Nigredo: Signa Parent

The twins left the table as soon as it was polite to do so, excusing themselves on the grounds of a need to rest. Instead, after inquiring with a golem, Summer and Autumn followed a corridor neither had used before, a route that felt unfamiliar in a way that was almost deliberate.

The air here was warm, a humid convection that seemed to rise directly from the volcanic core. The stone underfoot was polished but slightly granular, and the faint smell of minerals—a whiff of sulfur, a tang of iron—grew stronger the farther they went. The light shifted as they walked, from the bland, ambient blue of the main halls to an orange gold that painted the walls with something close to life.

They passed three doors, each unmarked. At the end, the corridor opened into a cavernous chamber, and for a moment they both stopped, stunned by the beauty of it.

It was a bathhouse, but unlike anything in their world: tiered pools carved into the living rock, each one a different size and temperature, the water clear and rippling with hidden currents. The ceiling was domed and inlaid with crystal, which refracted the light into a wash of amber and turquoise across the pools. No one else was there.

They said nothing, just looked at each other, and then at the farthest pool, which steamed gently in the light.

Summer found herself shivering. Autumn, for her part, seemed entirely unfazed by the space. They peeled their shirt and bra off in one smooth motion, slipped out of the ill-fitting jeans, and stepped into the water.

It was hotter than expected, almost scalding at first, but after a minute the heat bled the tension out of every muscle. They sank together, hair floating, and for a long time there was only the sound of their breath, and the faint echo of distant water running somewhere behind the walls.

At first, the words didn’t want to come out; the heat held the sisters in a loose, almost narcotic solidarity, dissolving the urgency of anything that might be spoken. Only when Summer noticed the way her own reflection in the water doubled and refracted—a blur, a distortion, two faces on the same surface—did she finally say, “Is it too hot for you?” and in that moment, the sound of her voice was as much a question for herself as for Autumn.

“No,” said Autumn, gently. “It’s perfect. I like it when we can’t remember where we start or stop.” She reached out and skimmed her fingers over the surface, drawing little eddies on the warmth, not for any reason but to see if it would feel different now that the world was reduced to mineral air, golden light, and water that pressed their skin until it forgot where it ended.

Summer let her head fall back against the smooth rim of the pool and closed her eyes. “I keep trying to picture us as we are now, not as we were. It’s the strangest thing—I look down and I know it’s me, but it’s also not.” She drew up a knee, examined it above the surface, then let it slip under again, lost in the shifting refraction. “I know it isn’t about looks. I know I should be used to it by now. But… nothing we own fits anymore. Every piece of clothing, even the stuff we thought was perfect, makes us look like we’re playing dress-up in someone else’s skin.”

She smiled, but it was thin, a gesture meant to signal to Autumn that she understood how little this should matter. “We tried on four shirts this morning. I hated all of them.”

Autumn, who had not opened her eyes since they entered the water, said, “I don’t think it’s the shirts. I think it’s us.” She let the words float for a while, unadorned. “If we lived in water all the time, we wouldn’t have to wear anything at all. We’d just be… what we are.”

For a second, Summer wanted to argue—say that people would still find a way to be unhappy with their own skin, that human nature always found a friction point—but she let it go. Autumn’s logic, at least, was honest. “Maybe that’s why it feels better here. Water fits.” She sat up and watched the colors on the ceiling, the moving mosaic of light and crystal and the little bursts of steam as it hit the cooler air above each pool. “I never thought I’d miss something as basic as being able to throw on a tee shirt and not think about it.”

Autumn turned her head toward her, the motion slow and deliberate, like a fish circling the edge of a shadow. “If you could go back to the way we were before, would you?”

Summer said, “Yes,” and the word came out more certain than she expected. She turned her palm up under the water, watching it distort. “You know what’s funny? We’re supposed to be—” she gestured vaguely at herself, at both of them— “perfect, now. And the only men who would notice are exactly the ones we spent our whole life trying not to make eye contact with in parking lots.”

