Nobody slep.
They tried, or at least they went through the motions of trying — Elin sitting with her back against the well’s stone lip, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes open the whole time; Colm pacing a slow circuit around the square like he was standing watch over something that hadn’t been named yet; Bren himself lying on the cold cobblestones staring up at a sky that no longer felt like it belonged to just one village, because now he knew better.
By the time the false dawn started bleeding grey into the edges of the horizon, Bren gave up pretending. He sat up, and found Elin already looking at him.
"You didn’t sleep either," she said. It wasn’t a question.
"Couldn’t stop thinking about his face," Bren admitted. "The other one. The way he looked at me right before the window closed. Like he wanted to grab my collar and shake the danger into me because there wasn’t time to explain it properly."
"He looked scared," Elin said. "Not of you. For you."
Colm stopped his pacing and came to sit across from them, dropping down heavily like the night had finally caught up with his legs even if it hadn’t caught up with his mind. "We should talk about what Elin said last night. About the word. Wake, not save."
"I’ve been turning it over since she said it," Bren admitted. "Save implies something’s trapped and wants out. Wake implies something’s asleep and doesn’t know it yet."
"Which means," Elin said slowly, working it out as she spoke, "that maybe the half-changed ones — the ones stuck like your double — they’re not actually suffering the way we assumed. Maybe they’re just... dormant. Waiting for something to happen to them instead of choosing it."
"That’s worse," Colm said flatly.
"Why worse?" Bren asked.
"Because saving someone respects that they wanted saving," Colm said. "Waking someone who never asked to be woken — that’s not rescue. That’s just doing something to a person because you decided it was good for them."
The words landed harder than Colm probably meant them to. Bren felt something in his chest tighten, an old and unpleasant recognition. Six years he’d spent handing out water in a square that wasn’t real, following a script written into him before he’d ever had the chance to choose otherwise, and no one had asked him whether he wanted waking either. The entity itself had said as much, hadn’t it — that it had reached into him, cracked him open, set the whole unraveling in motion, all without so much as a warning first.
"I didn’t ask for this either," Bren said quietly. "Whatever gift or curse last night was, nobody offered me a choice at the start of it. The choice only showed up after everything had already begun changing."
Elin’s expression softened, but she didn’t back off the point. "That’s exactly why it matters now. You know what it feels like to have something enormous done to you without your permission. If you’re about to do that same thing to a hundred other versions of yourself, don’t you owe it to them to actually understand what you’re choosing on their behalf?"
Bren didn’t have an answer for that. He looked instead at the well, dark and still and utterly unbothered by the conversation happening six feet from its edge, as though the ancient presence beneath it had already said everything it intended to say for the night and was content to let the silence do its work on him.
"I want to try something," Bren said finally.
Colm’s eyebrows went up. "That sentence has not gone well for us so far tonight."
"I want to talk to him again. The other me. Not through whatever the ancient thing opened up — on my own. If this sight is really part of me now, and not just something borrowed, then maybe I don’t need permission to look."
Elin frowned. "Bren—"
"I’m not going to do anything reckless," he said, cutting off the warning before it fully formed. "I just want to see if I can find that window again without the presence’s help. If it can reach into a hundred versions of me without asking, maybe I can reach back the same way. On my own terms this time."
Colm looked unconvinced, but he didn’t argue further, and that alone told Bren something about how tired they all were — too tired to fight about caution when caution had already been argued into the ground twice that night.
Bren closed his eyes and reached for the sight the way he’d learned to reach for it in the well’s water hours earlier — not grasping, not straining, but opening, the way a hand opens rather than closes around something it wants to hold. At first there was nothing, only the ordinary dark behind his eyelids and the ordinary ache of exhaustion pressing at his temples.
Then, faint as a held breath, he felt it again. Not the vast unbearable scale of a hundred doors flung open at once — smaller this time, focused, a single thread instead of the whole tapestry. He followed it the way he might have followed a familiar voice through a crowded market, and the world behind his eyes sharpened into a square that wasn’t his own. Different cobblestones. A well positioned wrong, too close to the eastern wall. And there, sitting slumped against a stall exactly the way Bren had been sitting against the well moments earlier, was the other Bren.
He looked up sharply, as if he’d felt the attention before he’d seen its source.
You came back on your own, the other Bren said, something like grudging respect threading through the words. That’s new. Usually it’s the old thing doing the reaching, not us.
"I didn’t want to wait for it to decide when we got to talk again," Bren said. "You tried to warn me. I want to hear the rest of it."
The other Bren’s face did something complicated — relief and dread arriving together, like two guests who hadn’t planned on showing up at the same door. I don’t have long. It notices faster when I do this. But I’ll say what I can.
"Then say it."
The thing under your well isn’t offering you a gift, the other Bren said. It’s not lying, exactly — that’s the trick of it. Everything it’s told you is probably true. But finishing it for us doesn’t ask us anything first. It doesn’t wake us up gently and let us choose to keep going. It just... continues the story. Whatever version of us was frozen mid-change, it finishes that change on our behalf, using whatever momentum you gave it by finishing yours.
"So it would be choosing for you," Bren said slowly. "The same way it chose to crack me open in the first place, six years ago, without asking."
Exactly like that. Except worse, because you’d be the one making the choice this time, not it. It would just be using you to make it. That’s why I stopped halfway, all those years ago — not because I was too afraid to finish, like it probably told you. Because I understood, right at the edge of finishing, that finishing meant becoming something the thing under the well wanted me to become, and I never got to ask whether that thing and the person I wanted to be were the same person at all.
Bren felt the words settle into him like stones dropped into still water, each one sending out ripples that touched everything he thought he already understood about the night. "Then what do I do? If I say no, they all stay stuck. Half-changed forever, the way you’ve been."
I don’t know, the other Bren admitted, and for the first time all night, real uncertainty broke through the careful caution he’d been holding onto. But I know that staying stuck is a thing that happened to us, the same as everything else that’s happened to us tonight. It’s not nothing. It’s not good, either. But it’s ours, at least, in a way that finishing it on the old thing’s terms wouldn’t be.
The connection wavered, thinner now than it had been even a moment before, and Bren understood without being told that this window, too, was closing.
"Wait," Bren said. "Just tell me your name. Your real one, not Villager Forty-Seven. If we’re the same person split a hundred ways, I want to know what to call you."
The other Bren’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile, tired and worn and entirely human despite everything strange around it.
Find out yourself, he said. Same way you found out everything else tonight. I have a feeling you’re going to have plenty of time to ask.
The window closed on that, gentler this time than the abrupt severing before, and Bren opened his eyes to find Elin and Colm watching him with matching expressions of tightly held patience, waiting to hear whatever he’d learned.
"He’s right," Bren said. "It’s not a gift. It’s a decision it wants me to make so it doesn’t have to ask permission from anyone else."
"So what do we do with that," Colm asked.
Bren looked toward the well one last time, feeling the ancient presence’s silence stretch out beneath the question like it had been waiting all along for him to arrive at exactly this understanding.
"We stop assuming this is my decision to make alone," Bren said. "If it wants a hundred versions of me to finish changing, then a hundred versions of me should get a say in whether that happens. Starting with the one who just tried to warn me twice."