BELLS.
They rang at odd intervals, distant and hollow in one breath, unbearably close in the next. They carved the world into sharp, uneven slices, leaving time thin and wrong.
I woke between them. Or maybe I didn’t wake at all. Maybe I had always been here.
The walls loomed smooth as quarried glass, and the damp air pressed cold against my skin. A sliver of light fractured the dark above, though it was pale and almost colorless. It seemed as if the light had traveled so far to find me that it had worn itself thin along the way.
I frowned, or I thought I did. My face felt unfamiliar. My limbs, unsteady.
A name surfaced, sticky and slow. Haven.
I sat up fast, too fast. The motion sent a sick, swaying weight through my stomach. The silence between the bells was unbearable, swallowing me whole.
That was when I noticed him.
A figure hunched in the farthest corner, folded in on himself, his frame drawn out and too long to seem entirely natural. His shift draped loose on him, pale linen gone grey with dust and damp. His head hung forward as he muttered. Words slipped from him in a sluggish drip, slow and lilting, circling back into quiet, familiar rhythms.
I tried to speak, but my own voice curled dry and useless in my throat. My fingers trembled toward water that wasn’t there. I swallowed, tried again.
“Who?” The word struggled to leave my mouth, like I had to pull it from a great distance. It barely breached the air between us. His murmuring did not stop.
I tried to piece together his words, but they tumbled over themselves as half-verses and broken couplets. The meter stumbled over itself, too far gone for sense.
Rhymes.
The realization crawled over my skin. My stomach turned cold. He wasn’t simply a madman. He was something far worse. A poet.
“I was never the first to follow,” the muttering unravelled between us. “Nor the last to call the name.”
I swallowed. Pushed to my feet.
“Stop,” I rasped. My voice cracked, ancient with thirst.
The rhyming voice continued. Another verse drifted between the weight of stone.
I stepped toward him. Then closer still.
The first thing I noticed was his hands. They moved with the rhythm, quick and deft, shaping soft answers to words I had not asked.
The second thing I noticed was me. The moment stretched. My breathing frayed.
I reached forward, hands shaking for something solid. My fingers met his shoulders, found fabric worn to nothing. He shifted. His head lolled forward, rolling loose before turning upward, slowly, carefully.
I saw him.
I saw me.
He smiled first. Of course he did. That’s what I would do.
He tilted his head, sharp and knowing. His eyes were something else entirely.
“Oh,” he said lightly, as if I had come late to something inevitable.
And then, in a voice that was my own, he asked, “If you were mad, would you even know?”
Time in Haven twisted itself into thin, brittle threads, impossible to hold. I measured it by breaths, by the fickle slant of light that bled through the high window and crept across the floor like a dying thing. Bells rang at strange intervals, distant one moment, deafening the next.
Somewhere between those bells, he appeared.
Elodin. Maybe.
He lounged against the doorframe, if there was a door. If there was a frame. His grin flickered in and out, too wide, too knowing, too sharp. “Good morning,” he said, amused. “Or good evening. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
His words should have startled me, but they didn’t. I had heard voices before. Sometimes they were whispers in the walls, rhymes in the dark, or even my own laughter echoing back at me from some corner of my mind. This was just another game Haven played, another hallucination.
I closed my eyes. Counted. One. Two.
“You always did like bending rules,” the voice stretched out, bored and easy.
I cracked one eye open. “You’re not real.”
That made him laugh. And when did he move? He had taken a step, or maybe the room had shifted. He was closer now but still not close enough to touch.
“Real is such a flexible thing,” he said. “Here, even more so.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I rasped. My throat was still raw. “Or I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know.” A pause. “I can’t remember.”
“Ah.” He pointed a dramatic finger at me. “There it is. The first thing to unravel.” His expression turned rueful. “A shame you were expelled. I had such hopes for you.”
I frowned. Or I tried to. My face still felt unfamiliar. “Expelled?”
“For helping yourself to the cookie jar. For putting a hole in a perfectly good courtyard.” His voice blurred at the edges, overlapping itself. He was speaking ahead of me, as if I wasn’t keeping up. “Not that I was really listening. I don’t enjoy polite outrage. Too performative.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head as if that might jar loose something useful. “That can’t be right.”