She let her hand sink. “The men we would have wanted—they never cared about any of this. And the ones who care about this now are not men I want caring about anything of ours.” She was quiet for a moment. “So no. I don’t think the upgrade was for us.”

Autumn shifted, her shoulder brushing Summer’s under the water. “What about Adrien, then?” she asked quietly. “If Amabilis is to be believed, we’ll all be bound to him when this is over.”

Summer went still. The steam seemed suddenly heavier, the mineral scent sharper. She watched a bead of condensation trace a path down Autumn’s temple. “He watches,” she said finally. “But he doesn’t stare. It’s… clinical.” She swallowed, the sound loud in the humid quiet. “Like we’re a puzzle he’s trying to solve, not a body he wants to own.”

“Is that better?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice dropped. “Maybe it’s worse. At least with the others you know what they want.”

The warmth made time strange; it was hard to distinguish minutes from hours, and every movement felt like it had to justify the energy spent to make it. For a long while they just drifted, shifting their legs, floating and sinking at the margins of the pool. Summer found herself thinking about Ashcombe Vale—its stony, windblown fields, the way the river in April would flood the low-lying meadows and turn their backyard into a miniature ocean.

She remembered the two of them, maybe eight or nine years old, daring each other to push further and further until the water was up past their chins, the cold so sharp it cut the breath out of their lungs. They used to talk about running away and finding the real ocean, the one with salt and tides, and living in it like eels or river otters. Even then, she supposed, they’d known there was something about water that was the opposite of being stuck in a box.

Autumn broke the silence this time. “I’ve been thinking about what he said. Adrien.” She dipped her chin under, came up with her hair plastered to the sides of her face. “About having read the published branches of the show.” There was a note of respect in her voice, or maybe just disbelief.

Summer nodded. “I heard.”

Autumn watched the patterns on the surface, the way bright lines would flicker and break apart if she blew a little ripple across them. “He said he's read a lot of the seasons. Old ones. And in all of them, he never saw anyone like us. No conjoined anything.”

Summer didn’t respond, but she shifted in the water, drawing her knee to her chest and hugging it, as if that might make her smaller, or less of a target for whatever point was coming next.

Autumn’s voice softened. “He thinks there’s a reason for it. That we’re not here just because of us, but because of something about Ashcombe Vale. The place, the history. Maybe even the land itself.”

Summer kept her eyes on the water, but her voice was clear. “You mean, like, everything that happened to us happened on purpose.”

“Not just us.” Autumn paused, as if marshaling evidence for a case that had to be airtight before she could risk saying it. “Everyone in our town. The birth defects, the weird ratios. Even the way Dad always said the soil was ‘peculiar’ and nothing tasted right unless you salted it twice.” She let out a breath that almost counted as a laugh. “What if we were never supposed to be ordinary?”

Summer blinked, surprised by the ache in her chest. “That’s a hell of a thing to lay on somebody. You make it sound like Ashcombe Vale is a science project.” She meant it as a joke, but it landed off-center.

Autumn shrugged, but not unkindly. “I don’t know. Just… different. Maybe they wanted us here because there’s nothing else like us.”

Summer let her hands float above the surface, fingers splayed, palms up. “So we’re a test case.”

Autumn nodded.

“Do you think the others know?” Summer asked.

Autumn’s answer was immediate. “Not about us, exactly. But I bet they each have their own version. No one here is ordinary. That’s the point of the whole thing.”

They let the matter float, not really resolved. Instead, they thought about what it would be like to be eliminated—the word still made Summer flinch—and if it would hurt more to go as themselves, or as something less. “I hope if we do get reduced, it’s in here,” she said softly, half to herself. “Not in some scratchy dress or weird shoes, just water.”

“Water fits,” Autumn said, and this time she reached for Summer’s hand, weaving their fingers together under the surface where no one could see, holding on even as the heat softened the skin and further blurred the distinction between one and the other.

