Bren didn’t wait for either of them to speak first this time.
"Show me," he said into the wrong-colored sky, into the silence where the voice usually was."You said an entire village went silent because of what you did. I want to see it. Not hear about it. See it."
That is not something I can simply show you, the voice said carefully, this time managing to sound almost human, this time folding the shamefulness of a moment ago back into its usual detachment. It exists in a version of Oakhaven I have not been able to reach since it happened. I do not have the ability to--
"Take me there the way you took me nowhere at all tonight," Bren interrupted. "The way the well took me somewhere without going anywhere. You’ve been showing me doors and walls and variations on this place all night. Find one."
There was a long pause, a long enough pause that Bren began to think perhaps this particular door had nothing on the other side, nothing at all.
There may be one way, the voice said quietly. I have never tried it, because I have never wanted to see it again. But if you are asking me to prove what I told you rather than simply trusting me--
"I am."
Then close your eyes.
Bren hesitated for only a moment before he did.
It was not that the world unfolded around him this time, not that it peeled back to reveal some great mystery. It was more like a dream folding over itself, replacing one room for another. When Bren opened his eyes again, he was not in the square anymore, but in something very much like it. The well stood in roughly the same place, the crooked market stalls arranged around it the same way, the village built around them in the same rough half-circle. But nothing was moving.
Not quite the same way that Oakhaven had been suspended in the moment of the message from beyond the wall, the dust hanging motionless in the air and voices caught mid-sentence. This was different. This was worse. The baker stood behind her counter with the bread arranged just so, her mouth open in a permanent approximation of a word she would never get to finish saying. The blacksmith’s hammer hovered an inch above the anvil, close enough that Bren could see the strain in the man’s neck, his muscles locked in a permanent pose of surprise.
Not paused. Silenced. Everything and everyone in this village had simply stopped, mid-sentence, mid-thought, and never resumed.
"This is what you did," Bren said quietly.
Yes, the voice said, and it sounded impossibly distant, even though it was right next to him. I did not mean for it to happen. I understand that does not matter to any of them.
Bren walked slowly past the frozen figures, their faces frozen in the same expressions he had seen every day in this village, the same daily rhythms captured forever in this single moment. He paused when he reached the well, running his fingers carefully over the moss-covered lip, half-expecting to find a carving there, BELOW. NOW.
He found nothing but smooth stone.
"She was never here, was she," Bren said slowly. "Ressa. She never carved anything into this well."
No. The voice almost sounded relieved to say it. She was here for a different reason. Bren-- I did not want you to see this next part. But you asked for proof, and proof does not let you choose which pieces you receive.
The voice gestured, or perhaps it simply drew Bren’s attention, to a small house at the edge of the square. Unremarkable, save for the tiny curl of smoke frozen above the chimney, the door slightly ajar as if someone had stepped out just a moment ago and never returned.
"Whose house is that."
Hers. The voice said. This was Ressa’s village, Bren. Before she ever stood outside your door. Before she ever waited four years for you to crack. She lived here, in this exact house, with a family who said their scripted lines to passing travelers just like everyone else-- until the day I finished listening, and every one of them stopped, mid-sentence, and never spoke again.
Bren’s stomach twisted violently. "She watched this happen. To her own family."
She was the only one who didn’t stop, the voice said more quietly, as if it were still painful to say even now. I don’t know why. I have never known why. Something about her cracked through, the same way something in you cracked through, right as the silence spread through everyone else around her. She woke up standing in the middle of a village where every person she had ever known had gone quiet forever, including the ones who loved her.
"And she blamed you."
She should have, the voice said. I expected her to. I would have understood if she’d spent every day since hating what I’d become. Instead she found me, eventually-- however something like me can be found-- and she asked me only one question. Not why I’d done it. Not how to fix it, because we both already knew there was no fixing it.
"What did she ask."
She asked what she could do to make sure it never happened again, the voice said. And I told her the only honest answer I had. Watch. Wait. If another crack ever appeared, in any version of this endless script, get to them before I did. Help them listen carefully enough to survive what I couldn’t.
Bren stood very still in the frozen square, understanding, in that sudden, visceral way all mourners understand, the true shape of everything Ressa had done. Four years of watching his stall. Four years of waiting outside a door that might never open. Not out of curiosity. Not even, really, out of hope. Penance, carried out by a woman who had lost absolutely everything she had ever loved to the same voice now claiming to guide him.
And she had died anyway, still trying to warn him, still trying to make sure his ending looked nothing like hers.
"Why didn’t you tell me this from the start," Bren said, and his voice cracked on the words in a way it hadn’t since the very first morning.
Because I was afraid that if you knew what she’d sacrificed to reach you, you would feel obligated to finish what I started, out of guilt rather than choice, the voice said. And I have already watched guilt make one person’s decision for her. I did not want to watch it happen twice.
The frozen village seemed to hold its breath around them, all those paused faces fixed in expressions no one would ever finish, and Bren felt, with a sudden almost-happiness that made his heart ache, that he knew exactly what question to ask next.
"If Ressa woke up when everyone else went silent," he said slowly, "and I’m the only one who’s ever cracked through the surface the way she did-- what happens to everyone else in Oakhaven, if I finish listening the way you did?"
The voice did not answer him right away.
And when it did, its voice was so quiet Bren almost missed it entirely.
I don’t know. That is the part I have never been able to predict.
You might be the only one who wakes up.
Or you might be the reason none of them ever do again.