Two days’ march from Hasholm. The road behind us had already begun to vanish beneath the churn of hooves and wheels, as if the land itself refused to remember the exodus of fools.

  I sat at the front, beside Halvdan, atop a cart creaking beneath our weight and the bulk of poorly balanced academic crates—inkpots, relic casings, charred folios, and a battered bronze sextant that once belonged to the late Professor Larmünd, now repurposed as a crude paperweight. The mule pulling us was old and brown, with cataracts in one eye and a temperament befitting a senior librarian. John walked ahead of us, his bare, muscled form wrapped in a blue half-cloak marked with the seal of the Studium. The spear he bore was not ornamental. It was a weapon, a walking rod, and a measure of sacred distance.

  Behind us sprawled the full shape of our procession: a motley column of belief and bureaucracy.

  There were scholars, like ourselves, cloaked in linen and wool, sunburned and overburdened with books and maps. There were soldiers—state-trained or mercenary—some wearing the crimson armbands of the Bull Hounds, others bearing the unpainted steel of local guards pressed into duty. And then, like the growing shadow of some long funeral, came the others: the saints, wheeled forward in their carriages or sealed in containment boxes; the workers, hired by contract or desperation; and the inevitable flood of camp followers who clot like blood around any military caravan.

  The universal truth of any march is this: behind the swords walk the whores, the peddlers, the cookfires, the gambling boys, the wives with their cooking pots, and the children who do not yet understand they have been made orphans in advance. They follow not for glory, nor even for safety, but because to be left behind in a time of unmaking is to invite a slower kind of death.

  I watched them once, from the higher path as we curved down into a valley. The wives bore the look of women who knew exactly how their husbands would die. Not just that they would die—but the manner of it. What bones would break. What blood would dry. What last words would be misheard in the noise of collapse. And the children? They seemed to absorb it all without language. I envied them that. I envied not knowing.

  A dark thought. Unbidden. But that is the state of my mind these days—clouded, cracked at the edges, colored by a black which no ink could match.

  Since the vision. Since the void.

  Since I saw what was not meant to be seen.

  Sleep had become a knife of diminishing sharpness. I slipped into it rarely, and woke not from dreams but from the persistent memory of a cold nothing that had pressed itself into me like a brand. There were whispers, still. Not voices, exactly. More like the tail end of a scream that never stopped echoing. A kind of divine tinnitus.

  And worse, the ringing in my ears—the true ringing, not the imagined one—had not abated since the projectile passed me in that moment by the altar. That infernal object. That relic, or curse, or god-spat device.

  It had moved with a will. It had chosen not to kill me.

  I often wondered if that was the deeper cruelty.

  “Your face seems sour,” Halvdan remarked, eyes fixed ahead, though the angle of his brow told me he had been watching me from the corner of his gaze for some time.

  “Indeed,” I replied, making no effort to mask my discontent. “Our train has grown fat with leeches.”

  “As is their right,” he countered calmly, “the wives follow the men if they deem it just. Or if they cannot afford not to.”

  He turned slightly to study me more directly. His expression remained blank, practiced—but the stillness of it, the subtle tension around the mouth, revealed the machinery beneath. That mind of his, always measuring, never fully at rest. He would not relent.

  I sighed, already defeated. “You can stop your digging. I will relinquish my troubles.”

  “I would hope so,” he said, without warmth but not unkindly. “In this state you are neither clever nor good company, and I could use both.”

  I let the words settle, then broke the silence with the thing I had been circling around for days.

  “You never saw the void.”

  Halvdan blinked once. “Come again?”

  “The void,” I said, this time slower. “The darkness that took over our hall. The infinite shadow that swallowed light and left nothing but noise.”

  A pause. His face did not change, but there was a flicker—recognition perhaps, or the decision to feign it convincingly. Halvdan would never allow himself to appear off-kilter, even when the ground beneath him turned to ash.

  “You never really spoke of it,” he admitted at last. “I’ve absorbed the facts from the others in your wake. But facts do not carry heat.”

  “Tell me these facts, then,” I said, not out of mockery, but to see if they sounded as hollow in another man’s mouth as they did in my memory.

  Halvdan straightened his back, his posture shifting from the slouch of a weary traveler to the careful readiness of a scholar preparing to cite his sources. Even in the rattle of a mule cart, surrounded by saints and sinners and the sweat of the road, he found a way to carry himself like a lectern.

  “Some have reported a tentacled beast,” he began, measured and dry, “with neither skin nor scale, screeching with the iron lungs of the strongest church organ. The sort that rattles frescoes loose from chapel ceilings.”

  I nodded. “Very well. What else?”

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  “Young Diedrik told me the intruder in our halls was Satan himself,” Halvdan continued, a slight upward twitch threatening the corner of his mouth. “An agent of the infidel and the untrue, come to tempt and destroy. He told me this with tears in his eyes. Called it the second betrayal.”

  I let out a dry breath, which was not quite a laugh. “Diedrik would be the one.”

  “He would,” Halvdan admitted. “And he will write sermons for children, mark my words.”

  He paused a moment, letting the jest fall away before returning to the matter with a scholar’s sobriety. “Others closer to the ordeal reported a sensation—a pressure in the air, the hum of a storm incoming. A shift in weight behind the eyes. But they saw nothing. Nothing at all.”

  His gaze turned to me then, direct and firm. “Otto, I think you were the only man to lay eyes upon the intruder. Ahlia notwithstanding.”