---

He found Nebet-Hedj in the Preserved Garden, kneeling by a raised bed, hands sunk wrist-deep in damp earth. She worked with the economy of someone who had nothing to prove, her linen dress wrinkled, the blue veins in her forearms stark against the darkness of the soil.

He watched from the shadow of the arched entry, waiting until the rhythm of her movements made it clear she had no plans to stop. Then he approached, squatting beside the next bed over, not speaking at first, not disturbing the pattern. The earth here was black and granular, the smell a deep, living thing that reminded him less of his own childhood than of the long-ago beds in Sebennytos, where the silt from the canal turned every seed into a riot by spring.

When he finally spoke, it was only to ask, “What are you planting?”

She did not pause, or look up. “Nothing yet,” she said. Her voice was flat, the sound of someone busy with her hands. “I am turning the bed over before I decide.”

He nodded, accepting this, and picked up a stick to clear a clump of matted roots that ran at the border of the next row. The two of them worked in parallel for a minute or two, neither hurrying. She reached for the hand trowel at the edge of her bed, and he passed it to her without her needing to look. She took it and dug in, bracing the tool in her palm, prying up a buried clod. Her arms were dusted with the same fine mineral as the bed.

He said, “How are you feeling, since the morning?”

She finished what she was doing before answering. “Fine.” The word landed exactly as it sounded.

He considered the line, then said, “Do you mean that the way most people mean it, or the way you mean most things?”

At this, she looked at him, the ghost of a smile on her mouth. “The second one,” she said. “I do not lie when it isn’t needed.”

He nodded, then watched the sun refract off the water trickling from the irrigation channel, remembering how careful the old Nebet-Hedj had been to conserve water for the plants, never for herself. He said, more directly, “Your ba stayed past sunrise for the first time. It left slowly, not at once. You were still yourself for almost an hour, while we ate breakfast together in the kitchen.”

She said, “I remember.”

He ran his hand over the surface of the soil. “How does it feel now, sitting here, to have been that close to keeping it?”

She thought for a long second, then shrugged. “The woman sitting here now does not feel anything about it. She knows it happened, but there is no feeling attached to the knowing.”

He let this settle. “What do you feel, then, right now?”

“Nothing in particular.” She brushed her hands together to free them of the loose grit, then reached for a fragment of old root and broke it between her fingers, as if to see what color the heartwood would be. “I have the body. The ka is the same as it was. There is no grief in it. No wanting, either.”

He nodded. “Do you miss your ba?”

She did not answer immediately. “No,” she said, and meant it.

He said, “Is that strange to you? Not missing it?”

She mulled it over, then said, “It is not strange. When something is not in front of me, I do not feel the lack. I know what she is, but I am not her, so I cannot want her. The woman who grieves is not here, and the one who is here does not know how to want her back.”

He was silent for a while. The sun moved in the sky, shifting the pattern of shadows along the beds. “The real question,” he said, “is whether achieving the akh is something you want for yourself, or only something she wants. The woman who is here, now—does she want it?”

She took much longer with this one than she had with any of the others. Finally, she said, “I do not know if wanting is something this version of me does at all. It might only be a question for the other. Or maybe it is the same answer for both: there is a rule, and I am trying to follow it, because that is what I was made for.” She considered the root fragment, then set it gently in a neat pile beside the bed, as if this, too, was part of the work.

He did not press her. There was nothing left to say.

She returned to her task, picking up a small green cutting and pressing it into the bed she had just turned. She did it with the same careful pressure as before, not minding the new dirt under her nails or the sweat beginning to shine at her hairline.

He sat a while longer, watching her work. It was a perfect thing, watching, and it made him wish there was a way to remember the feeling—not as a story, or as a way to solve the problem, but as a thing to keep for its own sake. He waited for the moment when the sun would leave her half in shadow, half in light, but she finished her row before then, and when she stood, the light caught her face and made her eyes look silver, nearly translucent.

