I run badly.
That's the first thing that comes back to me when my feet touch the tunnel floor. My body has forgotten how to run. My legs still know the mechanics — the knee bending, the foot pushing, the other foot following — but the rhythm is dead. For fourteen and a half months, my legs only had to move from the pallet to the back wall and from the back wall to the trapdoor. Three meters one way. Three meters the other. A body doesn't run with those memories in its muscles.
The priest supports me on the right. His hand on my elbow is firm despite his own fatigue — he's maybe forty-five, he's not in shape either, but he carries my weight like a man who has decided that he will carry it. Séhn supports me on the left. His hand is lighter. He doesn't lean — he's just there, ready to catch me if I fall. Three people in parallel in a narrow tunnel, moving at a pace that resembles neither running nor walking, just an obstinate movement forward.
Ahead of us, Narien leads the way. Her dim lantern lights only her own feet — enough for her to see where to step, not enough for the light to spill over and betray our passage if anyone were following us. Behind us, her two men bring up the rear. One of them holds a bare blade in his right hand. The other carries a lantern identical to Narien's.
Five people in a tunnel. We didn't take the false Eael with us. No one even suggested it.
•
The tunnel goes down.
I wasn't expecting that. When Narien had opened the low door in the cellar that smelled of oil, I had imagined a flat duct, a service passage, maybe two or three minutes of walking to an exit at the foot of the walls. Not this. Not a long slope sinking into the earth. Not a tunnel that is actually an underground staircase descending toward something much deeper than I had understood about the Well.
After a few minutes — maybe ten, maybe fifteen, I no longer have a clear sense of time — I ask the priest, in a low voice:
*Where are we going?*
He doesn't slow down. His answer comes between two breaths:
*Toward the water table.*
*The water table?*
*The underground water. The Well isn't called the Well for nothing, Louis. It was built above a water table. The tunnel goes down to the water table and follows it. That's how the old Speakers got out. That's how we still get out.*
I don't ask another question. The conversation costs me breath I don't have. And there's something in the priest's phrase — *the old Speakers got out* — that opens a door onto decades of people I don't know who made the journey I am making before me. The tunnel has been used before. The Well has been left before. I am not the first.
It's strangely comforting.
•
We descend for what feels like an hour.
Maybe more. Maybe less. The tunnel has no markers — no torches sealed into the walls, no frescoes, no inscriptions. Just bare, damp stone, sometimes hewn, sometimes natural. In some places, the passage is so narrow that we have to proceed single file. In others, it widens into small round rooms where we stop for a few seconds to catch our breath before Narien moves us on.
During these stops, I look at the others.
Narien — not out of breath. Not once. Maybe sixty years old, but she has a body that obeys like a thirty-year-old woman's. I wonder what life she led to keep a body like that at her age. I also wonder who exactly she is. She said, in the cell, that she was my mother's apprentice. But an apprentice in what? Marielle Vermillion didn't have students, as far as I know. She didn't give public lessons. If she taught Narien anything, it was in private, in secret, in a part of her life that my father himself may not have known about.
Caïs — the priest. I need to try to think of him by his name now. Caïs. Not *the priest*. It's hard. For fourteen and a half months, he was only a function to me — the man with the gentle questions who made me vomit. Giving him a name is giving him humanity. And giving him humanity is risking becoming attached to a man who could die before the night is over. But I do it anyway. Caïs. The priest's name is Caïs. Noted.
Narien's two men — I don't have their names. No one introduced them to me. They're young, thirtyish, the bodies of soldiers who did real fighting. One is taller, the other stockier. That's all I know. That's probably all I'll ever know, because in an escape like this, you don't introduce yourself. You survive.
And Séhn.
I watch him out of the corner of my eye as we descend. This is the second time I've seen him in motion, in light — the first was when he came out of his cell, and it was brief. Now I have time. He walks well. Better than me, anyway. His body doesn't seem as broken as mine by thirteen months of captivity — which confirms to me, without him telling me anything, that his thirteen months weren't like mine. Someone probably fed him properly. Someone may have allowed him to move more than me. His cell may have been larger. A thousand small things that keep a body a body.
He looks at me too. When our eyes meet, he doesn't smile. He doesn't look away either. He looks at me the way you look at someone with whom you haven't yet decided the exact nature of the relationship you'll have from now on.
I don't decide either. I look away. I keep walking.
•
The tunnel stops descending.
Suddenly. Without transition. We arrive in a large natural chamber — a cavity in the rock, not dug by men, shaped by water over centuries. And there, in the middle of the chamber, is the water table. An underground lake, black and smooth as a mirror, stretching beyond the circle of light from the lanterns.
Narien stops at the edge. She puts her lantern on the ground, slowly, and stands still for maybe ten seconds. I understand she's listening. She's listening to the water. She's listening to the chamber. She's checking something my ears don't perceive.