  The way he said her name—cut short, bracketed by doubt—made it clear she did not count in the tally of witness. Not in his mind.

  She was not a ‘man’ in that sense. Not a scholar. Not a peer.

  She was something else.

  “A privilege I could do without,” I muttered, the taste of bitterness rising again, like chalk in the throat.

  Halvdan inclined his head, gently, as if he were laying down an argument rather than insisting on it. “Tell me, then. If nothing else, do it for posterity. And for the road ahead.”

  I shifted on the cart bench, the wood creaking beneath me as if it, too, disliked where this was headed.

  “There was nothing there,” I said.

  “Nothing?” His tone remained neutral, but I could feel the weight of scrutiny behind the word.

  “Nothing truly,” I repeated. “An empty space where life should have been. Our hall—our sanctuary of thought, of scripture and measurement—was erased. Not merely destroyed. Not charred or ruined. Erased.”

  I lifted a finger and began to draw the shape in the air, slowly, deliberately, as one might trace the boundaries of a vanished wound.

  “It began roughly from the tomes pertaining to land measurements, to the early chronicles of the Saintly Orders. Everything between them, gone. Like pages torn out by a hand that knew exactly what it was unmaking.”

  Halvdan watched my hand move, his eyes locked on the phantom arc I carved in the space before us. As if he could see it too, now.

  “It did hum,” I added, voice quieter now. “Like a storm approaching from beneath the floor. A vibration more than a sound. Not heard with the ear so much as felt through my bones.”

  My mind drifted, uninvited, to the sensation that still haunted my soul.

  “To be honest, it still hums,” I confessed. “I feel it when I wake. Sometimes when I speak. A reminder.”

  Halvdan said nothing. His jaw shifted slightly, like a man turning over gravel in his mouth.

  He had a way of thinking where his eyes betrayed the motion of his mind—each glance a step along the unseen logic he built behind his brow. It was a habit I had once envied. Now I watched it with suspicion.

  Because I knew what he was doing.

  He was not simply listening. He was constructing a theory. One I feared would someday be used to explain away the inexplicable. To file it neatly in some category.

  And I feared that even more than I feared the void itself.

  “A void,” Halvdan began, his voice slower now, touched by that rare tone he used only when the boundaries of reason had begun to fray, “is what the blind sees. What unfolds when you close your eyes. When down in the mines, with the oil-lamps flickering out and no torch to hand.”

  He paused, chewing on the edge of the thought, then went on.

  “Nature tells us there are no voids. The sea is dark, but filled with life. The ground is silent, but it hides pressure and veins of ore. The map is blank only until man walks the length of it and records the dirt beneath his boot.”

  He tapped a knuckle twice on the sideboard of the cart, as if to prove his point through wood and motion. It was a fair argument. Logical. Reassuring, even. That the void I saw must be, at worst, an unmeasured part of the world.

  But I could not let him have that comfort.

  “We truly could no longer trust nature to tell us anything,” I countered, eyes narrowing. “Not after we found the Anomalies. Not after we documented the first tears in place and natural law.”

  I turned to him then, fully, not just in posture but in presence. “And I tell you, Halvdan—it was the purest void I have ever seen. The only one. There was no curtain, no cave, no optical error. It was not darkness that concealed. It was darkness that was. True darkness. The kind that consumes the idea of light before light even arrives.”

  Halvdan absorbed that. He did not smile. He did not scoff.

  “But, Otto,” he said eventually, voice light in a way that meant it was carrying weight underneath, “a void, by definition, would be the absence of matter. Of the worldly. Of substance. A lack.”

  He tilted his head just slightly, offering the logic not as contradiction, but as an odd sort of comfort.

  “Things lacking substance would not hum, would they? Or strike? Or choose?”

  There was an almost childlike irony in the way he said it. As if to suggest that the nightmare could not be real because it had screamed at me.

  As if terror becomes tolerable the moment it behaves like a thing.

  “Or ring in my ears? Or call to me in the night, tugging at my soul and my mind? The hum has not left, Halvdan!” I barked, louder than I had spoken in days.

  I could feel my pulse in my temples, like a second heartbeat. I didn’t wait for him to reply. I pressed on.

  “I understand Halvdan. There was more than darkness. The darkness had a mind. A purpose. Possibly a soul.”

  The words sounded mad even to me, but they were true. They felt more true than the soil under our wheels, more than the creeds we recited in the halls.

  “And it hated me, Halvdan.”

  The final words left me in a whisper, as if voicing them too loudly might call it back.

  A silence followed. Not the casual hush of two men without words, but the heavy quiet of withheld judgment. A long one. Halvdan presumably had much to say. I saw it in the way his jaw shifted, the flicker behind his eyes, the breath he drew but did not release into speech.

  He did not share it.

  Instead, after a time, he asked, “What have we journeyed to find, Otto?”

  His voice was soft. Not uncertain, Halvdan was never that—but tired. Worn down at the edges, like an old blade.

  “I do not know,” I admitted, and sighed. The sound felt hollow in my own chest.

  “A world that wants us dead.”

  It was a cruel answer, and an easy one. Too easy. But I did not retract it.

  Darkness again. Always returning to it, as if my thoughts circled a drain I could not seal.

  But what else could I offer? My soul had been dark of late.

  Since the vision.

  Since the void.

  And each step eastward seemed only to deepen it.