“To the Well!” he shouted again as he corralled the soldiers towards the center of the platform. “To the Well! To the Well! Everyone to the well!”

“Does that—”

“Nesr Wald has been lost! To the Well!”

“—include—”

“To the Well! To the Well! Everyone to the Well!”

“Are we—”

“To the Well!”

She looked at her friends, who were as helplessly lost as she was.

“W-well, h-he does say ‘everyone’…” Shera said, shifting from side to side.

She wasn’t wrong, and so the girls hesitantly followed the crowd that was gradually congregating around the platform’s oddest structure.

For a long time, they waited while Geel Hattuck operated the machinery, first letting the bucket loose, down, down, down into the abyss, then dragging it back up, churning through thousands of meters of rope as he did so. The organization stood in silence for what felt like an eternity, the only sounds coming from the massive crank as Geel turned it slowly and methodically, rhythmically, one revolution at a time. Dusk was upon them when the bucket finally resurfaced, and Geel locked the device into place with a loud click.

Then things happened. What had been a chaotic, unordered clump of people standing with no reason suddenly aligned itself, and though anybody had barely moved, a single-file line manifested out of nowhere, turning the clump of people into in a spiral, twisting inwards through the building and then back out again. It was a queue, and the girls were trapped somewhere in the middle, leaving them with no choice but to play their part in the winding snake, around and around to the center.

Geel was delivering a substance into their hands, a foul, purple-gray substance in an ambiguous state of matter, a fog that behaved like a liquid, or a slime that behaved like a gas, which swirled unevenly in the bucket. Each member in turn scooped out a small amount into a pipe, which everyone seemed to have on their person already, and held it out to Geel who lit it under his own palm.

Myra needn’t worry about not having her own pipe. Geel had one ready for her, and two more for the others, which he handed out in silence, communicating nothing save through his dark, ice-cold eyes.

They got their pipes, got their weird substance, got it lit, and they waited for everyone to do the same.

And then—

Nothing much happened.

Everyone smoked in silence, filling the air with a disgusting dense gas. But that was it. In Ralkenon, they had been celebrating. They weren’t celebrating here, not even close, and obviously the circumstances didn’t call for it—someone had died—but they weren’t grieving, either. They just weren’t doing anything. They didn’t speak, just gazed off into the distance with vacant eyes.

None of the girls were dumb or brave enough to actually try the drug themselves, and they subtly pushed the air around them to dodge the secondhand smoke that had blanketed the area. Myra was ready to fight them off if they tried to force anything on her, but ultimately, nobody seemed to care what they were doing. Nobody said anything, or in all honesty, paid them any much attention at all.

It was awkward. It was dull.

It was the ideal state of affairs.

Y’know, Roc was sitting like this, during the celebration in Ralkenon, wasn’t he, just off to the side? He had been on the ground, not engaged in the festivities at all. That was right before he flipped his shit and assaulted me.

She scanned for him and found him in the crowd. As always, he was hunched over, eyes fixed on the ground.

It was the ideal state of affairs, objectively, but it didn’t take long before Myra was bored. She wasn’t learning anything, and she was anxious to just turn in for the night and get on with the rest of the loop the next morning. In the dead silence, she couldn’t even talk to her friends, not without drawing everyone’s attention. Iz occasionally looked her away with a questioning look in her eyes, but there was only so much they could communicate with funny looks. Eventually, Iz closed her eyes, and she may have fallen asleep in the sitting-up position.

And eventually, mercifully, people started to leave. It was a trickle first, and then a wave. Myra got up when maybe half of the group was gone, and then Iz, who was awake after all, followed her.

She collapsed into her bed. It was quite late now, and her body was ready to drift off, but her mind was still wary. The people around her weren’t all quite ready to tuck in; many stood around the barracks idly, some of them finishing off the final remnants of their smokes. Iz was already asleep, though, and Myra was fighting off the heaviness in her eyelids, and then she wasn’t even fighting it, just letting them down because it felt so good to do so. She let darkness take her, and her consciousness slipped away…

…

There were some noises, but…

…

…

◆

“Someone has been lost.”

