I was swallowed again.

  There was no beginning. No source. Only the hum.

  It was a sound of the purest pressure. Behind the ears, between the teeth, under the skin. It pressed inward, folding me in until my own body forgot itself. Memory dimmed into a kind of ache. I felt the Studium collapse around me—walls folding like wet parchment, halls melting into one another. The lamps wept. The books bled. Even the ink forgot its shape.

  Someone called my name. Or I imagined it. I tried to answer, but my jaw wasn’t mine anymore. It had opened too far, cracked at the hinge. My tongue scraped something soft and rotting inside my throat.

  I was falling. Dragged inwards, into my form, into my mind. Through the rules that had once held me upright—warmth, gravity, time. Gone. Peeled away like the rind from fruit.

  There was a sound, slick and intimate. Flesh tearing off stone. And something—some thought, slow and vast—pressed through the dark: You are known. You are not allowed.

  Then my chest folded. My arms bent wrong. My left eye wept black.

  I screamed.

  I woke gasping. Wet with sweat. My hands clutched the blanket like rope. My ribs throbbed. It was dark—so dark I couldn’t see the roof of the tent, only feel the fabric clinging to the moisture in the air. My breath was loud, too loud, as if silence was a fiend to be kept away.

  Outside, fire crackled. Low. Controlled. Someone moved.

  I peeled myself upright. My clothes were damp. My body ached like I’d wrestled stone. My boots were somewhere. I groped for them, still half-blind, still half-there.

  Halvdan is here. John is here. I am here. I recited the names like a psalm.

  The facts were all I had left—and yet I chased their undoing.

  The hum had not ended with the dream.

  It clung like a pulse beneath the skin, a memory refusing sleep.

  The slow beat of the dark.

  It had not let go.

  I was still throwing on my robes when I opened the flap of my tent.

  The cold struck first—then the firelight. It carved the world into halves: ash and coal, night and false warmth.

  The firepit outside burned low, its glow swallowing what little moonless dark remained. Shadows danced, too long and too slow, flickering with the memory of movement.

  A figure sat by the fire, still as a carving. Perched on a crooked log, chosen not for comfort but for necessity.

  Halvdan.

  His form caught the fire at angles—his lank frame drawn taut by light and shadow. The ridges of his face became lines of hunger and wakefulness. Every sharpness was made sharper in the glow: nose, cheek, brow. A statue cut from the fatigue of men who wait too long in strange places.

  The caw of some tired old feathered thing in the dark cracked the silence.

  Halvdan turned.

  "Evening, Otto," he said. His cadence was strange. Like he’d been walking through the same dream.

  "Evening," I replied.

  I let the fire draw my gaze—but not before I took stock: wagons lined up like tombstones along the winding trail, a dozen tents sagging under dew, and the coffin—still rumbling faintly near the woodline, far from the others.

  Armed guards at the road.

  If I didn’t know better, I might’ve thought this was, in fact, an organized expedition.

  "Sleep does not arrive any more soundly out here than it did in the Dormitory."

  I said it without thinking—half muttered, half prayer. The words carried like dust.

  “Yes. The void of yours.”

  His voice lanced across the fire. Calm. Too calm. Like it knew where I’d been.

  “Do not attach such a horror upon me.” I said, sharper than I meant to. The words snapped from my teeth. My jaw still ached—phantom hinge, phantom crack. My ribs pulsed where they’d torn, folded, screamed. It lingered. It always lingered.

  Halvdan didn’t flinch.

  “Well, Otto, you are the discoverer. Surely it would be an honor to have it attached to you? The Ottonian Dark? Otto’s Void?”

  No smile. Not even a twitch at the mouth. He was too tired for performance—but the jest was there, dry as flint. He meant it to land. It did.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d kept. Bitter at first. Then warm. Not comfort. Just less cold.

  The fire crackled. The dark pressed closer. The hum—always the hum—beat just beneath the silence.

  And for a moment, I felt less alone in it.

  “Appart from the chance to make jest,” I said, eyes still fixed on the sky, “what are your reasons to be up at this hour?”

  I didn’t look at him. I looked at the dark. No clouds. A prominent moon. Dawn was nowhere near. The night stretched full and long above us, untouched.

