The stone beneath his feet had turned to mud, and he no longer stood on ground but on something between earth and water, warm and sticky, sucking at the soles of his boots with a small greedy hunger, so that every time he tried to lift one foot the other sank deeper, and he watched the leather around his ankle darken, peel, and crumble into gray dust that slid into the cracks, because the boot was dissolving, and after the boot would come his feet.
"Don't move," Rafael said gently. "The more you move, the faster you sink."
Esteban did not answer.
He had opened his mouth to say something and only cold air came out, his heart pounding hard enough to hurt his ribs and a sharp whistle ringing in his ears from a source he could not name, while the air in the room had grown thick, sweet, and metallic, clinging to the tongue like blood.
Rafael took a step closer.
It was not a violent step, since he set his foot down the way a man does in his own house, and the stone sighed beneath it and flowed, and he did not want to come closer, which was plain in his drooping shoulders and his low, sorrowful gaze, but he came closer all the same.
*Don't look at him.*
Esteban forced his eyes to move, to the right, to the hearth.
It was there in the ashes, a lump of charcoal, small and black, lodged between two half-burned logs and the size of a child's fist, and it lay only three steps from him, three steps across ground that was turning to mud.
He was not thinking about death, which astonished him afterward, because death was close beyond measure, as close as his sinking foot, but what occupied him was not death but a sentence, a single sentence spoken minutes ago by a thin man, still hanging in the air without an ending, *we hide*, and if he sank now, it would never be completed.
That thought alone, simple and foolish, was stronger than all the pain.
*You can't.*
*You can't reach it.*
His body knew before his mind did.
He bent, or rather did not bend, since something in him collapsed forward, heavy as a tree being felled, and he wrenched his right foot free with everything he had left and heard a wet, foul sound as the boot came away from it and stayed in the mud, and he lunged with a bare foot onto the dying floor.
The heat lashed him.
It was not a lash but a hand gripping his foot from below and trying to take it, and he screamed, the sound tearing out of his throat raw and animal and wordless, and fell to his knees, which sank into the mud up to the thighs, as the pain became a white fire stretching from his legs to his head.
"Esteban!"
Rafael shouted his name for the first time, and there was no gentleness in the voice.
But Esteban's hand had already arrived.
He had crawled half a step and his right arm had stretched toward the little hearth, fingers scrabbling through the cold ash, feeling it slip between them like flour, feeling a half-burned piece of wood, a hot stone, dust.
Then something solid.
Rough, black, light, with edges.
He closed his fist on it.
And at the moment the charcoal touched his palm, everything stopped.
No sound, no heat, no pain, and even the whistle in his ears fell silent, leaving only the heart, beating once, then once more, with terrible slowness, as if time had decided to grant him a single moment.
And in that moment the screen opened before his eyes.
It was not blue as usual but red, harsh, its writing trembling:
[Warning]
[You are attempting to create something without understanding it.]
[Probability of failure: extremely high.]
He stared at it.
He knew what it meant, because everything he had ever made, from the first sword to the last spear, rested on a single rule, that he could not make what he did not understand, and everything he had understood had melted in his hands, and this last thing, the charcoal, lay farther beyond his understanding than anything.
*No. No, no.*
The mud was climbing his legs, and Rafael's hand was rising.
He had no time to be terrified, only time for a single thing, to remember.
*"The coal in my furnace and the diamond in a king's crown come from the same origin."*
The voice came from far away, rough, dry, and old, a woman's voice feeding a fire with black lumps on a distant night.
*"Burned wood, and after a thousand years under the earth, under pressure and heat, it becomes something else, something harder than any iron."*
Under pressure.
Under pressure and heat.
*And everything in this world transforms if you press it with enough understanding.*
Something trembled in the red screen.
Its color turned slowly from red to a pale blue, as if someone had seen what was in his head, and then the writing changed:
[Partial understanding: pressure transforms coal.]
