The three of them lay sprawled like corpses the river had spat out. Cold mud soaked through Jack's shirt, needling his skin. Every breath tasted of iron and rot and the sour stink of his own fear. His left eye had already glued itself shut with blood and swelling; the right stared up at a sky the color of old nickels.
Steve was on his hands and knees a few feet away, coughing up river water in thick, wet hacks that shook his whole frame. The old man sat with his back against a birch, sleeve torn off, winding the cloth around his forearm where something had laid the meat open to the bone. He tied the knot with his teeth, slow, no expression. Blood kept seeping, dark and steady.
Jack tried to laugh; it came out a rasp. "You two are fucking idiots."
Steve spat pink into the mud. Didn't answer.
Jack rolled onto his side, ribs grinding like broken glass. "I held the knife, Steve. I put it in his hand and told him where to cut. You saw my face."
Steve looked at him. Lip split fat, river water dripping off his lashes. "Yeah," he said. "I saw."
"So why drag me out?"
Steve wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. He smelled of mud, gasoline, and something sharp (panic, maybe). "Because I didn't want to be the kind of man who lets another drown just to prove a point." A short, bitter laugh. "Still not sure I'm not."
The old man grunted. Might've been agreement.
Wind knifed off the water, cold enough to burn. Jack's teeth started chattering; he hated the sound. He pressed his forehead into the mud like he could disappear.
Memory slid in sideways: summer heat, cane poles, cut watermelon, dragonflies stitching the air. Eight years old, sunburned, asking why they'd stopped for a drunk stranger. His grandfather whittling, shavings curling like pale flames, voice low: "The day you decide a man's only worth saving if he's useful to you, crawl in the hole with him. Saves time."
Jack's chest hitched. Tears came hot and humiliating, mixing with the mud on cheeks that hadn't felt them since that dock. He didn't sob (couldn't find the air) but the shaking started deep and wouldn't stop.
Steve watched a long moment, then crawled close enough that Jack felt the heat rolling off him. No touch. Just presence.
Minutes or an hour passed. Wind dried the blood on Jack's face until it pulled like a mask.
"I ain't sorry yet," Jack whispered, hoarse. "I don't know how to be."
The old man flexed his bandaged arm, tested the knot. Looked at Jack for the first time (eyes the same flat gray as the river).
"Breathe," he said. "That's step one."
Steve huffed something that might have been a laugh. He hesitated, then let his hand settle on the back of Jack's neck (just weight, no comfort). Jack flinched but didn't pull away.
The river kept moving behind them, loud and indifferent.
None of them got up. Not yet.
Three years passed like a slow thaw.
Jack learned the small house on the ridge by heart: the groan of floorboards under Steve's step, the ghost of pipe tobacco in the curtains, rain on tin that could hush even nightmares. He grew into his height, shoulders widening from swinging an axe and wrestling feed sacks. Some nights he still woke tasting river water, but the dream left quicker now, chased off by coffee steam and low morning voices.
He was eleven, maybe twelve (he'd stopped keeping exact count) when the world cracked open again.
It was their birthday. Grandpa patted both heads with the same rough palm. "Chocolate for the wild one," he told Jack with a wink. "Vanilla for the sensible one." He shrugged into the frayed brown coat and walked down the dirt road toward town. The screen door slapped once. That was the last ordinary sound the house ever made.
They waited. Sun bled across the kitchen window and died. Jack wore a groove in the linoleum. Steve's "He's just slow" came out too flat to believe.
Night slammed down. Jack curled on the couch and cried until his throat bled (messy, snotty, loud). Steve walked into the yard, sank to his knees in frost-stiff grass, and pressed his palms to his eyes so hard the skin went white. He stayed there until dawn, breathing like every breath was borrowed.
Four and a half years of searching followed: curling posters, empty trails, Steve aging in fast-forward while Jack scrambled to keep up. Hope thinned to a thread Steve refused to let snap.
Then the call came.
The rift site smelled metallic, wrong. Mist curled waist-high over black grass. A single body bag waited.
They unzipped it.
Grandpa's face was the color of old ash, lips peeled back in a grimace that belonged to neither pain nor peace. The same coat, only shredded and dark with old blood.
Jack's legs went. He vomited into the strange grass, acid scorching his throat while cold mist licked his skin.
Steve stood frozen. Wind lifted his hair; nothing else moved. When words finally came they were small, cracked, a child's voice inside a man's body.
"Nice. You left too." A breath like tearing paper. "Okay. I'll handle everything."
He turned so fast his heel gouged the earth. One hand pressed hard against his sternum, as if he could keep his heart from falling out.
They burned Grandpa three days later on the ridge. Smoke drifted south toward the river that had once tried to kill Jack. Steve stood closest to the fire, face lit orange, eyes reflecting nothing. Jack stayed back, throat raw from tears he didn't remember shedding. The smell of pine resin and scorched flesh lived in their clothes for weeks.
That night Jack couldn't lie still. Something itched under his ribs, the old violent itch. At midnight he slipped outside in his socks, the pendant his mother had fastened around his neck years ago suddenly warm against his sternum. Night insects screamed. Trees gave way to a slit of violet-gold light hanging between two boulders.
The pendant burned. Jack hissed but stepped through.
The God Realm slammed into him (sky too bright, colors too sharp, gravity wrong). White towers spiraled where meadows once lay. Seven lost years had scraped the place clean and rebuilt it into something cold and foreign.
Jack dropped to his knees in perfumed grass that smelled of funeral lilies and copper. His chest caved in. Not from thin air, but from everything he'd pretended was buried.
Grandpa was ash. Steve was breaking in slow motion. And Jack had nothing to offer except the same empty, blood-stained hands.
He pressed his face into the alien grass and screamed without sound, fingers clawing until they bled. The pendant cooled against his heart, indifferent.
Behind him the portal winked shut like an eye that had seen enough.