The man ran his hands over the stone until his fingers caught on an imperceptible seam in the rock. “Gotcha,” he smiled.

With a bit of effort, he dug his fingers into… something. Kylara took a few steps to the side to get a better view of what he was doing, but she couldn’t see any mechanism. But he did something and the rock face opened outward, revealing a dark passageway. Kylara frowned. How had he figured that out? The trick seemed obscure even for a warbler.

Kylara let him go ahead. There was no way she was walking into a dark cave without watching someone go first. But the man went without hesitation and then motioned her to follow–as if he was the easiest person to trust in the world.

The air was warmer in the passageway and significantly more humid than in the foggy ravine. The second thing she noticed was the buzzing. It was much louder. There were other noises mixed in too. Chattering, crunching, rustling, clicking, tapping. The more Kylara listened, the more noises she could distinguish and the less she wanted to. She tried to ignore them.

Her companion seemed unbothered by the noise. He was searching his pockets for something. After a moment he produced what looked like a glowing orb. It was about the size and shape of a large yam. The shimmer Kylara had noticed before appeared again as he threw the orb into the air.

To Kylara’s surprise, the orb floated. It hovered about half a metre above their heads. It did not cast a strong light, but it was enough to see by and slightly blue-tinted. Kylara imagined it would look brighter when they were further from the entrance.

The man looked at the light with satisfaction. “It should follow us,” he said.

He stepped to the side as if to test it. Sure enough, the light bobbed a bit to the side too. Kylara did the same. The light stayed in place.

“Well,” he corrected, “I guess it will only follow me. Should be good enough though.” He looked at her, “Don’t wander off.”

Kylara had no plans to, but she moved a bit closer to him anyway. He seemed a bit relieved. “What country is it from?” she asked, pointing her head in the direction of the light.

“Honestly?” the man said, “I can’t remember. I’m sure I knew at some point, but not anymore.”

Kylara nodded. It was somehow reassuring that the warblers lost memories in the warrens too. It was even more reassuring when they admitted to it. Warblers were famous for having an almost fool-proof memory. At the University, they spent years training different memory techniques as contingencies. In fact, Kylara had heard that was what they spent the most time studying.

The man gestured in front of him and after a second’s delay, the orb drifted slowly in front of them. It was vibrating slightly. Kylara could almost imagine the buzzing was coming from the orb and not the walls. Almost.

“It comes in handy a lot,” the warbler said.

Kylara wondered where the orb was from. Perhaps there was a light country? It was a common myth that everything you could key a ward to had a country and vice versa, but it was a good rule of thumb. And it was possible to ward against light. Kylara used to do it all the time. Light wards made mirrors. There wasn’t much need for mirrors, but light wards were the easiest way to make wards visible to the general public, who usually complained that wards were invisible to ordinary sight. Which meant nearly every ward Kylara had ever made had been combined with some sort of light ward.

A light country would be interesting. She wondered how their magic might work. Would it be mirror based? Would there be a lot of rainbows? Or would it be too bright to see anything at all? Would the people there be blind? Maybe it blinded them with too much light. Maybe light country was considered Desert.

“One more thing,” the man said. Kylara snapped out of her daydreaming. “Take this." He held out what looked like a shard of green-tinted glass.

“What does it do?” Kylara asked. She looked at the shard dubiously. She wasn’t going to take an entad until she knew what it did. Some activated by touch. Some killed by touch.

Down Under, there wasn’t much to worry about. Only local entads worked and they were familiar. Kookaburra Creek had one entad that allowed you to fly based on flower direction. There was another one that gave you different coloured vision like a moth. Another turned your skin colourful and patterned, like the wings of a butterfly. They were all known. No one could bring in strange magics.

It was the same everywhere. Saltsbury only had salt based entads. Pinrith only had fog-based entads. In Warrung, the most powerful city in the world, each neighbourhood was in its own country. The inner west had different entads than the eastern suburbs or the southside or the city centre. But no other countries needed to worry about the entads in Kookaburra Creek. All entads stopped working once they left their native country. They could never be transported.

