Grieverkland

The voice arrived from somewhere too far back to place, high and soft and achingly familiar in a way that made no sense against a mind this empty of anything worth calling memory. It rang louder than his own heartbeat, which by then had slowed to something barely worth the name, and it pulled his eyes open the way nothing else in that tunnel had managed to.

He didn't know whose voice it was. He couldn't have said, if asked, a single word it had spoken, only the shape of it, the particular high, gentle pitch of it, something a much smaller version of himself must once have trusted completely. It didn't matter that he couldn't place it. It was enough that it had reached him at all, this deep under everything, this far past the point where reaching him should still have been possible.

Something in his chest answered it before the rest of him caught up. A promise. He didn't know the words of it, couldn't have recited its terms even to himself, only felt the shape of an old debt surfacing from somewhere beneath fifteen years of silence, insistent, unwilling to let this particular night be the one where it finally went unpaid.

He tried to rise.

His body did not cooperate. It hadn't cooperated properly in some time, and now, asked to do something as basic as lift itself off cold stone, it answered instead with a series of small, terrible failures — an arm that pushed and found no strength behind the push, a leg that half-straightened and folded again immediately, a spine that arched and then gave out, over and over, each attempt a fraction weaker than the one before it. He looked, to anything that might have been watching, like some broken machine trying to execute a command its own parts no longer had the power to carry out.

The apparition watched all of it without moving. Its face held no more expression now than it had at any other point that night, simply present, simply witnessing, the way it had witnessed every other collapse and failure that had ever happened to the both of them.

When rising failed entirely, he dragged himself instead.

There was no dignity in it, and he had none left to spend trying to find any. He hooked one forearm forward across the wet stone and pulled, the motion crude and desperate, his body sliding a few inches at a time toward the sound of moving water a short distance away. Blood ran freely from his nose now, thin and dark, tracking down over his lip and chin and dripping steadily onto the stone beneath him with each pull forward. His arms, bare where the sleeves had ridden up, showed bruises in every stage of colour — old yellow-green ones gone soft at their edges, fresher purple-black ones he had no memory of earning, the pale, cadaverous skin beneath all of it stretched thin over bone that had lost most of whatever had once padded it.

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His face, through all of it, stayed clear of anything that might have been read as suffering. Not because the pain wasn't there. It was, vast and total, every inch of ground he covered paid for in full. But whatever part of a person usually let pain show itself outward had gone quiet in him a long time ago, and even now, dying, dragging himself across broken stone toward black water, he did it with the same flat, wordless calm he'd carried through every other unbearable thing life had handed him.

The apparition moved alongside him without effort, matching his impossible, inching pace, watching the whole slow crawl with the same unmoved attention it gave everything, though something in its stillness now carried the faintest suggestion of expectation, as though it, too, understood — however dimly, however without words to explain the understanding — that this particular crawl mattered more than the ones that had come before it.

He reached the edge eventually. He had no memory of how long it took, only that it had taken everything he had left to give, and when his hand finally found the lip of the channel instead of empty stone, he didn't hesitate over what came next. He didn't have the strength left to hesitate with.

He let himself fall.

The water took him harder than he'd expected, cold and heavy and far stronger in its slow, patient current than it looked from the bank, and for a moment it simply had him, spinning him half over, filling his mouth and nose with something foul enough to have woken a corpse. It was, in its own brutal way, exactly what his body needed. The shock of it tore through him like a struck match through dry paper, sharp and sudden, and for one gasping, coughing moment he was entirely, violently awake, more awake than he had been in hours, his own body's fight to breathe doing what nothing else that night had managed to do.

Somewhere beneath the panic and the cold and the foulness of the water closing over his head, the memory that had pulled him this far stayed with him — blurred past all recognition, a voice with no face attached to it, a promise with no remembered terms, only the raw, wordless certainty that something out there still needed doing, some duty older than the gate he'd stood at for three years, older than the man who'd cut his throat, older, perhaps, than anything else he currently understood himself to be.

He didn't know what the duty was. He only knew, with a clarity that cut through even the cold and the dark and the water trying to take him, that he was not yet finished carrying it.

His arms moved. Weak, useless things that they were, they moved anyway, dragging at the water the way they'd dragged at the stone, some last reserve of him refusing, for reasons even he couldn't have named, to let tonight be the night it all finally stopped.