Rafael did not move, his finger still raised toward the door, without tension and without effort, like a man pointing out a chair and inviting someone to sit, and behind Esteban's back came a sound he could not explain, something moving, not a rustle or a creak or a hiss, but more like a candle bending.
He turned.
The huge iron lock on the door was softening.
He watched it change where it hung, slowly losing its edge, its corners drooping, a thick red thread running from it, dense and glowing in the firelight like molten honey, and a drop fell onto the stone floor and then another, and when they touched the stone they made no sound, no hiss, no steam, no smell, only stone reddening where the drop landed, then softening, then sinking.
A moment later there was no lock on the door.
Then the nail holding the hinge went soft, then the hinge itself, then the corner of the door and the edge of the wall beneath it, all of it pouring down into the floor like wax in the heat.
"Don't worry." Rafael's voice was gentle, nothing like the voice of a man doing what he was doing. "This won't hurt you, because I don't like anyone to be hurt."
Esteban could not answer.
The smell in the room had changed, turning into the smell of wet iron, sweet and metallic at once, clinging to the throat like the sweetness of medicine, and through the melted door the cold air of the corridor crept in, carrying a very distant sound, Julio muttering to himself about soup, unaware of anything.
His throat was dry as ashes, and his heart, which he had thought had feared everything it could fear, pounded at a speed he had not yet known.
He reached for the nearest staff.
It was a length of elm leaning against the wall, a piece of firewood some servant had forgotten by the hearth, and he touched it with his open palm without thinking and felt it respond, the wood trembling, lengthening, hardening, and in a second becoming a light, balanced spear with a gleaming gray head.
He stood before Rafael with the spear shaking in his hand.
"Beautiful," Rafael said sincerely. "I've seen someone do that exactly once, years ago, and it wasn't so simple for him."
Esteban did not answer, and charged.
The charge was not what mattered, but the second before it and the second after, as he saw the spearhead approach the gray shoulder slowly, in a rhythm that never ended, saw Rafael's face calm and unchanging, saw his hand rise.
Rafael's finger touched the blade.
Esteban heard nothing.
He only felt the weight pass from his hand into the floor, the strange lightness that comes where weight had been, and when he looked at his palm he saw a short pole of wood with no head, while on the ground by his foot a small gray pool slowly hardened as if waiting to forget that it had ever been a weapon.
"A sword," Rafael said gently. "Try a sword."
He tried a sword.
Then a shield.
Then a small dagger from another piece of wood.
Then a stone that he tore from the wall with his fingers, picturing its hardness, picturing the hardest thing he knew.
Everything melted.
Each time he saw the iron gleam in his hand for a fraction of a second, beautiful and solid, like what he had learned in those long nights between the fire and the hammer, and then Rafael's finger touched it, or his palm, or even, as it seemed to Esteban, his gaze, and it turned into something with no name and ran.
Rafael was not fighting, only standing where he was, half leaning against the hearth, his hand moving only when he had to, a small motion as if brushing away a fly.
And that was precisely what killed courage.
Esteban retreated one step, then two, until his back pressed against the cold wall, his breath coming audibly and his sweat gathering in his eyes and burning them, while in his head one lonely voice would not stop, *nothing lasts, nothing lasts, nothing lasts.*
Rafael said the same words aloud.
"Nothing lasts."
Esteban's knees shook, and he felt them betray him, heavy and soft as if made of clay, no longer knowing whether he stood by his own will or only because the wall held him up, and before him on the floor lay what remained of his weapons, a small gray pool, a stump of wood, and a half-melted piece of stone, everything he had made through months of exhaustion, everything he had understood with such struggle, reduced to a handful of scraps in minutes.
Rafael was not boasting, and that was the cruelest part, for his face showed no gloating and no pleasure, but something like an apology.
In a moment, without deciding to, Esteban lifted his gaze to the air before him and thought a single word.
The blue panel appeared.
He had no time, so he pressed on inventory, then on weapons, and the familiar list opened before him:
[Straight sword, short spear, dagger, axe, wooden shield]
But all its letters were red this time.
And above them all, in a single line, was a short phrase:
[Non-resistant material] Visit g.com for the full chapter.
He stared at it.
He read it twice, then three times.
*Non-resistant.*
There was something in the sentence, not an explanation but a small crack in a wall, because if these materials were non-resistant, then there must be resistant ones, and if something existed that did not melt, it was somewhere, perhaps close, perhaps even in this very room.
He did not yet understand what it meant, but he raised his head.
Rafael was watching him with quiet curiosity, tilting his head slightly as if seeing something only his kind could see.
"You're staring at nothing," he said. "How interesting. No one does that usually, except those who see something we don't."
Esteban did not answer, and closed the panel with a thought.
At that moment, from somewhere far off in the fortress, a sound came.
A whistle.
Faint, sharp, broken, three short notes and one long.
Esteban froze, because it was the signal Rico had agreed on with him, *if you hear a whistle, run*, and the young man was surely in trouble, and surely he had to move now, leap through the melted door, run, and look for the only man who had followed him in this world.
But his feet did not move.
