“Come with me, Fragile.”

“Stand up, bata,” Key mumbled. “Stand up. Why won’t you stand up?”

Young Wall slapped him. Key woke up with a start, beginning to cry out before a hand slid over his mouth. The darkness of the cramped and musty tent was total and, though he knew his voice and could recognize the smell of his breath creeping down his cheeks and neck, he could hardly make out the features of his accoster. All he could see were his eyes, whose gray color cut through the shadow. In the distance were voices, and the obliviate silence of Goal’s winter backwood. He released a muffled squeal.

“Do not speak,” Young Wall growled. “Look at me, Fragile. You must hear what I say. Wellborn is gone. My birthman and brothers cut her. He’s going to cut you in the morning. You need to get your things and come with me. Nod if you've heard me.”

Key blinked three times.

“Nod. Nod, empty-head!”

Key nodded. The Wall removed his hand.

Key took his father’s three-string and his tuskleather bag, into which he stuffed Beam’s necklace. He and Young Wall crept through the Goalish shelters, which were flush with activity. In its center, a fire burned, casting the shadows of tall, dancing figures on the cloth of their tents.

When they crossed into view of the proceedings, they could see the shell-dwellers and what they had done with Wellborn.

“Come on,” Young Wall entreated. “There’s nothing left.” Key looked.

The voicewoman’s body had been beaten until it was black with bruises; there were long cuts on her arms and upper chest, which had been scorched and disfigured. Her belly’s inside was exposed to the open air. A tangled weave of weeds and brambles had been affixed to her head, where her hair had once been, and her throat was slit at its center. Old Wall ranted and raved while his underlings listened in silence and fed her body to the flames. Key wouldn’t remember what he was saying; there was little he could recall, save its vile character, and the venom it spoke to.

Some other Sixbraids, watching from the periphery or from their tents, mourned. A large contingent of the Shell’s women shouted out in possessed anger, hurled stones, and hammered against the Walls trying to beat and restrain them.

Beside the voicewoman were three men. Key recognized them as younger Walls. They had been stripped down, and a vertical cut had been made below each man’s waist. The fire put a shine to the blood in this gap.

A stone struck Old Wall. He fell silent, and his body drifted away into the wild darkness. At that point, Young Wall seized Key by the arm and pulled.

“Come on!” he hissed. Key did.

Young Wall lead him to a spot just outside their perimeter, where lay a large, belted sack.

“I couldn’t get a stonehoof so quickly,” he said. “This is food, water, some Larun gifts. It’s going to get colder. Wear this.” He handed Key a snug, hooded coldover, white as the snow they would come to see.

Key still wasn’t responding, so Young Wall wrapped it around his shoulders. It was ragged, damp, and a bit mouldy, but it was warm. Then Young Wall picked up the sack and put it on Key’s back, over his three-string. It felt like it weighed more than anything he’d ever touched. He stood around, uncertain what Young Wall wanted him to do. Young Wall pushed him towards the forest.

“Go on, empty-head. You wanted to leave, so leave.”

Key didn’t move, so he pushed him harder. “Leave,” he muttered. “Get out. Please, get out.”

He still failed to obey. Young Wall took him by the shoulders, grabbed his chin and forced him to look up. “Fragile thing. Fragile thing; I know you’re hurting. I don’t even know if there’s anything left to live out in that head of yours. But I can’t lose another brother.” He squeezed. “And this – this is what I have to do. To keep with myself. So you have to go.”

He kissed Key on the mouth, hard, desperately, and then gave him one last shove. He fell backwards onto the pack. “Go. Fly! Fly, gapman! If I see you again, I’ll throw you in a fire! I swear I will!”

Key stumbled in the opposite direction, starting into a slow, awkward jog through the trees.

Young Wall watched his image melt into the darkness, until the only remains of his being were the sounds of snapping and brushing he made as he crashed through the foliage. He waited until these marks too had faded to a rumble – when they could at last no longer be heard, and only he remained.

-

Key spent twelve days in solitude, after his world had departed him.

His people had taken a path through game trails and otherwise-uncharted routes toward Longfur so as to avoid contact with bites or Larun patrols. In spite of his experience with the ways that lie at home, Key had never himself learned anything of these more distant paths, which lead through thick brush that had not been used by the Sixbraids in half a generation. So he walked through the forest, the plains, the streams and brooks, the marsh, not knowing where he was going – only that he would continue going at all, for whatever purpose had been put upon him.