She ignored him, now that he was no longer in her field of view.

He left first, because he knew the work would keep going without him, and because there was nothing else he wanted to ask. He left her there, hands sunk wrist-deep in the soil, and considered that Nebet-Hedj had referred to her night-time self as someone else.

---

The last time she finished the drill, her hands did not stop moving until she pressed them, flat, to the wall.

She was soaked through—not just the armpits and the band of her undershirt, but the whole back, even between her fingers, the sweat running in a line down her right thigh before she braced it against the stone. She gripped the wall, felt the cold of it leech into her, and counted off the seconds as if a delay would earn her anything. The drill was useless now—her hands would do it even in her sleep. But she ran it again, and again, until the urge to move burned itself out.

When it was done, she crossed the Palaestra in a straight line, cut through the door, and made for the Dissolution Chamber. She didn’t bother looking for anything to wear; what she had on would be fine. She wasn’t going to waste time in the wardrobe like one of the others. She paused at the entry, two fingers going automatically to the seam at her neck. She pressed, felt the give, then released.

The first term she’d set for the night was the same as always: if her head came off, she was to reattach it herself. No one else. Especially not him. She flexed her right hand, thumb and forefinger making a ring, testing the grip she’d need to do it clean, then let her hand go slack.

She sat on the edge of the bed, breathing through her mouth, the air in the Chamber too still for her liking. She ran the sequence: Drill, then hands, then check the seam, then—this was important—rehearse the rules again. The second term was the hardest. If she couldn’t get it herself, and he had to do it, he was to say nothing about it. No noise, no face, no follow-up. Not even after. She told herself that was for his sake, or maybe for the world’s, but she lingered on the rule longer than she meant to.

She tried to remember how it felt the last time, the transformation ceremony, when she had lost it in front of everyone and had to put herself back together with the whole room watching—the way the reconnection had moved through her like a wave she couldn’t brace against, public and unasked-for and complete. She thought about what it would mean to have his hands there instead, at that moment, and her body answered the thought before she could stop it. She held very still until the shiver passed, then filed it under the second term, where it belonged.

The third term was quieter, but more dangerous. If her head came off, he was not to say her name while she was like that. Not even a whisper. She wasn’t sure if this was superstition or practicality, but she knew what the word did when it hung in a room.

She stood, crossed to the shelf above the desk, and took down her belt knife. She drew the blade, checked the edge with her thumb, and sheathed it again. Bringing a weapon into the Axis Mundi would read as something it wasn't — an accusation, or an invitation to one — and she knew that. She buckled it on anyway. If tonight went wrong in a way none of her three terms accounted for, she was not going to be the only person in that room who couldn't defend herself.

She sat again, this time with her back pressed flat to the cold stone, and unfolded the scrap of scroll she had found near the Palaestra’s east wall that morning, half-tucked under the edge of a training mat. She had not looked at it until now. The ink was neat, unhurried.

Be as aggressive with Adrien as you would be on the battlefield, because he will flee and doom you otherwise. Use your words and body like you would a sword.

She read it twice. Then she turned it over, found nothing, and turned it back. She was not sure if it was counsel or a warning or something left for someone else entirely. She was not sure the distinction mattered. She thought about what aggressive meant, in this context—whether it meant argument, whether it meant pressure, whether it meant something she did not have a clean word for and did not want to name. She thought about the knife at her hip. She folded the scrap and set it on the stone beside her.

For one breath, she let herself think of her father’s chair—the one in the suite, the copy that had surprised her two days before. She thought about the sweat that had soaked into its arms, the way it always smelled of vinegar and ox bile from the cleaning. She thought about how small she felt sitting in it, even now, and how the world had always been too wide for her. She let the thought hover, then did what she always did: forced it down, until it was just another rule, another drill.

Before she rose, she ran through what she knew of the place: the two corridors that branched west from the Palaestra, the crack in the volcanic rim she had glimpsed on the Upper Walks, the way the outer walls caught the morning light from the east. She had not decided anything.