But here, in the Up Over? All entads worked. Any object could be dangerous. And worse, it could be any type of danger, not just the expected kind. It made the warrens more perilous than they already were.

It did allow the songlines to exist, though.

Collecting entads was how warblers travelled. No one could survive so many trips Up Over without protection. They would be eaten or turned to mash or suffocated or killed in various creative ways. So they collected powerful objects. Enough entads and most warblers, bearing extreme accidents, lived long lives.

Kylara glanced at the glass shard the man was still holding out to her. Perhaps it was protection of a sort?

The warblers usually hoarded their entads to themselves, but this man seemed like the exception. Most warblers just took you where you wanted to go. They rarely made conversation with ordinary people. But this man was more… hands-on. Like Kylara wasn’t simply a passenger but a partner. Kylara reached out to grab the glass shard.

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The man turned his palm and dropped it on the ground before she could. It was very purposeful. “Sorry,” he said, holding out his now-empty hands. “I know, rude.”

Yeah, rude. What the fuck?

“I wasn’t joking about that five minutes to live thing,” the man said as if that explained everything.

Kylara was almost 100% certain it had been longer than five minutes since he had told her that little tidbit. Which meant he was exaggerating, because as far as she could tell, he was not dead yet.

Kylara ignored the man’s apology and squatted down to grab the shard of glass he had dropped. The ground was oddly sticky and she needed to use her nails to pick it up. The glass was curved and smooth on one side, jagged and sharp on the other. Standing, Kylara wiped the stickiness off with the corner of her shirt. She tried not think about what the stickiness was or where it came from.

“Oh c’mon,” her companion whined. Kylara looked up at him in surprise. “You don’t want to know?”

“Know what?”

“I always give you such tasty hooks and you never ask me any interesting questions. How about asking, for example, why I think I have five minutes left to live? Or why Yalmay is in the warren with us? Or how are we here at all, considering it is meant to be impossible?” He jutted his head out in frustration. “All good questions, none of them asked.”

Kylara stared at him. She was… getting to it. She would’ve asked him all of those things eventually. Now, her confrontational side almost didn’t want to anymore. But he did have a point.

“Alright,” she said, trying to not sound annoyed–because really, he did have a point and she tried to not get annoyed at people who had a point–“what’s your name?”

“Good question! It’s– oh.” He swallowed the syllable.

“Oh?” Kylara asked.

“Oh, I seem to have forgotten.”

“You forgot your name?”

“Heh.” He ran his hands through his hair and smiled at her sheepishly. “Guess I did.”

“You really don’t remember it?” Kylara said. He seemed to be remembering everything else perfectly fine. He knew how to find the exact spot to open the invisible door–a door that Kylara had a funny feeling hadn’t been opened in decades.

Why was that door apparently a core memory for him but his own name wasn’t?

“Not my current one, no. And before you ask–yes, I’ll need to unpick my priorities about that at some point because what does that tell you about my psych? But that is for later. How about we start with a less embarrassing question, like why I have five minutes left to live?”

Alright then.

Kylara crossed her arms. “Why do you have five minutes left to live?”

“Because I got poisoned by a rather large caterpillar.” The man without a name frowned. “No, wait a second, that is embarrassing too. Hold on.” He put his finger up in the air as if waiting. Then he said, “Punch me.”

“What?” Kylara asked.

“You heard me. Punch me. Right now.”

“Why?” Kylara said.

“Because I said so.”

Kylara did not move.

The man sighed dramatically. “Fine, I’ll do it myself,” he said, and then he walked right through her.

It didn’t feel like anything, that was the most surprising thing. There was no contact at all. No coldness, no breeze, no feeling like someone was walking over her grave. He just got really, really close to her… and then didn’t stop. He kept walking.

