been, then at Ash, and opened his mouth.
Ash stood.
"That's enough."
Eren tilted his head.
"I wasn't going to—"
"Eren."
Ash held his gaze.
"If you want out of this place — and I think you do — don't make a habit of talking to me."
He turned toward the far corner.
"I don't have a good history with people who get close to me."
He sat with his back against the wall and closed his eyes. Eren watched him, bewildered in the quiet, specific way of someone warned away from something they hadn't yet decided they wanted.
***
Ash turned his face to the wall. Several times he drew close enough to feel the edge of sleep... and each time the memories of his came back, fragmentary and bright and wrong, and pulled him out again. He gave up.
For a while he lay still and listened. One man complained about the rice being cold. Another disputed this. A third produced a detailed theory about tomorrow's snowfall that no one had solicited. Paul told them all to be quiet, then without pause launched into the story of the time he'd nearly escaped by stealing an Apex vessel, foiled at the critical moment because he'd turned back for extra bread.
"Worth it. Best bread of my entire life."
The room laughed. Someone threw a boot at him. He caught it.
Eventually the voices wound down. The men found their patches of floor. One by one, they slept.
The night was not, however, quieter for it. The snoring started.
Paul opened with a deep, grinding rumble. Someone across the room countered with a thin, reedy whistle on every exhale. A third produced something that defied classification... the closest approximation being a large animal in moderate distress. They found a rhythm: not a good rhythm, not one anyone had requested, but a rhythm. It filled the room.
Ash stared at the wall.
'I survived a cultist camp. I made it through Deadfall Pass. I outlasted poisons that should have killed me twice...'
One of the men snorted himself awake, said something incoherent, rolled over, and resumed snoring at a volume suggesting the interruption had only deepened his commitment.
'...And this is what does it?'
Eventually, Ash pressed his face harder against the wall and turned his attention inward... toward his soul space. A place he almost never visited. Even now, it had been a long while. He closed his eyes and fell inward.
***
The transition was jarring, as always.
An endless flat plane of black, still water stretched in every direction like smoked glass, Impossibly and profoundly quiet. A soft shh rose beneath his bare feet with every step. His feet were bare. More than that, Ash was naked. He knew this. This place had never offered clothes. Only existential atmosphere.
A reflection stared up from the perfect black mirror below: the gaunt, weary young man he was now. Same disheveled black hair, same tired crimson eyes. But when Ash shifted, the reflection didn't follow. It held still, wearing his face with a faint, permanent curl at the lip. As though the universe had engaged it part-time to be disappointed in him.
"Yeah, yeah."
Ash looked down at it.
"I'm not staying long. Just checking in. Don't make something of it."
'Now I remember why I stopped coming here.'
The horizon gave a strange, nauseating shiver. Above him, three suns hung fixed against the false black sky.
One guttered orange, like a dying streetlamp.
The second crackled, a lattice of trapped lightning buzzing behind glass.
The last spun as a perfect circle of nothing, quietly consuming the light of the other two.
Strange as they were, everything appeared as it should. This was how things always looked here.
The black water rippled. The reflection's lips moved, and the familiar voice of the soul space rose. It was a voice... a voice resembling his own, but stripped of warmth and flat across the silence:
"The Soul's Records."
The water shifted. The reflection dissolved, replaced by lines of stark, luminous text:
Name: Ashley Burns
Realm: Core
Vessel: Human
Vessel Tier: 5th
Soul Stage: 1st
Soul Pool: 2500 / 2500
Soul Essence: 97%
Your soul is currently at the stage of awakening.
---
The letters dissolved as the reflection returned.
Ash regarded it.
"Do you have to perform the entire readout every time? I didn't ask. I know everything on that list."
A pause.
"Including the embarrassing parts."
The reflection held its expression with the patience of something that had never been in any hurry.
Ash sat down on the still water, which bore him without complaint. He let out a slow breath.
"I know you don't want me here. You've made that plain enough over the years."
He paused.
"I only wanted to check on you. That's all."
The reflection offered nothing.
"Right."
He looked up at the three cores.
"Yeah. Okay. I shouldn't have come."
Silence.
"I don't think things are ever going to be the way they were. Are they."
It wasn't really a question.
The reflection held still.
Ash looked at it a moment longer, then stood and stepped forward on the black water. His reflection shattered, dissolved, was gone. In its place, clear and small and vivid, a little boy. Wild black hair. Standing very still, staring into a dark puddle at his feet, into the face of a wide-eyed, smiling stranger wearing his skin, thinking nothing at all. The wonder too large for thoughts.