Apart from the whitewings and long-eared jumpers with whom he had already been acquainted, Key enjoyed six encounters with the other hearts whom he now shared it with. A life’s worth of songs and frightening tales had turned the rounds, in his mind, to a place of strange, hungry forms; his brief excursions there had changed it into something else. Regardless of its true character, he would be forced to discover the things that lay beyond.

His first encounter was with a group of hearts that passed by him in the night, stopping briefly to groom themselves and lap water from a pond. He could make out little more than their coats of bright red fur, which the wind tousled as each cleaned his neighbor. When one of them yawned, starlight glinted off a set of long teeth. Another saw him holding his hand to his mouth, but the faint yellow tint of its irises soon shifted from his paralyzed frame. After a time, they continued on, letting out triumphant howls as they galloped into the dark.

His second arrived in the known, familiar shape of a riverwing, which shook off water from its glowing feathers as it dove through the sky. One had perched itself on a low-hanging branch while he was passing through over a thorny hill. Its presence tinted the light grey, and it splashed him with drops of dew. He stroked its back, which it took no notice of. It flew into him, bumping its head. Before it corrected its course and carried on East, its injury flared white.

Nights were not bearable. Winter had come, and Key could not make fire. He piled up leaves and other bedding as best he could, but he was astounded that he didn’t freeze in the cold. It wasn’t cloudy, and so there was still some solace to be found the sunlight that remained.

He quickly lost the provisions Young Wall had stolen for him. Three days on, in his third encounter, an enormous heart wandered into his camp, just as he had begun to nibble away at a piece of dried meat. Key scrambled up a tree to escape its interest. Left the option of abandoning his instrument or his supplies to the creature’s ravaging, he took the three-string. It spent the rest of the night tearing the pack open, running its snout over its contents, devouring them, and falling asleep on the spot. The morning light came soon thereafter, enabling Key to gain a better idea of his oppressor; in its appeased state, the fluffy, lumbering mammal appeared nearly placid, although its rampage the night before had taught him different. He scurried down the tree and decided to bolt for the golden mists of dawn, rather than risk extracting his rations’ remains from its grip.

He was hungry the next day. Though he had no weapons, he considered hunting; in his fourth encounter, he happened upon a few round, flightless wings nesting in a bush. He reached out his hand at one, but it scattered and they rushed squawking into the green.

Key could feel a pit forming in his stomach. He ate some berries to fill the gap and then spat them up, losing water. He tried drinking from a creek, which worked for a little while, until he spat that up too.

In his fifth encounter, Key came upon a wounded heart, a roothead, its leg snagged in a trap left by some hunter who had already departed the rounds. In spite of his feverish stupor, and of its anguished, wailing cries, Key's gaze was drawn to the pair of wooden branches that rose from behind its ears, and to its eyes round and black. He became caught by its smooth coat of fur, which was colored a pure, radiant shade of white. It was smaller than Key, and although sheer pain had made its movements jumbled and erratic, he was sure it could not resist any violence he might bring upon it. In desperation, he picked up a rock and looked at its soft, fragile skull. His gut roiled and churned and demanded he throw.

Using his littlecane, he cut the roothead free. It limped away in terror the second it could, leaving patches of red on the leaves and grasses it scrambled through. He lamented and blubbered into the night for his weakness, his stomach and his skull tearing at him all the while. Then he picked up and moved on.

Key began to see and hear things he knew couldn’t be there. These were voices of his old peers, the crackling of fire, and his father’s humming. He felt that he was losing the strength to continue forward, and that he had no destination. Key wished often that he had never been born, and he knew that he would see Peak at the end of that long-awaited and implicit journey, but he still feared to take it. To really consider it, as he could, brought out no end of shivering and tears.

The last thing he imagined, leaned up against a lone tree in a dry and frosted glade, was The Warrior, standing over him. She was by far the most vivid of all his visions, cloaked in black and the white-gold twilight of the twelfth day.

“Are you a shadow?” he whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you return my gift?” he asked. His voice was an icy spark; he had to pull it out from his throat and stuff it past his frozen lips. “I so wanted you to have it.”

“I didn’t want it,” she said.

The world grew darker.

“I admire you very much,” Key told her. Perhaps he was thinking it now. “You’re a very fine heart. I’m scared.”