Then she straightens up and says:
*The boat is there. Three minutes.*
One of her lanterns shines further and I see — maybe ten paces away, emerging from the black water — the bow of an old boat tied to a ring sealed in the stone. A wide, flat boat, capable of carrying maybe six or seven people packed tightly. It looks like it's been waiting there for a long time, but seems to have been maintained recently — someone came to check that it still floated, in the weeks or months before tonight.
Everything was prepared. Everything. I didn't escape by chance. I escaped because people, whose full identities I don't know, probably spent years preparing this route for the day it would need to be used.
We board. Slowly, because the boat is unstable and none of us are in top form. Narien and one of her men take the oars. The rest sit on the benches. Caïs gestures for me to sit between him and Séhn, which I do without thinking.
We set out on the water table.
•
The silence of the crossing is different from all the silences I've known.
It's not the silence of the Well — which was made of waiting, listening stones, motionless bodies. It's not the silence of the night — which is filled with small natural sounds, leaves, insects, distant things. It's an underground silence, total, where there is only the tiny lapping of the oars entering and leaving the water, and the breathing of the five other people around me.
I close my eyes for a few minutes. I let myself be carried. The Guardian in my chest is peaceful — truly peaceful for the first time since Mord came down. She's resting after the blow she struck against the guard's blade. She's reconstituting herself. I feel a slow, even warmth in my sternum, like an animal sleeping and breathing softly.
Narien's stone in my left cheek is still cold. Inert. I had forgotten it. I move it with my tongue, gently, to check it's still there. It is. I don't know what took its breath away tonight — the voice above the Well, or something else. I don't know if it can be repaired. But I keep it in my cheek.
I open my eyes again. I look at the ceiling of the cavity — invisible in the darkness, its existence guessed at by the echoes of the oars bouncing back. I think of the last time I was under a ceiling that wasn't a cell's ceiling. It was my childhood bedroom, the last night, just before my mother came to tell me the sentence. The ceiling was painted light blue with gold stars that my mother had painted when I was five because I was afraid of the dark. I fell asleep for years under those stars. I don't even know if the room still exists. I don't know if the paint is still there. The Vermillion house has probably been looted, burned, dismantled. My gold stars may no longer exist.
Something about that thought tightens my throat. I swallow it.
•
The crossing lasts maybe twenty minutes.
At the other end of the water table, there is a tiny beach of black pebbles and another tunnel that goes back up. Narien ties the boat to a stone ring identical to the one at the departure point. We get off. My legs are stiff. The priest — Caïs — offers me his hand to help me get off. I take it. His hand is dry and warm.
The tunnel going back up is shorter. Or it seems shorter to me, because we ascend with hope instead of descending with fear. In a few minutes, we reach a thick wooden trapdoor, sealed with a metal lock from which Narien produces the key from her sleeve.
She unlocks it. She pushes the trapdoor gently. And above, for the first time in fourteen and a half months, I see a real piece of sky.
Not a strip of sky through the slit of a cell. Not the limited sky of an inner courtyard. The open sky. The true sky. The sky that extends all the way down to the horizon in every direction.
And it's night.
It was morning when we left the cell. But the tunnel lasted so long that we lost a day. It's night. The sky is black with a blackness that resembles no black I've known — a deep black, dotted with so many stars they seem too numerous. My eyes take a few seconds to understand what they're seeing. They haven't looked at stars for almost two years.
I climb out of the trapdoor. I almost collapse to my knees on the ground. Not from fatigue — from vertigo. The sky is too big. The horizon is too far. My body has forgotten how to bear open space. Caïs takes me by the shoulders and helps me stay standing.
*Breathe,* he says in a low voice. *It's normal. It'll pass in a minute.*
I breathe. The air has a smell. Not a specific smell — lots of smells at once. Damp earth. Grass cut by something, somewhere. Something burning in the distance. A flower I don't recognize. My nose, which lived for fourteen and a half months with only two or three smells (stone, bread, my own body), receives ten new smells per second and doesn't know how to process them.
I cry without realizing it. Not much. A few silent tears. No one says anything.
And then I look up at the stars.
•
And I see the thing.
At first I think it's a star among others. Brighter. Bigger. But a star. My eyes focus on it, and I understand it's not a star. It's a light, yes, but a light that moves. Slowly. Very slowly. But clearly moving, in a precise direction.
It's descending.
Not toward us. Toward a silhouette several kilometers to the north — a dark silhouette that stands against the sky, taller than everything around it, like a tooth set on the horizon.
The Well.
I see the Well for the first time from the outside. Fourteen and a half months locked inside it, and I had no idea what it looked like from afar. A large square fortress on top of a hill, isolated in the middle of a plain, surrounded by nothing. No village. No farm. Nothing. Just the fortress alone, dark, and the glow slowly descending toward its summit.