  Halvdan moved, just enough to shift the firelight across his face. Then, finally, he turned his head.

  “The map has not been set straight,” he said. “We travel east, yes. But to what end?”

  “To reveal the source of our doom,” I answered.

  No irony. No weight. Just the truth, laid bare like a rotten tooth.

  “Indeed, you gloomy sod.” His voice scraped against the silence, not unkind—just frayed with exhaustion. I rolled my eyes. The gesture was old between us.

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes catching firelight. “But as I’ve stated before… could not traces of doom be found on the way?”

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  I turned to face him now. “Halvdan, you were the first to dismiss the dead sheep. The village gossip. You waved away every whisper.” My fingers tensed near my knees. “Is chasing rumour the surest method when time is bleeding through our hands?”

  He didn’t blink. “Ah. But was it not rumours that led us to this day trip?”

  The smirk never came. But the ghost of it hovered at the corner of his mouth—just enough to draw heat to my throat.

  “We are heading east,” he said, tone dry, “only if you’re forgiving with the phrase. The Gustavian border stops any hope of a straight endeavour. Truly, we are heading north.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but the thread had already left my hand.

  “And north,” he continued, “means the fringes. The marches. Islands and forested places where secrets are whispered instead of written, and where old crones pray before every step.”

  The fire popped. I said nothing. He looked at me now—directly.

  “John. Your void. The calamities that came after…” He exhaled slowly. “They’ve taught me something. Certainty makes us fools.”

  He tapped his temple, gently, twice.

  “And it kills.”

  A shade moved at the edge of the firelight. A slow and steady wobble—like stone learning to walk.

  A boulder of a form. Arriving as surely as the tide.

  John stepped into the light.

  Spear in hand, shoulders squared in that ancient, unreadable posture of his kind. The fire caught his wide chest-face full on, casting long shadows where a man’s head should be. His great eyes scanned us both—silent, deliberate, unblinking.

  “It is midnight, friends,” he said, and though it came as a whisper, it carried with the weight of granite grinding against itself. The kind of quiet only giants possess.

  “Surely you need the rest. The perimeter is secured. The road lays still. The coffin of our lady is safe. There is no fear.”

  “Our friend is haunted,” Halvdan remarked, as if discussing a cough. As if the tearing of flesh, the void that licked at the mind, were a passing fever.

  John looked down. Contemplative. Studying my form up and down.

  Blemmyes rarely blink.

  Their eyes are wide and wet and open to everything, but they do not flinch. There’s a gravity behind their gaze. A fatality.

  John was searching now—not only with his eyes. Within his mind as well. Pulling words from a place slower and deeper than the rest of us could touch.

  “I know of darkness, Otto,” John said at last. His voice carried with it the drag of stone—slow, certain, full of weight. “I lived in it. Though I do not know how long.”

  His torso shifted with the words—slow nods, like a tree yielding to wind it cannot feel.

  “Would you believe I do not know my own age? Where I am from? When, or where, I was birthed?”

  I didn’t speak. His voice had not risen, but it filled the space between us like a second fire.

  “I awoke from a consuming darkness merely two weeks ago. I lived—yes, I assume. Or at least… my great husk did.”

  The smile that followed was small, nearly imperceptible—but it curled across his wide, inhuman mouth with a strange shape. Not joy. Something older. Grim acknowledgment.

  “Darkness is the key,” he said. “And the end. I feel we have touched the same coin.”

  His eyes glinted.

  “The same page.”

  “Have you told Otto of our proposition, Halvdan?”

  The question came low from John’s chest, like a memory dredged from stone. I felt it before I processed it—like the weight of a closing door.

  “If you mean to question and parley with every crone and leper on the way,” I muttered, “then yes, Halvdan has made the proposition clear.”

  I studied him as I spoke. The way the fire threw long shadows across his chest, the texture of his skin like dry earth layered over bone. Faded scars marked him—some long healed, some too deep for memory. Wrinkles gathered around the edges of his eyes, though they never blinked. One wonders how old these beings are. How long they’ve been made to wait.