The weight on his eyes had become too great. He felt that when he closed them, he might melt into the world and become more silent – fall into the ground, and become as quiet and content as an unwild place.

Before he slept, the world brought into him one final thought. It was one that would color and sculpt the first leg of his journey. It would carry Key through the dim, sightless pass that awaited him.

It was nice to be held.

-

He had the dreams: of home, food, and the dead.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” Peak said. “Beam is safe. He’ll be home tonight.”

He hugged him and cried tears of joy. He cried so hard his mind tumbled and vibrated and his chest pounded like a charging bull. That moment lasted for years. He was terribly happy, until he tried to look for them again; he looked and looked and looked, and at last he realized they had already become, and had always been, absent.

A brightness started searing itself into him. He wondered if this was the path to the easy place, beneath the rulers’ house, and that he might find his father there. He wondered, and hoped, until he heard a voice.

“Ih, look at that. Eyes are opening.” It was a man speaking, and his words were Goalish, but they weren’t Peak’s. He became nauseous. “Eyes are opening. Careful now. You ought not to speak.”

His eyes stretched themselves open, and they were assaulted by a mixture of hues and scents that gathered into the wrinkled face of his mysterious caretaker. He felt weighed down by something soft, heavy, and warm. “Where am I?” he asked.

“You ought not to speak,” the man repeated, “but a speaking place is where you are, yonbrother. That is enough.”

“I’m not- I wasn’t…” He held up a hand to his head. “Who are you?”

“My name is Will,” he said. “And I know many things.”

“Will” was dressed in the fixtures of a Goalish roundsman, a knower of hearts. His voice was soft and chalky, as though he hadn’t used it in many years. The single-room shelter in which he had awoken was assembled from chopped wooden columns and insulated by the skin of hearts. A line of dead jumpers, trapped or hunted, hung from the wall. A minty scent rose from the corner of the room, where a mash of leaves was being steeped in a bowl over a small flickering candle. The smell pleased him, even though he did not yet known its meaning or source.

Will himself was a smooth-skinned Goal of middle-age, old enough for wisps of silver to be running through his thick black hair. There were no braids in it. He wore a leather upover, along with a dense fur that wrapped around his shoulders. On his hip was a knife, fashioned from a large tooth.

“How did I get here?” he asked.

“Please, be silent. You have suffered the cold troubles, emptiness of food, and emptiness of water. Before I removed them, your insides were joined by many hearts.” Will knelt down and raised a dish of water to his lips. In his drowsy stupor, he ground his teeth and reared his head. “I have done what I can, but your body is weak,” Will said. “If you do not drink, you will go to the rulers.”

He reluctantly took a sip. After the first, his thirst became more apparent. He took hold of the bowl and swallowed hungrily.

While he hydrated, Will told him his story. “You’ve come out of a place from which few return. A young dryman left you in my care,” Will said. “I know not from where she came or how she found me. And I know many things.”

In the middle of drinking, his brain switched on, and he choked on the water. After recovering, he asked, “A dryman?”

“A dryman.”

“Did she lead a stronghoof? Was she wounded in any way?”

“And she waited until I was sure you would survive,” Will said. “She seemed very hard of heart. But perhaps not. Otherwise, why bring you here?”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“And she left when the sun was low. The sun is high now; do you know this heart?”

He set down the bowl and attempted to get his bearings. He struggled to free himself of the massive black fur that he had been tucked into. The world was still spinning on its axis, and his body was telling him all sorts of nasty things. He balanced himself onto his feet, shuffled Young Wall’s cloak onto his shoulders, and looped the three-string onto his back.

“Please, eldman Will, tell me,” he said. “Which way did she go?”

Will’s laugh was a high-pitched, whiny braying. “Eyes open a moment. He does not even know where he is; still, he asks for the way out.”

“I’m sorry, eldman,” he sputtered. “I did not mean to injure. If you wish-”

“I wish only for your health, yonbrother. But her heading is cold, and complicated. It will easily be lost. Are you certain you wish to go?”

“Yes,” he said. “If I can, I would like to tell her something.”

Will brought him over to a fold in the cell and held it open, revealing the sprawl of shrub and sky. He pointed up, to the river of daylight stars. “See you that sign? It sits in the place she reaches for.” He pointed another way. “That way is to the road of the Laruns. I advise you seek her with that thing, but should you lose your way, she let slip to me her own path. Once you have arrived there – it is cut wide, and will carry over hills – follow the sign again. These will bring you the one you seek.”