Narien follows my gaze. She says, half-voice:
*She's almost there.*
*How long before she sets foot?* asks Caïs.
*An hour. Maybe two. No more.*
*And how long before she finds us?*
Narien hesitates. She doesn't answer immediately. When she speaks, her voice is lower, more precise — the voice of a woman calculating things she'd rather not calculate.
*If we move now, without stopping, keeping a pace we can maintain — maybe a day. Maybe two. No more. She's not searching blindly, Caïs. She can feel us. And the further we get from the Well, the weaker the signal becomes, but it never disappears completely. Not as long as Louis has what he has in his chest.*
Caïs nods. He doesn't ask another question.
•
That's when it happens.
The taller of Narien's two men — the one who held the bare blade, who hasn't said a word since we left the cell — takes a step forward and falls.
Not like you fall from fatigue. Not like you fall from losing your balance. He falls like a man falls who has just received a blow no one saw — suddenly, heavily, forward, onto his knees then onto his hands then onto his face. He tries to get up. His left arm gives way. He falls again. He starts to writhe.
And he vomits. A long stream. Not food. Black bile. A bile that isn't the color of human bile.
Caïs and Narien are next to him in two seconds. Caïs tries to turn him onto his back so he doesn't choke on his vomit. Narien holds his head in her hands. *Her* face has become very calm — the calm of a woman who already knows what's happening and knows that nothing can be done.
The face of the man on the ground is changing.
Not quickly. Not instantly. But visibly. I see his cheeks hollow before my eyes. I see the skin of his forehead wrinkle, new wrinkles that weren't there a minute ago. I see his hair — light brown a second ago — turn gray, in strands, as if someone were painting it with dye in fast-forward. He ages twenty years in thirty seconds.
He tries to speak. His voice has become that of an old man. He says, clutching Narien's arm:
*Narien… the sky… she…*
His skin continues to age. Thirty more years now. Forty. His lips retract, his teeth appear. His entire body shrivels before our eyes. The black bile continues to flow from his mouth.
Caïs straightens up abruptly. He says:
*Step back. Everyone. Step back.*
We step back. Caïs too. Narien hesitates — she would like to stay with her man — but Caïs takes her by the arm and pulls her back.
The man on the ground dies in less than two minutes total. At the end, he's maybe a hundred years old. Maybe more. His face is that of a very old dead person with no precise age anymore. His eyes are open, fixed on the sky, and they are white — white as if they had never had any color.
He stops moving.
No one moves.
•
Narien closes her eyes. One second. Then she opens them again. She says, in a voice that doesn't tremble:
*She's already touched us. Even from a distance. She learned to do it while she was descending. The longer we linger, the more she'll take us one by one.*
*How do we protect ourselves from it?* asks Caïs.
*We don't protect ourselves. We move faster than her. That's all.*
We remain still for a few more seconds. The dead man on the ground already looks like a corpse that has been there for years. His skin is starting to dehydrate. In an hour, he'll be a skeleton in clothes.
Narien gestures to her other man — the stocky one, who has gone pale but is holding up. She tells him:
*We're leaving. You lead the way. Aim south. The sparse forest. We don't stop before the ruins.*
He nods. He starts walking.
Narien looks at me. She looks at me for a long time. And she says, in a changed voice:
*Louis. You're going to have to maintain a pace you can't maintain. We can't stop for you. If you fall, we'll try to pick you up, but if we have to choose between carrying you and moving forward, we'll move forward. Do you understand?*
*Yes.*
*Good. Walk. Now.*
Caïs takes my elbow again. Séhn too, on the other side.
And we walk.
•
We leave the dead man behind without even having known his name.
That's the thing that comes back to me as we walk through the night, at a pace that hurts my lungs, across a grassy plain that slopes gently down toward a sparse forest we can make out in the distance. That man probably had a mother somewhere. A family. A first name he was given in childhood. He probably spent several years serving Narien, learning to fight, risking his life for people he didn't know. And he died in the grass, because of a thing in the sky, and no one even gave me his name.
Maybe I'll regret it someday. But not now. Now I walk, because I have no choice.
In my chest, the Guardian is awake. Not panicked — on alert. She felt the man's death. She understood something about the thing in the sky. She sends a slow, constant warmth into my sternum, like a signal that says *I'm here, I'm watching, I'll do what I can*.
I answer her, in my head: *thank you.*
And she sends an extra warmth, brief, that resembles an acknowledgment.
It's the strangest thing I've experienced since the start of this night. This tiny, wordless communication between me and the creature that has slept in my body since my birth. For the first time, we're really talking to each other. For the first time, we are two.
•
The sparse forest approaches.