Myra went up.

No part of her, not the part of her that was dreaming nor the part that was waking up nor the part that still thought she was falling asleep was expecting to go up. It was a hypnic jerk without end—no, she had definitely gone up, and she was on a slope for some reason, and there were loud banging noises everywhere. She yelped, and she scrambled to get a handhold on something, but her hands only found her own bed sheets as gravity took its hold and rolled her off the edge of her mattress. What what what what—

She hit the wooden floor, hard, knocking the wind out of her stomach. Someone stepped over her. “Hey!” she called, trying to sit back up. “Rude way to fucking wake—”

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Something hard and sharp smacked into her temple as she was sitting up. She screamed, knocked back to the floor, in excruciating, skull-pounding agony. “Augh!” Something heavy was dragged over top of her. It was a large piece of furniture. It was a bed.

“Someone has been lost.”

It wasn’t Geel’s voice. No, it was a hundred voices, speaking in a low, dull unison.

“I know someone has been lost!” Myra shouted. “Fuck!” She grabbed onto her head. Am I bleeding? “Fuck!”

Somebody stepped over her again, the deliberate avoidance serving as the only sign that anybody could even see her. She crawled out into the open and scrambled to her off-balance feet.

What struck her first about the murk bogs was that they had the same far-off, distant stares they’d had earlier in the night. Instead of idling around, though, they were busy.

They were moving the beds. Each one lifted from one side, then pulled, dragging the feet on the lower side and practically ripping up the floor. Each one, a single unit over. They were moving the shelves, packing and unpacking, tearing the room apart and putting it back together.

Myra blinked. Wait, just like Iz and I theorized—

“Someone has been lost.”

Wait, Iz? Where’d she go?

Partial realizations kept coming amidst the confusion. If it’s just like we guessed, then—Fuck! That also means—!

Still clutching her forehead, which was wetter than it should have been, she dashed outside, frantically looking for it. I’m not too late—?

Off in the distance, slow-moving, she saw them. A pair of soldiers, dragging a bed behind them through the mud. Where the fuck are Iz and Shera?

Her feet carried her towards the men with the bed. “What are you doing?! Where are you taking that?!”

“Someone has been lost.”

“I can fucking see that!”

She grabbed uselessly at one of the bed posts. “Why are you throwing this away? What’s in here?!” She was no match for the brute strength of the murk bog soldiers, who carried ceaselessly onwards.

She grabbed at one of the bed sheets and the neatly made bedding unraveled. The soldiers didn’t seem to care, leaving it in the dirt. A pistol fell out from under his pistol, smacking to the ground. I found that in my search the last time, Myra remembered. She took a look at it while the soldiers continued to make off like bandits with the mattress and frame.

“Someone has been lost.”

Two more soldiers showed up behind her to pick up the things that had fallen to the ground. With the same clockwork cadence, the first one scooped the bedding into her arms and followed after the others. The other one tore the pistol from her hands while barely looking at her. There hadn’t been anything odd about the pistol, not anything that Myra could see, not anything that would make anyone want to toss it.

But it wasn’t as if Myra could protest. How could she protest something she didn’t understand to someone who would not explain?

“Someone has been lost.”

It was loud, when they tossed the bed over the edge. It slammed and cracked against the branches on the way down, and there was even a very faint crash that might have been the thing hitting the damn ground, which really did exist.

All that theorizing about Lukai’s bed, puzzling over the bedsheets and the evidence and the circumstances of his death, and they just—this was something they just did? When someone died? What the fuck was going on?

And where the fuck were her friends?

There was some light, off in the distance, far on the near-opposite side of the damn platform. Myra ran, but she was quickly out of breath having to stop to recompose herself and clutch her head. She kept running anyway. On the far side of the platform, a similar sight was apparent, but greater. There was a weapons shed, one of many the murk bogs had, but this was one they were forbidden from entering. It was a personal storage system belonging to Nesr Wald. It was surrounded on all sides by soldiers, crouching at the bases of the four walls.