She told herself she had not decided anything. But her mind kept returning to a thing she had done once, years before her father’s health had turned—she had spent the better part of a winter quietly learning the layout of a house she was to be sent to, the rhythms of its gates and its guards, the name of the road that ran north from its outer wall. When the arrangement collapsed with her father’s death, she had felt the particular shame of having prepared for a thing she had not chosen and could not refuse. She recognized the feeling now. She did not like recognizing it.

She stood, checked her neck seam again—habit, not need—and walked for the Axis Mundi as the windows in the corridor started to glow with the low, coppery light of dusk. Her hands were steady, her feet silent. By the time she reached the main staircase, there was no sweat left in her at all.

---

As evening leaned in through the upper corridors, Adrien found himself muttering about the various reasons he had jotted down as explanations for Nebet-Hedj’s ba staying—like if he said them out loud enough times, the ba would stabilize. He walked the Axis Staircase at a measured pace, steps echoing against the tile, hands in his pockets. The railing, a single length of blackened steel, was cold to the touch; he ran two fingers along it, grounding himself in the world of simple matter.

The turn at the bottom of the staircase opened onto the Axis Path, a corridor made almost entirely of glass, running over the open span of the caldera. He was so wrapped in internal calibration—Was he supposed to say something, do something? Was it all in her hands? Was he even allowed to intervene?—that he nearly missed the fact of someone sitting at the far edge of the walkway.

Oudemia.

She was sitting cross-legged where the glass corridor met the basalt landing, the bare stone cold against her ankles, the molten orange of the volcano glinting through the glass at her back. She wore an off-white chiton, the old Macedonian style, pinned over one shoulder and cinched at the waist with a plain wool sash. Her hair, ridiculously long and usually wild, was tied back in a simple cord, and her feet were bare. The sight of her in that dress—of her in any dress, let alone one that matched a memory so closely—hit him with a force he was not prepared for.

For a second, the practiced caution of twenty-three centuries wasn’t enough to keep him upright. He felt like he might say something foolish. So he didn’t say anything at all. He approached, then lowered himself to the floor across from her, matching her posture but folding his legs to the side instead of under.

She looked at him. The light from the lava and the last of the sunset gave her face an unreal cast, an old gold not found anywhere in the modern world.

He sat down across from her, matching her posture but folding his legs to the side instead of under. “That chiton,” he said. “It suits you.” He meant to leave it there, but didn't. “It's the first time since I got here that I've looked at you and remembered what it was like to see you in the palace.”

She looked at the fabric over her own knee, not at him. “Magda gave it,” she said. “I chose it.”

“Do you like it?”

She considered this the way she considered most things, slowly, and said, “It is soft.” After a moment she added, “The pin is heavy.” She touched the brooch at her shoulder, rotated it slightly, then let her hands fall into her lap. Her posture, always so careful and deliberate, was stronger tonight: the lines of her arms parallel and still, the small of her back straight as a stanchion, legs crossed just as he remembered from a dozen previous after-dusk conversations long ago, before the world had calcified into its present shapes.

He said, “Are you comfortable, in it?” He trailed off, looking at her feet, then at the lava outside the glass.

She didn't answer right away. When she did, it was short. “I do not know yet.” She didn't explain further, and he didn't ask her to.

The quiet that followed was a deep one, edged with the strange acoustics of the caldera and the steady, underlying pulse of the volcano’s heart. Oudemia had never been one to fill silences; she let them accumulate, as if they were a material to be handled or a solvent in which the irrelevant would eventually dissolve. Adrien found himself grateful for it, even as the weight of their silence built.

It was Oudemia who spoke first. “You were going to the Axis?”

He blinked, pulled from his spiral. “I—” For a moment, he tried to reconstruct a plan from the detritus of his intentions, but found none. “I think so. My feet just went.”