Kylara turned back around and stared at the man. She had no idea how to react. “How did you do that?” she asked.

“Neat, huh? It’s another entad. That shimmer you noticed before but didn’t ask about? It’s this.” He held out his hand. Nothing was in it. “I’m using it to store my body in stasis. I’m poisoned badly enough that I need to or I’ll start dying again. But every time I do this–” the man shimmered again and kicked some rocks on the ground. They moved, despite him being intangible just a minute before. “Every time I turn the entad off, I lose a little time. It’s why I had you hit the wall for me. So sorry about dropping that glass on the ground for you to pick up, but I was wasting my life holding it. Quite literally.”

Kylara nodded.

“That sounds like a very useful entad.”

“It is.”

The man had to be either very experienced or very lucky to have something that powerful. Time, for a warbler, was everything. A warbler could do nearly anything if they just had enough time to do it.

Cut a warbler’s arm off? If they could survive in the warrens for an hour or so, they could probably make their way to a songline and get to a healing country and grow it back. Poison a warbler? Give them enough time, and they could make their way somewhere that had the exact antivenom they needed. For a warbler to have an entad that basically made them intangible and invulnerable for a time–that was powerful and rare.

Kylara, not for the first time, wondered who this man was.

“I reckon I have about four minutes left. It’s why I needed to bring you and your sister up here. You two are going to need to help me when we need to translate again.”

Kylara nodded, taking this new information in. She’d been wrong. They were helping him, not the other way around.

She wondered who had volunteered to help first–her or Yalmay. Probably Yalmay. She was always the more generous one and anything to do to the warrens she would probably jump at (because the warrens meant warblers which meant the University).

“I’ll try to help,” Kylara said.

“Thanks,” the man said. “I don’t intend on dying yet. Such a hassle, isn’t it? And I quite like my life.”

There were several more questions that statement sprung to mind, but Kylara decided on the more obvious one.

“What does this do?” she said, holding up the frosted green glass.

“It’s sea glass. Beautiful, isn’t it? Look through it.”

Kylara put it up to her eye. At first, nothing looked different. Then she realised that she could see. That in itself was strange. The glass looked too clouded to be able to peer through at all.

But then the image began to change. The walls of the cave seemed to fade away and then fuzz. Kylara stepped closer. The walls were made of little gold filaments. The filaments seemed to be moving too. Very slightly vibrating. The more she stared, the more the filaments seemed to come alive–skittering about like tiny insects, converging and separating in random patterns. Kylara blinked and lowered the glass.

“What did you see?” the man asked.

“There’s something in the walls,” she said.

The man cocked his head to the side and then shrugged. “To be expected, I guess. See anything else?”

Kylara raised the sea glass again, focusing on the path up ahead of them instead of the walls.

“There’s a spot up ahead where the gold is moving together, like it is coordinating,” she said.

The man perked up. “Excellent,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“What does it mean?” Kylara asked. “What are the gold filaments?”

“Filaments,” the man said, walking ahead. “I like that. Good description. I’ll need to use that. They show movement.”

Kylara stopped walking. “They show movement?” she said nervously, glancing at the walls. She gripped the glass tightly. The walls didn’t seem to be moving, at least. “What do you mean?”

“Hm?” the man looked back at her blankly, then saw her expression. “Oh. Well, this is the moth warren, isn’t it? Stands to reason there would be moths in the walls. Don’t worry about it. Your sister’s up ahead. Again, my fault. When I did the translation I was half delirious. Usually everyone would end up together, going through on the same connection and ending up in the same spot, but I didn’t have the energy to do that. I had to do each of you individually.”

And yet, he is still claiming to have constructed a whole language during the translation. Too delirious to put us all in one spot, but not delirious enough to have trouble sorting through several thousand words and bits of grammar.

The man looked up ahead. “Ah, I think that’s her!” he exclaimed. He ran up ahead, the light following him. Kylara followed. She didn’t want to be left in the dark with the moving walls.