“Thank you!” he cried, instantly driving out the door, toward the direction Will had indicated.

“Yonbrother,” Will said. He turned back.

“If you don’t find this heart,” he continued. “Come back to this place before dark. I don’t know what anyone is doing all alone, anyway. The riversland is full of hearts. The riversland is not a place of waiting. It’s full of ones who need to be alone. You can be alone here, too. I’ve no concern with that. Can you hear this?”

He hesitated. “Yes,” he said, “I think so.”

“Perhaps you do,” Will said. He gave a slight smile.

A wing sang from the trees, telling the morning’s arrival. They turned to where it sat, high in a thicktree.

Stolen story; please report.

“Thank you eldbrother,” he said. “I only live due to your kindness. I will find something I can give you. I promise it.”

“Life is a search for such things.” Will replied. “Go to your path, little Sixbraid. Submit to its command. I will be waiting.”

He bowed to Will, turned his back on the shelter, and returned to the forest. As he departed, his host’s roundseat dissolved into the icy Goalish mist.

-

He thrust his way into the rounds with conviction, impelled toward The Warrior and her road.

He did his best to adhere to the way Will had pointed, but he was still unfamiliar with the woods, and soon feared he was becoming lost. He had long since departed his own position in the country, and had been walked by sleep West, into one fabulously new. It was a section of new shapes, new lights in the sky, and new hearts that watched him from the dark. He followed The Warrior’s star, drowsy and disoriented from his ordeal, but empowered by a newfound and immediate purpose.

For three steps of the sun, he pressed his concern. His sixth encounter began.

Light retreated from the woods. He was confused, because it hadn’t been so long since he had departed the roundsman's territory, and yet the world was declining into shadow and silence. The wings chirping in their nests hushed and disappeared. The crawlers and parasites shied away and skittered back into their ancient, cryptic burrows. Even his footsteps, trodding on the frozen forest bed, became muted, fluttered echoes.

He could see the star yet. It had become clearer in shape, with the light of the sun wiped from the sky. He considered heeding the roundsman's advice for a moment; the dark had been so warm and pleasant. He had no doubt that he would be able to find it if he returned.

A new whim tugged him back toward the rounds. He had become blessed like other people. He reached into his bag, wrapped his fingers around his father's necklace, breathed, and then pressed forward. His heart was in his throat, and his mind half-asleep.

The trees of the rounds began to dry away all around him. Their trunks and sprawling roots shrank into the soil and gave way to a blind plain, untouched by starlight; the only illumination came from a single, distant, dead sapling; beneath its branches stood a large figure on two feet.

His sight shook and ran at the grass of the plain. Its kind waved in the wind like shellplants, tall, long, and stemmed, and possessed of two appendages on either side. They were ash-colored and faceless. Their thick, braided hair was blustered by the current as they were. They did not speak or say their names. Without voices, they could tell no stories. But they blew in the wind, and the wind had a voice.

“You have funny hands,” it said. “Funny.”

“You’ll be well, I promise,” it said.

“You’re not released from this.”

Something wet and sticky covered his hands. When he brought them up to his face, he found them covered in a mixture of red and green fluid.

“You have nothing of us inside you,” the Sixbraids said.

The sapling’s light and its keeper bade him forth. He sank nearer to the ground with each step. His mind was barely conscious, and it did little to recognize the imprint of this heart which accuse and which pillaged and which took back the body. A feeling of cold and broken bone. It was something that held night.

He arrived under the tree, which was dead and young. The night spoke to him in a number of garbled, almost-familiar voices that spat out a slurry of words and syllables. He sank to his knees, breathing too quickly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

As he regret, and called out to his elders in shame, it visited him. It dropped over and around the pain and hatred and he was embraced, and all of it was passed away. Its work settled in quiet and sureness where there was none, and then offered it freely forever.

It grabbed hold of him then, wrapping its tendrils around his arms and chest. He was losing strength. The creature was no phantom; it was not a shadow cast by his dilapidated mind. It was a thing of the world, and its arms were mighty, constricting his skin and bones and turning his face blue.

He struck out one time by screeching. His declaration was ignored by the oppressor, and tears poured down his cheeks. He gasped and sputtered for air. Sights of the air and of light and of people were summoned up for him, and there was no fire left in his body. His eyelids slid down and his grip loosened as he succumbed to the pressure, until it changed.