Above us, in the sky, the light has almost reached the summit of the Well. It's immense now — bigger than a star, brighter than a moon. It's barely moving anymore. It's landing.
Caïs looks up. He says, in a very low voice, almost to himself:
*May the stones protect me. I never believed I would see this with my own eyes in this lifetime.*
*You know what it is?* I ask.
He takes time to answer. When he does, his voice is tired — the voice of a man who would have preferred never to have to formulate what he's about to say.
*Yes, Louis. I know what it is. But I won't tell you now. Not while walking. Not in fear. Later. When we're in the ruins, safe, I'll tell you what I know. For now, save your breath. Walk.*
I walk. My legs hurt. My lungs burn. But I walk, because I know now that behind me a man died in two minutes aging a hundred years, and that ahead of me a thing is landing on the roof of the Well, and that the only way not to be the next to die is to move faster than the thing can hunt us.
Séhn walks beside me in silence. At one point, he puts his hand on my shoulder — not to support me, just to place it, briefly, like a signal that he's there. I say nothing. I let his hand stay. When he takes it away, a few seconds later, I feel at the spot where it was placed a warmth that isn't entirely that of his physical hand. Something else. Something he just transmitted to me through contact, perhaps without knowing it, perhaps not.
I don't ask him. I file it away. I'll keep walking.
Above us, the thing in the sky touches the summit of the Well.
And everything becomes silent.
The rumbling that had accompanied us since she answered Mord's seal — that low rumbling that made the ground vibrate beneath our feet — stops suddenly. The silence that follows is not that of the night. It's an attentive silence. A silence in which something is listening.
Narien stops. She raises a hand. Everyone stops.
She says, in a very low voice:
*Don't breathe too hard. Don't think too hard. She's listening to find us.*
We don't move anymore. We remain still in the grassy plain, under the open sky, about a kilometer from the edge of the sparse forest. The light at the summit of the Well has become immense — it illuminates the entire silhouette of the fortress, which now looks like a supernatural object, bathed in a clarity that comes from neither a star nor a moon.
I close my eyes. I breathe as little as possible. I tell the Guardian in my chest, without words: *you too. Be small. Be silent. Don't show yourself.*
She obeys. She contracts. She becomes a point in my sternum, almost inert, almost nonexistent.
And we wait.
Minutes pass. One. Two. Five. With every passing second, I expect to feel in my body the thing that aged the man earlier. With every second, I expect to see Caïs collapse, or Séhn, or Narien, or her last man. With every second, I expect to die.
No one collapses.
After what feels like an eternity, Narien slowly lowers her hand. She says, in a breath:
*She didn't find us. Not this time. Walk, Louis. Gently. Don't run. Walk.*
We walk gently toward the edge of the sparse forest. The Guardian in my chest remains small, contracted, silent. Caïs and Séhn still support me, but their gestures have become more cautious, more measured — as if any sudden movement could betray us.
After twenty minutes, we reach the first trees. We move in among them. The forest hides us.
And for the first time since the man died in the grass, I can breathe normally.
•
Narien makes us walk another hour through the forest. No break. No word. Just the obstinate walking through the trees, under a vault of leaves that filter the moonlight.
In the end, we come out of the forest. Ahead, down below, in a narrow valley, I see for the first time what she called the ruins.
A village. Or what was a village, long ago. Collapsed walls. Roofs that no longer exist. Trees growing through what might have been a central square. A half-collapsed tower still standing in the middle, like a broken finger pointing at the sky.
Caïs murmurs:
*The Collapse.*
*What?* I ask.
*This village. It was abandoned when the Collapse of the Mouths happened. No one has returned since. It's one of the many collapsed post-Collapse places. They're everywhere in the country. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. What you're seeing there, Louis, is what the world became when the languages fell silent.*
I look at the dead village. And for the first time, I understand that I know nothing of the world I'm going to have to live in now. I had an idea of what the world was before — the Vermillion house, school, summer festivals, the estate. But I had no idea what the world had become since the Collapse, because I was only a child when it happened and my parents had shielded me from what they knew. And then the Well. And then nothing.
And now this. A village that no longer exists. A world of ruins.
This is the world I'm going to live in, from now on.
If I live.
•
Narien starts down toward the village. She turns to check that we're following. Caïs gives me a little pat on the back to get me moving again. Séhn is already walking.
I go down.
The moment my foot touches the slope of the valley, in my chest, the Guardian does something new. She no longer contracts. She no longer salutes. She no longer howls. She sends a soft, almost tender vibration into my sternum, as if she's accompanying me. As if, for the first time since my birth, she too is becoming aware that we're entering somewhere together.
I tell her in my head: *welcome outside.*
She sends back a warmth. And I believe — perhaps wrongly, perhaps out of fatigue — that the warmth she sends me resembles a smile.
We descend toward the ruins.