She nodded, accepting the answer with no signs of judgment. “You will see the warrior there.”

He nodded slightly, the thought of Drosia—her angry energy, her bluntness—almost comforting in its inevitability. “Eventually.”

She did not reply, letting her attention drift again to the volatile seam where the glass corridor met the churning, glowing stone. The quality of the light had changed completely in the minutes since he’d arrived: the sun had dipped below the volcano’s rim, and now the caldera was the brighter thing, the molten interior casting impossible reds and golds through the glass floor, painting both of them in shifting, unfamiliar colors. The effect was so pronounced it seemed to strip their conversation of its reality, relocate it to a place outside ordinary experience.

Adrien took a moment to watch her profile in the strange light, the way the colors refracted in her hair and along the sharp angle of her cheekbone. In the old days, he’d have been tempted to draw her like this, to try to capture in ink the way her presence always threatened to overtake the surrounding space. Instead, he traced a line with his thumb along the floor, trying to ground himself in the now of it.

After several more breaths, Adrien asked, “Do you mind if I talk?”

Oudemia did not look at him, but her head inclined, a nearly imperceptible gesture that carried an entire grammar of permission and constraint. If you must.

He drew in a slow breath. “This morning, something happened with Nebet-Hedj. The ba stayed at sunrise. It didn’t want to leave. For the first time since we came here, she was herself in the day.” He ran his thumb against the seam where two glass panels met, the tiny friction sharpening his focus. “I thought that was the point of it—the Host’s experiment, the whole crucible thing. I thought if I did the right thing, if I got her to the right state, she would be whole again.”

Oudemia was quiet for a while before she answered, the kind of quiet that didn't ask to be filled. She said, finally, “Was it what she wanted?” Her tone was flat, no challenge in it, no comfort either.

He hesitated. “That’s the problem. I asked her, this afternoon, if she wanted it.” He looked at his hands, flexed them once, as if remembering the shape of her soul in his palm. “She said no. She said the woman who wanted it wasn’t here anymore, and the one who was here didn’t care one way or the other.”

Oudemia’s expression didn’t shift, but the line of her jaw tensed, ever so slightly. She said nothing, and the moment stretched.

He pressed on. “She refers to her day-self and night-self as two different people. Not as a metaphor, not as an illness, but as fact. The version that cares isn’t the one who’s in the room when you ask.”

Oudemia's fingers drummed once against her knee, the only visible sign she was still listening. “Why one thing,” she said. “Why not two?”

The question caught him at a vulnerable angle. “Because I loved her that way,” he said, and the words landed harder than he’d expected. “And because I told myself, if I could help her—help her reunite the pieces, or move on, or whatever—I’d have done at least one thing right in all this.” The admission tasted like copper on his tongue, but he said it anyway.

Oudemia watched him without answering right away. She said, “For her. Or for you.”

Adrien didn’t answer immediately. The confession had left him unbalanced; he could feel the heat from the caldera pressing up through the glass beneath them, his own pulse in his throat. “Both,” he said at last. “But more for her, I think.”

She did not correct him or challenge him, just let the answer sit, as if it was a stone she would someday pick up and use for something, but not tonight. They let the silence return, and for a while neither moved. Adrien leaned back, supporting himself with both hands, the reflected glow of the magma painting his forearms in shifting shades. Oudemia’s gaze returned to the horizon, where the last threads of daylight tangled with the fire below.

Eventually, he said, “I’m worried about tonight. I’m worried about Drosia.”

Oudemia’s attention shifted, but she did not prompt him.

“There’s a new rule,” he said, after waiting for the words to arrange themselves in a way that sounded less like defeat. “Amabilis announced it this morning. If anyone is about to be eliminated, they have to be warned. No one gets erased without knowing it’s about to happen.”

Oudemia said, “Why is that bad?”

He considered it. “Because I believe it means the audience is expecting someone to be at risk of elimination soon.”

She nodded, as if this was self-evident. “Why her?”