[Skill acquired: Carbon Compression]
[Level: weak... very weak.]
[Enough to make only something small, such as a dagger.]
He almost laughed.
He was weak, as weak as a man could be, and yet in this world that melted, this feeble skill, born a second ago, was the strongest weapon he owned.
And in his palm, around the charcoal, he saw, not with his eyes but with his hand, a small world of thousands of narrow black threads packed tight and sliding over one another like pages in a book, something soft and brittle that crumbled when pressed, layers that slid. Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
And what if they did not slide?
If they were all drawn tight, every thread to every thread, from every side, with no gaps.
The blue stone on his chest had burst, not with heat this time but with silence, and behind it, within it, something was watching him, with no face and no eyes, only complete attention, as if someone had been waiting for a very long time for him to ask exactly this question.
And he pressed.
Rafael had stopped.
Esteban saw him between his lashes like a distant shadow, a thin man in a gray coat with his hand raised and his finger an arm's length from Esteban's forehead.
And Esteban's right hand was slowly rising from the ashes.
He did not know how to feel it, for it was not his hand, heavy and light at once, as if holding something with the weight of a stone and the edge of a droplet, and he felt it tremble between his fingers, not from fear but from completion.
He opened his palm.
There was a dagger in it.
Small, the size of his hand, with a transparent blade that gleamed like a piece of frozen light, without a hilt, without ornament, without a flaw, colorless, catching the firelight and scattering it across the room in a tiny, trembling rainbow.
Diamond.
And it was cold to the touch, a strange, living cold, as if it were the only cold thing in a world on fire.
It did not resemble any weapon he had ever made, since everything before had carried some of his effort in its feel, the roughness of wood, the weight of iron, the mark of his hand, but this was pure, with no trace of anyone in it and nothing to show that it had been made, as if it had always been there at the heart of the charcoal, waiting only for someone to understand it.
And it occurred to him that there was something frightening in that purity, the way water so clear that its bottom cannot be seen is frightening.
Rafael looked at it.
Esteban saw his face change slowly for the first time since he had entered, his pity vanishing and something subtler taking its place, the astonishment of a man seeing what he had never seen.
"What is that?" he said in a low voice.
Esteban did not answer.
He rose.
He did not know how, with his legs half dissolved and the floor beneath him mud, but something in his body lifted him, as if the dagger itself were pulling him out of the drowning, and with every step he took through the melting mud he heard with strange clarity his own breath, and the breath of the man before him, and the drops of molten stone falling into the silence as though counting what time remained, until he stood on one bare foot and on the other half flesh, his hand around the blade trembling, and not from fear.
"No," Rafael whispered.
He was not speaking to him, but to something farther away.
Then he raised his finger and pointed.
Nothing happened.
The transparent blade was in front of Rafael's face, a hand's breadth from his finger, and the finger pointed, and everything around them softened and ran and reddened, the floor, the wall, the chair, the furniture, everything but this one small thing that did not change.
A second passed.
Then another.
Then, slowly, like a man testing cold water, Rafael touched the blade with the tips of his fingers.
It did not melt.
Its color did not change, no steam rose from it and no glow, and it stayed as it was, transparent, still, and solid, like a remnant of a world untouched by time.
"Diamond," Rafael whispered.
His voice was different, with no gentleness and no sorrow, a bare voice.
"Clever." He smiled a strange, trembling smile, like a man who has seen an old friend in a place he never expected. "It never occurred to me that anyone would think of it."
The dagger had reached his throat.
Esteban did not know when, having felt no movement of his arm, but there it was, the transparent blade against the skin of a thin man, the first blood gathering in a fine line along its edge and the gray eyes looking at him from a distance smaller than a breath.
Silence fell.
It was the longest silence of his life.
In the room the collapse of the stone had stopped, and the floor no longer softened, as if something somewhere had pulled a thread, and the air was heavy now only with smoke, dust, and that sweet smell.
"Kill me," Rafael said.