“—— has been lost.”

“Huh? What was that?”

The soldiers lifted. They stood up, slowly, ripping the entire building—floor, walls, and ceiling—out of the ground.

And slowly, without even speaking or taking directions, they made their way to the edge of the platform. Somehow, they were able to push the whole thing over the edge, the soldiers on the far side somehow twisting themselves under it without being crushed, the contents making a cacophony as they crashed about on the inside.

“Nothing has been lost.”

“Nothing?!” Myra cried between her intense gasping breaths. “What do you mean, noth—” She couldn’t even finish as overwhelming nausea

◆

For the second time, Myra awoke disoriented and confused.

It was daytime now. It might have been close to noon. The sun was bright and it really hurt.

She was lying on a blanket, but it was out on the grass, near the bridge at the front edge of the platform. Slowly, she realized that her head was bandaged, and that there was a stand next to her, with a bag of clear fluid hooked by a tube into her arm. To her immense relief, both Iz and Shera were sitting next to her. Iz was focused intently on the runework they’d built earlier in the month.

“Oh my god,” Myra muttered. “What the hell is going on?”

They both snapped their neck to look at her. “Myra!” Iz said. Her face was washed with relief. “You’re awake…”

“What’s going on?” she asked again.

“W-we sh-should be asking you that,” Shera said. “I found you over by the edge where they tossed that building. Y-you fainted right in front of me, and it looked like you’d been hit on the head really hard…”

Just hearing that made her head hurt worse. “That was… an accident, I think,” she muttered. “God, I think I have a concussion…”

“That’s what we thought, too,” Iz said. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on in the barracks, so we brought you out here. We debated getting you to a real hospital, but we thought it’d take too long, so we raided the medical cabinets for elixirs, and then we got the medical officer once they snapped out of—whatever it was—they set you up with the fluids.”

Myra slowly tried to sit up, trying as hard as she could to not think about the tube poking into her arm. That kind of thing squicked her out.

“… How long was I out?”

“About nine hours,” Shera said.

She probably could have guessed. The stench from that drug was still lingering around the air, so there was no chance she’d slept through an entire day.

“Okay. But what happened last night?”

“Well, I woke up to some noises in the distance,” Iz said. “The barracks were still calm at that point… I thought I’d go check out the noise, figured I could come get you if it was anything. It was over by the main building, they were trashing some junk, mostly papers, chucking it off of the platform. They were completely unresponsive. Didn’t seem to notice I was there. I found Shera, and we both went back to the barracks, but they were making a mess, and you were gone, so we split up to look for you. Shera found you right when you passed out, I think.”

“Yeah, uh, they were trashing Nesr Wald’s bed and moving all the rest of them. They didn’t seem to know or care I was asleep, and I hit my head in the chaos…”

Iz winced. “Well, the doctor—or medical officer or whatever they’re called—says you should be fine by the end of the day.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “So what was up with all that? I don’t suppose we’re lucky enough they bothered to explain it.”

“Eh-h… we did ask…” Shera said.

“And?”

“They were, uh…” Iz shifted oddly. “Honestly, it’s probably easier to explain if you just go ask yourself. You actually speak the language, so maybe you’ll get more than we could…” She didn’t sound like she believed it, and Shera looked immensely skeptical.

Regardless, Myra agreed to take her suggestion. Iz helped Myra remove the tube from her arm, then made sure she could stand. Myra had to use the bathroom before anything else.

Then she dragged herself to the dining hall. It was lunchtime, and the hall was packed and cheery with talk and laughter. Maybe she was feeling bold, or maybe it was the concussion. She went straight to the top.

“Geel,” she addressed plainly.

The psycho doctor looked at her, his face plastered all over with his usual cocksure smirk. “I see our rune lady’s up and about! What can I help you with?”

“Why’d you all toss all of Nesr Wald’s shit?”

Momentary confusion crossed his face, and he asked casually, without even a hint of his usual sarcasm, “Tossed all of who’s shit, now?”