He took a breath, searching for the delicate way to say what he meant, and failed to find one. “She’s not like the others. She doesn’t fit. Not in the show, not in the… whatever this is. She’s not here to perform, or to connect, or to work through old heartbreak. She’s only here because she refuses to let go.”

Oudemia considered this, and a faint line appeared at the corner of her mouth, a suggestion of a smile that had never quite learned how to be one. “That is not a bad thing.”

He smiled, in spite of everything. “No. But it’s not the kind of thing this place forgives.”

They let that hang in the air. Oudemia went back to watching the caldera, her profile now outlined in molten light. Adrien felt the urge to ask her what she thought of the whole arrangement, but refrained; she had always been selective about what she shared.

Instead, he found himself thinking about the early years, before the centuries had started to stack together, before the first time he had watched someone he knew vanish from the world forever. How many times had he believed that if he just did the right thing, said the right words, he could keep something whole? How many times had he hurt, when he had failed? The pain of it was so deep that he sometimes wondered if it was the only real continuity in his life.

He sat with the weight of that, then said, “The twins are different. They don’t know me. Not the way the others do.”

Oudemia did not reply, but the focus in her eyes sharpened. It was a signal to continue.

He spoke quietly, as if afraid to call down the curse of what he was thinking. “Every woman in this place—” he stopped, started again. “Amabilis brought them here because of me. Or because of something I owed them personally. With the twins… there’s no personal responsibility. I didn’t even know about them until the Host made me come to get them.”

Oudemia let the silence run, but then, for the first time in memory, she asked him a question of her own accord.

Oudemia let the silence run. Then, unprompted, she said, “You hate this more.”

He blinked, thrown. “Hate what more?”

“This,” she said. She didn't gesture at anything in particular. “Them. The twins.” She was quiet again, working toward the rest of it slowly. “With the others, you knew them before. There was a reason. With these two, there is no reason. Just the taking.” She stopped there, as if she'd used up what she had to say on it.

It landed. He turned the thought over, tracing its grain from end to end. “I don’t know if it’s worse,” he said, “but it’s harder to let go of the idea that I should have prevented it. With the others, there’s a chain of reasons, something that makes it… inevitable, or at least logical. But with Summer and Autumn—” He shook his head, slow. “They’re just in the blast radius.”

Oudemia looked at him for a while before she spoke again. “In our home, a god took people,” she said. “No one asked why. It is just what gods did.” She looked back out at the caldera. “You do not think that way anymore.”

He said, “No.”

"You think it is yours to carry," she said. "The taking." It wasn't quite a question.

He nodded. “I do.”

Oudemia considered this for a long time. “I do not know if that is true,” she said finally. “But you believe it either way.” She didn't try to talk him out of it.

He didn’t answer right away. The silence felt like permission to think, so he used it. He stared at the glass under their feet, at the way the world burned below them and not once did it shudder or threaten to break. “Maybe. But if Amabilis did it just to see what would happen to them—if there was no reason but the experiment—it means someone like them will always end up here, no matter what I do.”

He had never said this aloud, even to himself. The admission was a tiny, private relief.

Oudemia didn't answer that directly. She was quiet for a while, and when she spoke again it wasn't really a response, just something she said. “The sea does not choose who it takes either.” She didn't explain what she meant by it, and didn't seem to need to.

He turned his head and met her gaze. “Is that how you survived it? Back then?”

She was quiet for a while. “At first I thought it was a curse,” she said. “Then I stopped thinking that.” She didn't say what she thought instead, or whether it helped.

He wanted to ask what it felt like, living without the illusion of meaning. Instead, he said, “I remember you at the palace, when I’d come in from the market. You used to sit by the well, and you’d stare at the shadow until the light changed. I always thought you were waiting for something.”

Oudemia shrugged, a small, uneven motion, and didn't answer the question directly. “If you want to talk more,” she said, “you can.”

