The Hunter leaned back in the armchair with the kind of calculated movement of someone who managed his own energy as a finite resource.
“Before Crest,” he said.
Not as a question.
As the beginning of something.
Morgan frowned slightly.
“What do you mean?”
“You lived there since the Fall.
But the Fall wasn’t the beginning of everything.” The dark eyes fixed on Morgan with that surgical attention.
“What do you remember about the day it happened?
Not after.
The moment itself.”
It was a strange question.
Not the question Morgan had expected.
He had expected something about Crest, about the creatures, about protocol — tactical information, the kind of exchange that made sense between survivors comparing resources.
Not a question about personal memory.
But there was something in the way the Hunter asked it — the precision, the complete absence of casualness — that made it clear this was not conversation.
It was investigation.
Morgan went back.
It was something he did carefully, rarely, always with the awareness that certain memories were like rooms in poorly maintained houses — it was possible to enter them, but the structure offered no guarantee the ceiling would remain where it was.
“It was noon,” he said.
“I know the time because I was at work.
There was…” A pause.
Work.
An entire world encapsulated inside those two words.
I walked into the conference room and was looking at the clock on the wall when it happened.”
“What exactly?”
“The sound first.” Morgan stopped.
Briefly closed his eyes.
“It wasn’t thunder.
It wasn’t an explosion.
It was more like…” He searched.
“Like a trumpet.
But not a real trumpet.
It was as if someone had taken the concept of a trumpet — what a trumpet means, what it announces — and turned that into sound without using an instrument.”
The Hunter did not move.
“And then?”
“Everyone ran to the window.
Me too.” Morgan opened his eyes and looked at the fire.
“I saw something descending from the sky.”
Silence.
“Descending.” The Hunter repeated the word carefully, like someone examining a fragile object.
“Describe it.”
“It looked…” Here was where memory became uneven, not because there was a gap, but because what had been seen did not fit within the available formats for description.
“It looked like a man.
The silhouette was a man’s.
But the scale was wrong — too large, or large in the wrong way, as though its size was relative to a different reference point.
And there was…
there was light.
But not light that illuminates.
“I don’t know how to describe it better.”
“You don’t need to.” The Hunter looked at the fire for a long moment.
“You’re confused by the question.”
“I am.”
“You want to know why I asked.”
“Yes.”
The Hunter rose from the armchair.
He walked toward the window covered by the sackcloth — not to look outside, only to stand there with his back to Morgan, as though what came next was easier to say without a face in front of him.
“Because you’re not the only one who saw it.” A pause.
“I’ve been collecting testimonies for two years.
People from different places, who don’t know each other, who never had contact.
And the memory of the moment of the Fall is always the same in the details that matter.
The sound of a trumpet.
Noon, local time — which is physically impossible because of time zones, but it happened that way.
And something descending.”
Morgan remained silent.
“Always appearing as a man,” the Hunter continued.
“Always with light that does not illuminate.
Always with the sensation — and nobody can fully explain this but everyone tries — that what was descending was real in a way that made everything else feel slightly less real by comparison.”
“What does that mean?”
The Hunter turned around.
And for the first time since Morgan had met him, there was something in his eyes other than the calibrated coldness of someone managing his own survival with surgical precision.
There was something older than that.
Something heavier.
“Have you ever heard of Eden?”