A length of metal emerged in the space between him and the creature, stopping just as its tip was about to scratch his belly. The creature looked down into its chest, to find that the blade protruded from its core. The wound turned a dull shade of white.

Explosion! He was blinded. The sun’s brilliance flooded everything, and the shadow cast by the beast was stripped away. It shrieked as it dropped him to the ground, turning its attention to its assailant.

He clutched at his windpipe as the air returned to his lungs. He could hear the loud clamor of battle, hissing and grunting as the two powers struck at each other from every direction. Their crash and tumult threw up such a cloud of dust that he could see little but the flailing of black appendages, the creature’s speech pleading and accusing its opponent as she fell upon it.

As suddenly as their earthshaking contest had begun, it halted. An earsplitting tone rang out from where their battle was joined, driving daggers into his skull and wreaking havoc, so he clapped his hands to his head.

The nightholder’s agonizing high note was accompanied by three flashes of light, sending golden rays shooting out through the smoke. The first flash revealed two silhouettes, locked together in the dust. The second and third revealed only one.

The noise faded, and the fog of debris began to lift. He uncovered his ears, and she emerged.

-

The Warrior whipped her blaith downward, casting a long, thin ray of fluid into the dirt. When it hit the ground, the material solidified, and began to dissolve. She pressed down with her boot on the remains of her opponent, which flattened out and shifted into the white substance that comprised it. She stuck her sword in the ground and, kneeling down, laid one of the corked bottles she kept hooked to her person next to it; the nightholder’s sludge eagerly leapt inside. After it had finished collecting, she stoppered it up and slid it into a sleeve on her coat.

He watched all the while, too shocked to do much other than gawk. A black fog had swept over his mind, leaving him senseless and disordered. It was only when The Warrior spoke at last that his faculties returned.

“I found you alone,” she said. She wiped filth from the blade with her cloth. “Why did you leave the others?”

He glanced off to the side. “I… I preferred not to burden them." He coughed twice. “Their journey is l-long. There are many they must feed.”

She didn't release her gaze. She slipped the rag into her pocket and sank her weapon back into its sheath. He tiptoed forward.

"How..." He gulped. "How did you find me?"

"I did not mean to. You went my way. I have means of keeping apprised."

“Ih.” He stuttered. “That was because... I wanted- to give you something.”

“What?”

He removed the necklace from his bag. For a moment, he didn’t offer it to her, merely holding it in his fist as he conceived of a way to propose it. But she could see it.

The Warrior only spoke when he started to raise the necklace. “I made forty detours to return that price,” she exhaled. “Why would you return with it?”

He almost felt too cowed to speak. “I believed you might have dropped it.”

“It was placed down. I carry no weight I do not want.”

“Weight?”

The Warrior considered her words. “I had a wiser,” she said. “Birthwoman. I had a lawsman; birthman. I have nothing of them now. It is a nothing one can feel. It is a nothing I have felt.”

She spit into the grass. “And I won’t have yours.”

“I never meant to- I just- I wanted…”

“You wanted to leave,” she said, “and pass off some piece of yourself to a stranger. It won’t be me.”

He shook his head. “No, that was not its cause.”

“Really?”

“It can’t be.”

“What, then?”

He said nothing. She began to walk away. “Return to your country, Quiet Feet,” she said. “There is still a place for you there.”

“Its cause-!” he cried. She stopped.

“Its cause… its cause, is that… I know you,” he said. “I do not know how, but I do.”

The Warrior turned back toward him and crossed her arms.

“I mean, I… or… ih, my mouth is twisted!” He stamped his foot on the ground and forced himself to look straight up at her. “I know that I don’t know anyone. I thought that I could never speak in a heart's way; that there was nothing in the riversland that knew my words but the rulers. But I felt as though you did. And I was glad! I had not spoken with anyone before that day. I know that I might do it again.” He shook the necklace in his hand. "I know that I need not feel so only."

His eyes closed and tears ran down his face. His hands fell to his sides into clenched fists. “I know no other way to give back for it. It is a best kind of gift. I have no other way. I beg you to let me do it, eldsister. I promise, I will beg of you no further. But I-”

A shock went through his body. A great gloved hand took hold of his own, and its rough digits curled open his brittle, shivering fingers. They lifted the necklace from his palm and closed it back up.