He waved a hand as though brushing dust from his sleeve. “Lorren is here too,” he said lightly. “I’ve never seen someone so shattered. But speculation is so exhausting, don’t you think?”
The words hit me wrong, a step missed on a staircase, a note struck on the wrong string. I stared at him.
“Shattered?” I repeated.
His head tilted. “As shattered as your prospects at the University,” he said, wearing a jagged little smile that didn’t belong on his face. “Really, Kvothe, you should pay more attention.”
I swallowed. My mind felt like wet paper, unable to hold anything without warping. I had known this, hadn’t I? Hadn’t someone told me? Or had I dreamed it?
He took another step forward. The movement was too effortless, his shape pulling toward me as if stretched. The room didn’t shift with him this time. That small change settled into me like a warning.
I pressed my palms against my temples and tried to force some clarity, begging for something solid. “I didn’t,” my voice wavered and grew thin. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to,” the voice echoed, softer now. His grin didn’t return this time. “Tell me, Re’lar Kvothe. What is the name for someone who breaks a thing and then apologizes to the pieces?”
He turned, though I hadn’t seen him pivot. Behind him a door was closing with a soft snick. Had there even been a door there before?
I sat there long after he was gone, heartbeat in my throat, walls leaning inward with the weight of silent things. I could almost hear them breathing. I could almost hear me, still laughing from a different corner of the room.
Real. Flexible.
The shadows shifted. The bells rang again.
Or they hadn’t.
My pacing had long since collapsed into nothing, a shape worn into the floor and a rhythm with no music. One step. Two steps. Back again. I had forgotten where it started. I had forgotten where I had started.
In the quiet, my own breath felt untethered. It stirred the damp, then fell still.
And then, the smallest sound. A whisper, tucked in the crack beneath the door.
“You sound rather undone,” it said.
I froze.
Words didn’t come from nothing. Words had to belong to someone. But I had spoken in places far from my mouth before. This could be another trick, another splinter of myself come to taunt me.
Slowly, like a limb stiff from sleeping, I let my voice uncoil.
“Auri?”
There was a pause. Then, as if nothing in the world had ever been more obvious, she answered, “Yes. And you are still you.”
The words struck something deep in me, something buried beneath the fractured lines of my thoughts. You are still you. My ribs tightened. A breath caught in my throat that I did not expect.
I pressed my back against the wall and swallowed. “I don’t feel like me.”
She made a quiet sound. Not quite sad, but something near enough that I wanted to shut my eyes against it.
“Mmm. Well,” she said lightly. “Even if you’ve misplaced a few pieces, you’re still here.”
I wanted to laugh, but I had forgotten the shape of it.
The pause stretched long. Then, softly, something small slid beneath the door and caught against my foot.
I stared. A silver ring, fine as a whisper, glinted in the dim light. Its pale amber stone caught the glow and turned it warm.
I hadn’t moved, but suddenly, it was already in my palm.
“What’s this for?” My voice sounded strange again. I didn’t know if I was asking her or the empty walls.
Auri sighed, as if I had said something frustratingly obvious.
“To keep safe,” she said.
“For what?”
“For safe-keeping.”
The words curled soft around me. The pressure in my chest eased but didn’t fade completely. I turned the ring over between my fingers, watching it catch the slivered light. Keep it safe.
But even with the ring cool against my palm, I couldn’t trust it.
She had been here. Or she had not.
I could still hear my own voice from where she had been, repeating her words back to me before she had said them. Somewhere near the door, stone groaned as though she had only just stepped away.
Or had she ever been here at all?
I opened my mouth, but she was already gone.
The voices wouldn’t stop.
They crept over each other like ivy strangling a ruin, tangling in through the cracks, soft as breath against my ear.
One murmured, “You lose everything, you know. Always losing, always left behind.”
Another hummed, lilted, sang of bitter things. “Broken and buried, never to rise, little fox trapped under trembling skies…”
And then, “She won’t come again, you know.”
It slid into me before I could question who had spoken. But something about it was out of place. A discordant note in a familiar song.
A second passed. Too long. I faltered.
I shook my head, pushing it away.
The bells had rung again.
From somewhere outside, a voice cut sharp as a whip.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kvothe!”
A pause, seething. Then, “She’s gone.”
It came again, frustration cracking at the edges, trying to push its way into my thoughts.