It was not courage that held him, for Rafael stood between him and the door, not blocking it with a gesture or a glance or a word, only standing, and that was enough for him to understand that any step would be his last.
And Rafael did not turn his head toward the whistle, as if he knew it already.
"Before we go on."
Rafael had finally lowered his hand and leaned his shoulder against the hearth, his whole face composed in a calm that resembled sorrow.
"Why did you come?"
At first Esteban did not understand the question, as the words reached him from far away, from behind the roar of his own blood.
"What?"
"Why did you come, Esteban? To this place, with your face uncovered, with a hand bearing no tattoo, a man who knows no one." He asked it with real gentleness, not mockery. "I'm asking because I want to know, since no one has come before you."
Esteban's voice caught in his chest and then came out low and rough.
"Because you took half the world."
Rafael did not move.
"And we won't let you take the children too."
Silence fell.
A long, heavy silence in which nothing could be heard but the hiss of the fire and the drops of molten iron falling slowly to the floor behind Esteban.
Then Rafael smiled.
It was not a mocking smile, nor a defeated one, but the smile of a man who has heard something he thought he had forgotten long ago.
"So it was a mistake."
"What?"
"It was a mistake." Rafael bowed his head, and in his voice was a strange note, closer to a confession to himself than speech to another. "We should have hidden the whole world."
Esteban froze.
"Because if you take half the world," Rafael went on in a low voice, looking at the fire, "the other half remains, a half with enough anger to move, everywhere, on every road, searching, asking, coming to our fortresses with their faces uncovered." He raised his eyes to him. "Like you."
There was no threat in the sentence, and it was closer to an elegy.
Esteban felt it enter his chest like a thin knife, because he understood it described no one but him, for he was the anger that remained, the other half that had not been hidden, who had come carrying in his eyes enough to stand before a man who melted iron.
And Rafael said it without hatred, like one lamenting a mistake in calculations he had not made himself.
"You..." Esteban swallowed. He felt something stirring in his chest, far from the stone, far from fear, something very old whose name he did not yet know but which pressed on his ribs from inside. "What do you mean?"
"What did I mean?" This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
"What do you mean, hide it?" He did not know how the voice came out, trembling and louder than he intended. "To hide the world. Didn't... didn't you kill them?"
Rafael looked at him.
And looked. And looked.
Then he laughed.
A short, light, gentle laugh, like a man from whom a word has slipped that should not have been said and who did not entirely regret it, with no gloating in it, but the laugh of someone carrying a heavy secret who feels, for a brief moment, its lightness.
He did not answer.
"Tell me." Esteban took a step forward, despite the floor softening beneath his foot. "Tell me where."
"I can't."
"You..."
"I can't, Esteban." There was no evasion in his voice, but a man saying his hand was bound, and that he knew it. "And I don't say that because I don't want to."
He said nothing more.
He stood there, smiling a small sad smile, his eyes on Esteban and his hand slowly returning to his side.
Esteban could not move.
The silence was more eloquent than any answer, and in it something happened for which he was not ready at all, something more dangerous than fear and harder than anger.
Hope began to rise in him.
It was not great hope, or even clear hope, but a very thin thread, like a breeze in a closed room touching his skin and making it prickle, *we hide, we don't kill, we don't destroy*, a single word that had passed from the mouth of a man who did not love violence.
*If they had hidden them...*
He did not finish the thought, and could not.
He felt his hand press against his chest, where the blue stone was beating violently now, with a force he had never known, as if screaming something he did not understand, his breath coming in fragments, his eyes burning, and in his throat something that neither wept nor laughed.
Ten years.
Ten years of grieving for what he thought was dead, and in a single sentence, from a thin man standing before a hearth, the possibility that it had never died.
*Lucia...*
Rafael looked at him with eyes in which no trace of amusement remained.
"You're thinking something now, aren't you?"
Esteban did not answer.
"Don't." Rafael said it in an almost pitiful voice. "Hope is worse than despair, I know."
And the floor began to heat.
Esteban did not notice at first, as the warmth crept up from the stone beneath his boots slowly, the way warmth creeps from a nearby furnace, and then it intensified, and the stone grew soft under his sole, and he began to sink into it, a centimeter at a time.
He stepped back and found the wall behind him softening too.
He raised his head, and Rafael had moved away from the hearth, with a new look in his eyes, the look of a man who has decided something heavy.
"I'm sorry, Esteban."
Rafael did not move or raise his hand, only looked.
And in Esteban's chest the blue stone was beating madly, hot as an ember, burning his skin and screaming, and before his eyes, red and steady and unchanging:
[Warning: opponent beyond your level]
He retreated into the corner with his back pressed to the shifting stone, his feet sinking, and his eyes, searching for an exit, for a trick, for anything, suddenly flashed on a small spot far from the fire.
In the corner of the hearth, among the cold ash, lay a small black lump the size of a child's fist, a piece of charcoal, the remains of wood burned long ago and abandoned in the ashes.
He did not understand why his heart stopped at the sight of it.
He had no answer, only eyes that could not leave it and a body that listened to that small black lump the way a person listens for his own name in a crowd.