He let out a breath and opened his eyes. He bowed low to her.

“Thank you, eldsister!” he whispered. “Thank you!”

The Warrior said nothing. She looked at the shell in her hand, as though she didn’t understand its purpose, before she tucked it into her belt.

The hiding itched at him, directing his mind and pushing him hard. It had grown stronger and louder than he had ever feared possible. He turned away from her; the cold had burned his wet cheeks a bright shade of red. The path back seemed far, and terribly treacherous. The night to come would be cold. Even now, swallowed whole by the rounds, he sensed that he would find his way back to the roundsman, but he did not know if he would ever find his way out. He rubbed his arm.

“I… I hope that the rulers follow you, eldsister,” he mumbled. He began to walk. “I hope you will be safe.”

“I have a long journey too.”

He turned back around.

“Very long. A far way to travel. In the shell, you had hands for hoofed hearts.”

His eyes widened and he nodded.

“Have you hands for any other thing?”

He racked his brain, searching for something he could do.

“W-wallrock!” he said. He scrambled for his birthman’s knife, pulled it from his bag, and made a hasty rubbing motion on its edge. “You’ve wallrock. I’ve had- I’ve worked with-”

“Good, that’s useful,” she said. She picked up The Stronghoof’s lead. “You can come with us, if you want. We can find you a place to stay in the next shell over.” She urged it on, and it began to lumber forward once more with a lick of his ears.

Without hesitating, his charred throat whispered, “I do.” He coughed, and cried out, “I do! Please let me follow you, eldsister!”

“Come now, then,” she said, looking forward. “We have a long way to go before dark.”

The haze that had been obscuring his vision was finally dissolved. The world seemed extra bright, and filled up with excited energy. The hiding was thrust out, and followed behind him as he ran towards The Warrior’s retreating form.

-

“You need not call me eldsister,” The Warrior said.

After a long day of marching through the Goalish country, He and The Warrior had stopped under a rocky cliff at the top of a long path West. The sun had begun to fall below the horizon, scattering green-orange light on three distant mountains whose white, icy slopes formed a harsh contrast to the landscape established by the sunset beneath them. His gaze was fixed on the tallest peak until The Warrior spoke.

“I know what it means,” she continued. “But for the moment, we are travelling companions. Neither of us is above the other.”

“Then…” he asked, “…can I know your name, now?”

“I have no name to know.”

“Didn’t your creators give you one?”

“My creators are gone. That was long ago; I can’t remember what they called me.”

“Ih.” He cast his eyes downward, and seemed to come upon a realization. “Then, how should I know you?”

The Warrior laid back on her arms and looked up. The sun had declined low enough that one could see the dimmer, farther stars beginning to emerge from and spin about the blue night sky.

“There was a disaster. Long before your time, or mine. Those I follow used to be a part of a large, armed gathering; it split in half.”

“A gathering?”

“A Family. Now, the Lotaslager. I am their servant. Some joined them, or others, but many of its armsmen wanted nowhere to go. They were finished with commands and marching. Some stayed together; others went into the seatless rounds. Your own, in that time, called those of us who did ‘stars that wander.’” She looked back at him. “Those in Goal remember the words, so when others ask what I am, that’s what I say. You can call me something like that, if you want.”

His mouth had gone characteristically agape. “What about ‘Wander?’” he asked. She shrugged. “Wander,” he said, definitively.

They kept quiet for a while. The sun slipped below the horizon. Night fell, and it became too dark for him to see, and too cold for Wander’s ambient temperature to warm the two of them. So he gathered a pile of wood and kindling and she removed a glaucous metallic mould from one of her bags, along with one of her bottles. Then, she swirled her finger in the jar she’d filled that morning, placed the mould onto the pile, and spread the substance over its surface. It joined to the mould like an opposite pole, running through its carefully chipped and shaped contours before it became fully engulfed. It glowed, and the wood erupted into flame.

As he crouched and rubbed his palms over the heat, he realized he hadn’t introduced himself. “My name is…” He hesitated. Then he found his mouth say, “Fragile.”

He put a hand to his chest. “My name is Fragile.”

Wander sat up and gave him one of her looks, and these gave little except her eyes and their push. He began to shrink under it until she released her gaze. “I know,” she said.

“You do?”

“It’s what the woman called you. The one at the punishers.”

“Wellborn,” Fragile said. “She was called Wellborn.”