I felt my lips move before I thought about speaking. A faint echo of a name, nothing more than breath. But then the voices took it, too. Drowned it in the tide.
“She’s gone, Kvothe.”
The words distorted as they hit me. Warped in the space between hearing and knowing.
“…a girl in a cage…”
“Chains, fox, she’s caught in the trap…”
“Taken, forgotten, stolen, lost…”
“Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone…”
I winced, pressing my hands over my ears, but it didn’t help. The words broke on the way down, shifting from urgent to singsong, lost in the meter of my madness.
“She’s…”
“…gone.”
Someone exhaled sharply.
“Tehlu’s teeth, Kvothe.” Their voice was barely more than a breath. Tired. Resigned. Defeated.
I turned my head toward the door. I meant to look for them, to really look, but the walls shifted wrong, and I caught nothing but a shadow moving. Leaving.
The cell door clanged.
The empty space left behind collapsed in on itself, folding neatly back into the rhythm of ruin.
My false selves moved into the silence like scavengers.
“He’s gone,” one of them mused mildly.
“Gave up. Like everyone does, in the end.”
“Maybe it’s better,” another murmured. “What would you even do, little fox? Claw at the walls? Call a name you don’t remember?”
“She won’t come again, you know.”
The words threaded through me before I fully heard them. They knotted off and held.
Something was wrong with them.
It was small at first, nothing more than a missed step, a brief and distant wrongness. My mind moved sluggishly, pulling at the stitch but unable to work it loose. The words had been spoken before. Just now. A moment ago.
I tugged at it once, then let it be.
“She won’t come again, Kvothe.”
It wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t a whisper from the walls. It hadn’t come with the lilt of madness. It hadn’t curled from my own lips in some twisted echo.
It had been spoken. Someone real. Someone with weight.
The wrongness sharpened. Everything inside me recoiled to attention.
Elodin.
Elodin had said it.
My pulse kicked hard in my throat.
I gripped the silver ring, crushing it against my palm with shaking fingers. The ache of it burned me back into myself.
Elodin had been here.
This wasn’t some deep dream, some trick of Haven. I hadn’t conjured him from the marrow of my mind.
He had stood in this room.
And I had done nothing.
Like ice fracturing under sudden weight, the realization split through me.
I had let him leave.
I had let Auri’s name fall into the void.
The sickness in my stomach turned sharp, violent. My hands shook against the stone. I wanted to dismiss the thought, shove it away like all the other twisting illusions. But this thought didn’t warp like the others. It didn’t shift when I tried to pin it down. It held.
Auri.
Taken.
The moment stretched thin. My mind resisted one last time, trying to retreat back into the safety of madness. It would be easier to sink. Easier to be lost.
But this was real. And the weight of it sat heavy against my chest, too much to ignore, too much to fade.
I clenched my teeth. I drew breath back into my lungs. My fingers curled tight against the floor, gripping the stone to hold myself here.
I forced my head up.
The voices still circled, splintering and snarling, but now I saw them for what they were.
I turned on them and on myself. My own specters, my own fragments, my own ruin.
They didn’t retreat at first. They crowded close, whispering their last venomous doubts. One of them sang a lilting piece he called The Moon Fae’s Plight. Another murmured of horrors that made my stomach lurch. The madman in the corner kept time, nodding, muttering, and chanting.
I bared my teeth and fought them.
It was not a clean battle. It was not a sudden reckoning. I lost my footing. I slipped and fell into silence, and I had to claw my way out again and again.
Piece by piece, I drove them back.
Even when the cracks were all that held me together, I fought.
Even when shadows closed in seeking purchase, I would not be unmade.
And in the end, the voices faded. The muttering dissolved. I had only my own breath, my own body, a weak light that stretched thin across the floor.
It was enough.
And in the silence, I found it.
The stone of the wall, worn and cold, whispered to me in a way I didn’t understand. My hands traced its surface blindly, nothing between my skin and the stone, until, at last, a name surfaced.
“Cyaerbasalien.”
I spoke it hesitantly, then with certainty, then with the weight of stone.
The wall answered me.
It broke.
The rush of night air left me dizzy. Moonlight, nearly full, flooded through the broken stone, and I let it carry me to the edge of the world. Pressing the ring to my lips with trembling fingers, I whispered into the wind, “Wait for me, Auri.”
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