The road to nowhere became a path, then a game trail, then the faint memory of where animals might have walked once. They followed it because to stop was to admit they had arrived, and arrival implied a destination. They had none.
The land remembered how to be wild. Thorny thickets clawed at their clothes. Berries, small and fiercely tart, stained their fingers. They found a stream, cold and clear, and drank from their hands. The water tasted of stone and distance. It did not taste of memory.
Lyra's hands were learning. She'd taken a needle and coarse thread from Anya's caravan. Now, by the light of their small, stolen fires, she practiced on a torn corner of her cloak. Her stitches were large, clumsy. They did not mend so much as **bind**, holding the frayed edges together in a truce. She showed Cassian her work one evening, her brow furrowed. He looked at the jagged seam, then at her face. He touched one of the stitches. It was tight. It would hold. He nodded.
It was enough.
His own hands were restless. He took to whittling again, not memory, but the dry wood they found for the fire. His knife, the one from the Orrery, was too sharp, too fine. It bit deep, leaving gouges. His first attempts were formless, reduced to shavings and frustration. He was trying to carve a shape, but he had forgotten what shapes were for.
Then, one afternoon, he stopped trying. He let the knife follow the grain of a piece of pine, not imposing a form, but revealing the curve that was already there. What emerged was not a figure, not a symbol. It was a hook. A simple, crooked piece of wood, smooth at the curve. He held it up. Lyra looked at it, then at the stream. She nodded.
The next day, he spent hours at the water's edge, tying a length of twine from his pack to the hook, weighting it with the river stone Kael had given him. He had no bait. He didn't know how to fish. He sat on the bank and let the hook dangle in the current, feeling the water's pull through the line. It wasn't about catching. It was about the **connection**—a tenuous, silent line between his idle hands and the deep, cold life of the stream.
He caught nothing. It didn't matter.
***
The seasons turned, or something like them. The grey-green of the hills deepened, then faded to a dry gold. The air grew sharp. They found a abandoned shepherd's hut, its roof half-collapsed, its hearth cold for years. They did not repair it. They used one corner that was still dry. It was not a home. It was a **pause**.
One morning, frost etched the grass white. Lyra woke with a start, a sound trapped in her throat. Not a scream. A name.
"Hollis," she whispered, the word a ghost in the hut's chill air.
Cassian was already awake, watching his breath fog. He looked at her.
She rubbed her face, the borrowed memory vivid in the dawn light. "He dreamed of Marta. In the cellar. After. He dreamed she was knocking on the underside of the trapdoor. Not scratching. Knocking. Polite. Like she was just… waiting to be let out for supper." She wrapped her arms around herself. "It's not my memory. But it's so… clear. The sound of the knuckles on the wood. It's a dry sound."
Cassian reached out, not to touch her, but to the space between them. He made a fist, then opened it slowly. *Let it go.*
"I don't want to let it go," she said, her voice small. "It's horrible. But it's… a thing he had. A real thing. If I let it go, who remembers the sound of her knocks?"
He had no answer. He thought of Elara's hand. Not the memory of it, but the **fact** of it. If he let the feeling fade, did the truth of her grip fade too?
They sat in the cold silence of the question. The memory was not a weapon now, nor a chain. It was a **burden**. A specific, human weight. To carry it was a kind of honor. To set it down was a kind of betrayal.
She did not cry. She simply sat with it, letting the phantom knocks echo in the space the baker had left inside her. Eventually, the sun rose higher, the frost melted, and the memory receded from a sensation to a story she knew.
She looked at Cassian. "We carry them," she said. It wasn't a question.
He nodded.
They carried them.
***
The next change came not from the sky, but from the ground.
A week later, the game trail they'd been following ended abruptly at a **wall**.
It was not a natural formation. It was made of the same black, glassy substance as the mountains of fossilized regret, but here it was shaped. Smoothed. It rose twenty feet high, seamless, curving away to left and right until it vanished into the haze. Its surface was not a perfect mirror, but it held a reflection—a distorted, mournful version of the golden hills and the two ragged people standing before it.
On it, carved at eye-level with a delicate, almost loving precision, was a single sentence in a language of flowing, alien glyphs.
Lyra reached out but didn't touch it. "It's cold," she murmured. "Not like stone. Like… held breath."