  “I concur with Halvdan’s proposal,” John said. His voice did not rise, but settled like silt. “I can only guide us with a faint inkling of direction. East.”

  He paused. The silence wasn’t heavy—it was deliberate. He could have a flair for theatrics when he wanted.

  “It is not much to go on. I feel the storm. But the storm grows. What guides me now… may soon cloud my sight.”

  “Halvdan,” I said, dragging the words through my numbing mind, “I would assume you have a more thorough plan than turning over every stone and sniffing at every nook?”

  Without looking up, he flicked a page in that battered green notebook of his. Heavy leather binding, edges curled with grease and sleep.

  “The child in Felthaven,” he said simply.

  The hairs on my back rose. Slow. Unbidden.

  “So you did heed the reports when they stared you in the eyes,” I murmured.

  Halvdan’s fingers kept moving, tracing ink, tapping margins. “Felthaven,” he recited, tone dry as chalk dust. “Young Iselin. Darling of the village. Found on the gaardsplass making the most heart-wrenching racket. Lying on the ground, legs shaking like a rabbit in a fox’s jaw. Went into coma. Died.”

  The fire popped again.

  I swallowed once, slow, tasting copper at the back of my throat.

  “What, Otto, was it that set us out on this crusade of knowledge?” Halvdan’s voice sharpened now, losing some of its tired drift. “Danger, where we had only known safety. No reports have ever come from Felthaven before.”

  I felt the words lodge in my chest, unwelcome and accurate.

  He didn’t pause.

  “Felthaven was quiet for decades. A place where sheep outnumber people, and gossip never leaves the wellside. And now—a child screaming in the dirt until her lungs gave out. Legs kicking like she was caught in the jaws of something unseen.”

  He tapped his notebook with the back of his knuckle. Once. Flat. Certain.

  “We ignored the sheep. We waved off the dead fields. But this? This is the kind of scream that makes maps change.”

  “Halvdan has convinced me of this endeavor,” John said, steady as stone.

  “I spoke to Ahlia of the matter, and—”

  “What?” Halvdan’s voice cracked like a whip. The notebook snapped shut with such force that somewhere in the camp, a snore broke mid-breath.

  I blinked, startled, but John didn’t flinch.

  “Yes,” John continued, unbothered. “Ahlia and I share a concord.” His gaze didn’t leave the fire, but I felt the weight of it. “She agrees with the sentiment: to search for rifts closer to home.”

  “You do realize these things could boil you like an egg,” Halvdan said, voice half-mirth, half-knife, “if you said something that annoyed them? Or if they sneezed at the wrong moment?”

  His words cracked the air, sharp enough to draw glances from the nearer tents. I saw one of the guards shift, restless at the sound of raised voices.

  John’s gaze drifted toward the guard, slow as turning stone. “Speech can be dangerous with many of our companions,” he murmured, voice low enough to settle in the throat but loud enough to land. “A sneeze from you could spell my doom as well… depending on what tool you held at the moment.”

  He shifted his weight—just enough to loom.

  “Am I not dangerous, Halvdan?”

  The question lingered—half challenge, half truth. The fire didn’t crackle. The night didn’t stir.

  Halvdan’s mouth twitched. Something between a swallow and a smirk. He said nothing.

  “Me and Ahlia share a bond,” John said, the words slow and deliberate, like stone grinding against stone. “We are of this soil. In one way or another.”

  I caught the shift in Halvdan’s posture—the tension behind his eyes—but John pressed on.

  “You see the light in me, Halvdan,” he continued, voice lowering. “I ask you… see past her darkness too.”

  That settled the air for a beat too long.

  A fitting end. Time to take back control.

  “Names of Iselin’s next of kin?” I asked, not looking up.

  “Recorded,” Halvdan answered. Short. Clipped.

  “Witnesses to the malformity?”

  “Also recorded.”

  I nodded once, slow, deliberate.

  “Felthaven will be our next stop,” I said. My voice felt steadier saying it than I expected.

  “Tell our scholars and students to ready their instruments. The guards will safehaven our search and inquiries. The Saints…” I let the word hang for a breath, “will be stationed at a safe distance. Ready—should anything happen that needs their miracles.”

  The fire cracked again. No one argued.