“Was?”

His jaw clenched. The memory of her flashed in his mind, and he fell silent. “I know what they did,” Wander said. “You don’t have to speak.”

“How can you know a thing like that?”

Wander contemplated the fire. “Tell me of your commands,” she said.

“Commands?”

“Things they had you do,” she said. “What’d make you correct.”

Fragile thought. “We had ways,” he said at last. “Ways for our rulers, that they would keep with us.” He looked out into the night. “But I do not know if they are with us now.”

“A command is its commander,” she said. “Could she speak?”

“Wellborn?”

Wander nodded. “Sometimes,” he said.

“But not as she pleased.”

“No.”

Wander said nothing more. Fragile looked into the fire. “Is it wrong?” he asked. “To carry them with me?

“What?”

“The ways that hurt her.”

“Men need hurting,” she said. “So they need ways. You are no exception.”

With that, she lowered her hat, and laid against the stronghoof. “We’re running out of dark,” she said. “I’m going to sleep. You should do the same.” Soon enough she had dozed off, grasped by a sudden and noiseless slumber.

Fragile hugged his three-string. A branch snapped somewhere in the dark. A gust of wind blew over the plains, making the trees creak, pushing leaves into their space, and bending the fire sideways. It chilled him to the bone.

He snuggled closer to the embers and fell on his side. When he shut his eyes, rest refused him. A new darkness had arrived, a face-hour. He could still see them. He had been given a vision of empty spaces, and they cycled through his mind’s eye. He bit his teeth and clawed at the dirt, shrinking into himself, away from his nerves and gut, which he did not want to hurt.

A warm current whistled in from the night and passed into him. It became a quiet and well-studied part of his mind. With time, it gave rise to a song.

Listen to me, it said.

Listen to me, brave one.

Here grows a strength of eighty thousand…

Here grows mind a thousand strong.

Here grows hands that lift the river…

Here grows words that storm the shore.

Here births such a mortal kindness…

A good none can ignore.

It is fine to look upon him…

And bring him forth once more…

He began to hum along to the tune as it lulled him away. His chest rose and fell, and he chattered in his sleep.

The Bell couldn’t smile, but she twisted another gust of wind to tousle the little Sixbraid’s hair. She swirled through mind and world and laid herself in a place that lie between them.

See you now, joyous one? That heart of yours – how grand it is! she whispered to Wander. I will find you a many for it. A people of your own. Such is my promise. Such is my labor for us both.

-

The first morning crept inside his head, and it did what mornings do. He was released from the easy place, and sapped of the strength to get anywhere else. Memories became incomplete and mingled with unconscious fabrication. As the mind built itself anew, he would be Key again - for a little while longer.

He opened his eyes to Wander’s face.

“It’s time,” she said.

She stuck a skin of water on his chest. “We have to get moving. Drink that, if you can. We’ll be on our legs until dark.”

Key rubbed his eyes and sat up. “How far is the path?”

“I suppose not far,” Wander replied. “If your Lodge’s papers were correct.”

She picked up the stronghoof’s lead and clicked her tongue, urging him onto his feet and towards the grasses.

Key got to his knees. The clouds had settled in the night. The sun was coming up, and its world was being rebuilt. He put his hands on his three-string, relishing its familiar texture. Some part of him knew where the tree it had been cut from lay, and would always need to lay there still. It basked in the old that he kept with him, that would always remain in that now and forever imaginary place.

“Quiet Feet,” Wander said.

Key looked toward her.

“Are you ready to go?” She jerked her hand in the direction of the open way.

He wasn’t sure. Key looked back, over the reach of his birth country, one final time. He suddenly felt as though his heart would explode.

The day was new! Its light, such profound novelty! Shaking apart as it had been for centuries, the entire world, on its knees since his emergence from its scars and systems, had flown apart at last. It had shattered at the seams and all its promises and antiquous loathings were far past dissolved. He did not know that it still existed, or that to it would he ever return.

Key had always known that its end would come. But he had never imagined that the end would not tie itself to him. Rather than vanish when the world had, he still remained. He still tasted breath from his chest. There it was, the smoke of him, rising yet into the smoke of the sky, and whatever lay beyond.

There were ends elsewhere to be tied to. Key looked back at Wander, and down at his hands, which shook with such excitement.

He threw the three-string over his shoulder and stood up.

“I’m ready,” Fragile said.