Cassian's hollow gave no pulse. This was not a place of active anguish. It was a **memorial**. He could feel it. A sadness so complete it had been given form and then abandoned.
He traced the glyphs with his eyes. He did not know the language, but the Brand on his tongue, that old scar of stolen meaning, gave a faint, sympathetic throb. It recognized the grammar of loss.
He knew, without knowing how, what it said.
***HERE BEGAN THE UNKNOWING.***
It was not the First Cell. That was the wound. This was the **scar**. The place where the world had decided to stop understanding itself.
Lyra took a step back, her eyes wide. "It goes on forever."
Cassian looked left, then right. The wall did not invite crossing. It did not threaten. It simply **was**. A definitive end to one kind of landscape and the beginning of another. To follow it would be to walk the perimeter of a forgotten grief. To climb it would be to enter… what? The territory of the Unknowing.
He looked at Lyra. Her face was pale. The wall's reflected landscape swam on its surface, making her look like a ghost in a golden world.
"We could go around," she said, but her voice lacked conviction. Something in the wall's perfect, sorrowful presence demanded a decision. It was a question posed in stone.
Cassian looked at his hands. The hands that had held a sword, that had whittled a hook, that had failed to catch a fish. They were empty.
He thought of the road behind them—the caravan, the stew, the broken axle, the boy with the stone. A life of small, hard, real things. A life of **knowing**, however poorly, what to do.
The wall offered the opposite. The Unknowing.
He felt no pull from his Brand. No itch from his hollow. This was a choice for the man, not the wound.
He walked up to the wall. He placed his palm flat against it.
The cold was profound. It was the temperature of a concept. Of **negation**.
But beneath the cold, deep within the glassy substance, he felt a faint, slow **pulse**. Not a heartbeat. A rhythm of… **questioning**. A vast, patient, eternal *why?* trapped in stone. This wall wasn't just a barrier. It was a **record**. The solidified echo of the first time a creature looked at the world and could not find a reason in it.
He took his hand away. On the perfect black surface, his palm had left a print of warmth, of living moisture. It fogged for a second, a brief, human stain on the memorial, then faded.
He turned to Lyra. He pointed to the wall, then made a climbing motion with his fingers. He then pointed back the way they had come, and made the motion of walking.
*We can climb. Or we can go back.*
Lyra stared at the wall. At the words. *HERE BEGAN THE UNKNOWING.*
She thought of the baker, Hollis, who knew exactly why he did a terrible thing. She thought of her lover, who knew his reason was fear. She thought of the Chronicler, who knew the taxonomy of every silent sin. She thought of Gareth, who knew the aesthetic value of every broken thing.
To know was to be part of the story. To be curated. To be a page in someone's book.
She looked at Cassian. At the man who had chosen to forget his reason. Who carried a hollow not as a lack, but as a space.
She walked to the wall. She did not touch it. She leaned her forehead against it, closing her eyes. She listened to the silent, questioning pulse within.
"I am tired," she whispered to the stone, "of knowing what things mean."
She stepped back. Her eyes were clear. She looked at Cassian and shook her head. She pointed back the way they had come, then pointed to his hands, to her own, and made a simple, shaping motion in the air.
*Let's go back. Let's make something. Even if it's just a stitch. Even if it's just a hook.*
Cassian looked at the wall one last time. At the beginning of the Unknowing. He felt no desire to cross. The hollow in him was not a question to be answered in that void. It was a room to be lived in, here, in the world of rough wood and sour berries and clumsy stitches.
He nodded.
They turned their backs on the wall and began to retrace their steps, leaving the seamless, sorrowful monument behind them. The sun was warmer on their backs. The gold of the hills was just a color, not a metaphor.
They did not speak of the wall again. It became a thing they had seen, a fact of the landscape, like a distant mountain. It had asked its question, and they had given their answer with their feet.
That night, by their fire, Cassian took out his whittling knife and a fresh piece of wood. He did not try to reveal a shape in the grain. This time, he set out to make a **spoon**. A thing for stirring, for eating, for holding a small amount of something.
It was awkward. The bowl was too shallow. The handle was too thick.
But it was a spoon.
He handed it to Lyra.
She took it, ran her thumb over the rough curve of the bowl. A real, almost-smile touched her lips. She dipped it into the pot of boiling water and roots, stirred.
It worked.
It was enough.