You lose five months of your life to sleepless nights; to endless work days and disturbed meetings. You write until your pen runs out of ink. You write until your hand feels as though it will fall off. Neal Schultz is sent to Larderngathern. A letter appears on your desk shortly after. Not from Neal, but Alik Rowe:

Deborah Tosteson,

I keep thinking about our conversation that night. I know you didn’t want to say it in front of Inkin, but I think I know why you found yourself in our neck of the woods. The war finds us out here too.

I already told you that my friend and mentor, Sayid, told me to follow my heart down strange roads. I believe yours already has. I’m asking you now to see it through.

The latter half of the letter is in Skenyan. Below the writing is a child’s scribble of a lake. It does not contain any piers.

You find the strength to write a little more. Enough to draft your resignation. With your last paycheck–on which you are shorted days worth of work–you fly to Athar.

You walk four city blocks with your bag in one hand and your little suitcase in the other. The wind has a bite and it’s blowing head-on. You become less confident the further you venture into the rotten heart of the city. Litter and plant life are all that appear to thrive on these streets. You do not even hear the distant horns of a funeral procession. Your suitcase’s wheels catch on yawning cracks in the sidewalk. You nearly trip over a forgotten shirt laying across your path. You pass by a building with all its furniture out in front of it. One of the pieces–a winged armchair–catches your eye. You stop; look again at the building. This is the Twin Piers Youth Hostel. The windows are boarded up. The front door bears a notice of closure.

Next to the door, a young Wilskenn girl is sitting on the ground. You approach. “Do you know where the owner is?” You gesture to the door.

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The girl gives you a wide-eyed stare. You’re familiar with this panicked look. She has no idea what you’re saying.

You give up. You look up and down the street but no one else is around. Not anyone you can see. You fish a piece of paper from your bag–the letter from Alik–and take a seat in the armchair. The relentless wind begins to numb your exposed skin. Though you stare at the letter for a very long time, the Skenyan remains uninterpretable to you. All you have is Alik’s advice and Orla’s drawing. The silence of Athar. The wind.

Three footsteps at a time, the silence is broken. Bennett walks down the empty street. He stops for a moment to retrieve a crumpled bit of paper in his path. He is surrounded by a sea of litter that would require nothing short of an army to dispose of. Once he has taken care of the paper, he continues on in your direction, finally coming to a complete stop in front of you. He doesn’t say a word. He only looks at you. His features are not contorted into a scowl nor cruel amusement, yet the look is hard. It is unsympathetic neutrality.

You look up at him from where you are hunched over in the armchair. The letter is grasped a little too firmly in your hand. “Edrye is free to withdraw from the war,” you say. You can’t bear to sit under his gaze so you look back down at the pavement between your feet. “It’s not over. It won’t be for some time. Pangua will see it through to the bitter end. Until there's barely anything left to salvage of itself. There’s not much left as it is. That’s why.”

He does not respond, but takes a seat in a chair next to you.

When you look at him again, his face has softened. You hand him the letter. “Please.”

He grabs the paper from you and looks it over. Then he reads from the page:

Most of us were silent. To not laugh was about the most we could do. A long time ago we learned, or rather we were taught, that empathy for one ought to mean apathy for another. And if you could bear to feel bad for both, then there better be someone else entirely that you can blame for the suffering of each. Pain was understood as being man-made, as opposed to originating from a cosmic beam blasted from the depths of cold space. If this was true, we decided, then we can discover who created pain. We can destroy the source. We searched high and low. We found perpetrators in all sorts of strange lands. We strung them up and burned their homes. We wrote promises for peace with their blood. Only when we returned, weary from our work, did we never ever ever see ourselves as both treader and trod. We prayed to definitive decisions.