Esteban did not move.
"You can. Do it." There was no challenge in his voice, only something like relief. "No one will stop me."
"No."
"Then what?"
Esteban did not know how to answer, feeling the blade tremble in his palm and the pulse of the man's neck beneath the edge, fast and alive, and feeling that everything he had built on for ten years, everything he thought he wanted, stood here at this small point before a man who was asking him to kill him.
*We hide. We don't kill.*
"You're coming with me," he said at last.
"Where to?"
"To a place where you'll answer."
Rafael gave a short, sad laugh.
"You don't know what you're asking."
"I know."
"The answers will hurt you." This story is hosted at g.com.
"They can't be worse than what I carry."
"They are worse." Rafael said it with a sincerity untouched by anything else. "Far worse, because now you carry something that can be borne, but what I'd tell you can't be."
"I'll try."
Rafael looked at him for a long moment, then closed his eyes briefly, like a man deciding to set down a weapon from his shoulders.
"I won't tell you anything."
"You will."
"And why do you think so?"
Esteban looked into his eyes and answered with a single word in a steady voice:
"Because you laughed."
The blue writing appeared as it always did.
He barely saw it, as it trembled in the air, faint, between his face and the captive's:
[Added: Diamond Dagger]
Then it went out, and another line rose after it, familiar, but this time carrying something new:
[Ascension: Wood Rank (+3)]
He stared at it.
He did not know what the parenthesis meant, or the number, but he felt the stone on his chest calm, pulsing slowly, a soft rhythm like the breath of a sleeper, as if it had finished heavy work.
"What are you looking at?" Rafael asked with real curiosity.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at the void again."
"I know."
"And that too is something I've never seen." Rafael tilted his head slightly, despite the edge at his throat. "Perhaps you're stranger than I thought."
"Master!"
The shout cut through the whole room.
It came from the corridor at the melted door, where Julio stood in his tight black coat stretched over his belly, a spoon in his right hand and his bowl still in his left, with pure terror on his flushed, mustached face, and in his fist, gripped by the collar like a mischievous puppy, hung a thin young man with a freckled face and an ugly star drawn in charcoal on the back of his hand, dangling above the floor with feet that did not touch it.
"I found him in the kitchen!" Julio cried in a broken voice. "Trying to steal the spoons! He... he..."
He stopped.
He saw the room, the melted walls, the red floor, the door that was no longer a door, and two men standing in the middle, one with a dagger at the other's throat.
The bowl fell from his hand.
The gray-green soup spilled across the floor, thickened slightly, and then burrowed a small hole between the molten stones.
"Esteban!" Rico shouted, his eyes wide and his face white as paper. "I was trying to save you! I had to... this man is huge and..."
"Let him go, Julio."
It was Rafael's voice, calm despite the blade still at his throat.
"Master... but..."
"Let him go."
Julio released the collar, and Rico landed on his feet like a cat, staggered, then ran to Esteban and looked at the dagger, then at the man who held it, then at Esteban.
"What did you do?" he whispered.
"I don't know."
"Did... did we win?"
Esteban looked at Rafael, and Rafael was looking at him with calm, sorrowful eyes and a thin line of blood on his throat.
"I don't know," Esteban said again. "I think this is only the beginning."
And in the silence of the melted room everyone heard the sound of a drop falling on cooled stone, and then another.
"Julio," Rafael said quietly, as though asking for tea.
"Yes... yes, Master!"
"Tell everyone not to interfere, not the guards, not the servants, not the cook." He paused. "Especially not the cook."
"At once!" Julio nearly fell as he saluted, then hesitated. "And should I... clean this up?"
"No. Go."
Julio ran down the corridor, the echo of his spoon scattering across the walls and fading little by little.
And Esteban, Rico, and Rafael stood in the red room, none of them knowing what to say, with the transparent blade glittering between them like the last thing in the world worth trusting.
And none of them knew that what had begun that night would not end in this room.