He considered. He let the question spiral out in his skull, tumble and ricochet, try on its usual disguises. Why did he always have to be thinking? What would it even mean to think of something else—something not bent backward on his own guilt, obligation, or failure? It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine a future, or even a past, where he had not made the same mistakes, or where he had been someone worthier; it was that he had never in all his centuries learned how to live in that hypothetical.

He was always constructing elaborate arguments for why he should have known better, or done more, or loved harder. And so, at some point, he had realized it was just as well not to try at all. “I’m just tired of running the same circles in my head. If I could think of something else, I would.”

Oudemia seemed to find this funny, and she made a sound that was almost a laugh, or perhaps just a small hum of acknowledgment, but declined to elaborate. She settled back onto her elbows, her posture loose but not careless, the way a soldier learned to conserve energy during a siege.

The glow of the volcano shifted, the color deepening from orange to blue at the far edge of the caldera. Neither moved. Adrien let himself rest in the moment, in the pressure of her presence, the unforced quiet that had always made him feel less like a man and more like a tuning fork, vibrating at whatever frequency the space required.

After some time, Oudemia said, “Do you ever wish you had not survived?”

He didn’t need to ask what she meant. He shook his head, then said, “Never for long.”

She nodded, accepting that as a true answer. “Good.”

They let the silence have a second turn, and this time it was so complete that Adrien could hear the movement of air in his own chest, the slow, tidal intake and release. He wondered if Oudemia was measuring the silence too, or if she had long ago stopped keeping count.

He tried to imagine what it would feel like to simply embrace the present. He wondered if it was a form of luxury to sit here, on the world’s thinnest margin between destruction and safety, and know that nothing urgent was required of them. Maybe it was a kind of luxury only available to the very old, or the very numb, or to those who had lost enough that there was nothing left to fear.

He became aware, gradually, of the chill seeping into the glass they sat on. The temperature was always a negotiation between the heat of the caldera and the bite of the upper air. He turned to check on Oudemia, worried she might be cold, but found her with her bare feet splayed against the glass, her toes flexing and unflexing as if testing its resilience. He said, “Are you cold? We could go inside.”

She looked down at her feet, then at her knees, then back to him. “I like it here,” she said, and to his mild surprise, added, “The floor is smooth.”

He smiled, not the big kind, not a performance—just a small sideways acknowledgement of her having found something in this world she preferred over the alternatives. “You always did like the cold.”

Oudemia considered, then gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “It is better than the old cistern,” she said, and the words hung there, not as an accusation but as a simple inventory of facts.

He wanted to say he was sorry, that he had tried to find her, that he had spent years twisting himself into knots over the wrongness of it. But there was no point; she already knew, and more than that, she had chosen not to hold it over him. He decided instead to let the silence resume, and let the heat of the caldera bleed upward into his hands, and to forgive himself, temporarily, for not being able to change the past.

They remained like that for a long while.

He became aware, after a while, that Oudemia had gone very still. He glanced at her, and for a moment thought she had fallen asleep upright, but then she spoke, her voice soft and oddly formal, as if repeating a line from a play she had learned in childhood.

“The chiton itches less than I thought it would.”

He laughed, for real this time. The sound was low, but genuine, and it surprised him with its fullness. “That’s a relief,” he said, “You wear it well.”

He felt the rest of the day unwind in his chest, some of the tension leaving his shoulders and neck. For the first time in a long time, he sensed the possibility of things being okay—not perfect, not even happy, but survivable. A place where stillness was allowed, even encouraged, and where the next moment did not have to be a rehearsal for disaster.

They sat together, side by side on the glass corridor, the shifting light from the caldera painting blue and orange stripes across their skin, until the pulse of the volcano changed, just barely. A faint, almost imperceptible tremor passed through the structure, as if announcing the approach of shift change, or summoning them to whatever ritual or duty was next required.

There was no urgency. They had time, and they used it.

---

Recurring Author's Note: The (older) sister season, The HH, can be found here.

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