Eren was still going.
"I know I'm a lot. People tell me that. But I bore easily, and there are only so many times you can count the cracks in the wall before you lose your mind entirely."
He paused.
"Anyway, Apex said we can leave whenever we want, so at least there's—"
"We can leave?"
Paul's voice came from his corner. He didn't sound amused. He stood.
"Leave?"
He laughed once. It was a short and dry laugh, the kind of laugh that isn't really a laugh.
"You're filling that fool's head with your little ideas again."
He crossed the room and stopped in front of them both, looking down.
"Let me be very clear with the pair of you, since you're evidently still laboring under some impression about this place. We are not workers. We are not citizens. We are not even guests."
Paul pointed at the floor.
"We are prisoners. They feed us and give us this room because a dead slave can't dig. That is the entire reason. Nothing more."
Eren looked up at him.
"You don't actually know that—"
"Don't I?"
Paul folded his arms.
"You think it was an accident that those horrors hit your settlement at the exact moment Captain Matthew's ship happened to be close enough to collect survivors? You think that kind of timing is coincidence?"
He looked at Ash.
"Do you, red-eyes?"
One of the other men spoke from across the room.
"They put us in chains, Paul."
"I'm aware they put us in chains."
The room broke into noise. Arguments, grievances, someone raising something that had clearly been festering for weeks.
"Enough!"
Paul's voice cut through it all. The room went quiet. regarding Eren and Ash for a moment longer, Paul then took Ash's bowl and turned and walked away.
"Here is my advice, since you're both still young enough for it to be of use."
He didn't turn around.
"Stop waiting to feel ready. Start thinking about how you get out. You're free to leave whenever you wish, they said so themselves."
A pause.
"Funny thing to say to someone in chains."
He settled back into his corner with Ash's bowl in hand.
Ash watched the food disappear.
'I didn't want it anyway.'
His stomach immediately and loudly disagreed... loud enough that Eren heard it from where he sat. He looked at the empty space where the bowl had been, then at Ash, and opened his mouth.
Ash stood.
"That's enough."
Eren tilted his head.
"I wasn't going to—"
"Eren."
Ash looked at him steadily.
"If you want to get out of this place — and I think you do — don't make a habit of talking to me."
He turned and walked toward the far corner of the room.
"I don't have a good history with people who get close to me."
Sitting with his back against the wall, Ash then closed his eyes, and said nothing more. Eren watched him for a moment, bewildered in the quiet, specific way of someone who has just been warned away from something they hadn't yet decided they wanted.
***
Ash lay on the ground and turned his face to the wall. He tried to sleep. Several times he drew close enough to feel the edge of it — and each time the memories came back, fragmentary and bright and wrong, and pulled him out again. He gave up and decided to stay awake.
For a while he lay still and listened to the room. One man complained about the rice being cold. Another disputed this. A third produced a detailed theory about tomorrow's snowfall that no one had solicited. Paul told them all to be quiet, then without a pause, he launched into the story of the time he'd nearly escaped by stealing an Apex vessel, foiled at the critical moment because he'd turned back for extra bread.
"Worth it. Best bread of my entire life."
Paul said, with complete conviction.
The room laughed. Someone threw a boot at him. He caught it.
Eventually the voices wound down. The men found their patches of floor and settled in. Then, one by one, they slept.
The night was not, however, quieter for it. The snoring started.
Paul opened proceedings with a deep, grinding rumble. Someone across the room countered with a thin, reedy whistle on every exhale. A third man produced something that defied easy classification — the closest approximation being a large animal in moderate distress. The three of them found a rhythm together: not a good rhythm, not one anyone had requested, but a rhythm nonetheless. They filled the room with it.
Ash lay with his eyes open, staring at the wall.
'I survived a cultist camp. I made it through Deadfall Pass. I outlasted poisons that should have killed me twice.'
One of the men snorted himself awake. He said something incoherent, rolled over, and resumed snoring at a volume suggesting the interruption had only deepened his commitment.
' And this is what does it.'
Eventually, Ash pressed his face harder against the wall and turned his attention inward, toward his soul space: the interior realm where his soul resided. A place he almost never visited, because the need had rarely been there. Even now, it had been a long while since he'd last gone inside. He closed his eyes and let himself fall inward.
***
As always, the transition was jarring.
He stood on a surface that defied ordinary physics. An endless flat plane of black, still water stretched in every direction like smoked glass, impossibly and profoundly quiet. The only sound was a soft *shh* beneath his bare feet with every step. Of course his feet were bare. Actually not only that... Ash was naked. He was aware of this, of course. This place had never offered clothes. Only existential atmosphere.
A reflection stared up from the perfect black mirror below: the gaunt, weary young man he was now. Same disheveled black hair, same tired crimson eyes that refused to sleep. But when Ash shifted, the reflection didn't follow. It simply remained still, disturbingly still, wearing his face with a faint, permanent curl at the lip, as though the universe had engaged it part-time to be disappointed in him.
"Yeah, yeah."
Ash muttered into the void.
"I'm not staying long. Just checking in. Don't make something of it."
'Now I remember why I stopped coming here.'
The moment the thought passed, the horizon gave a strange, nauseating shiver. Above him, three suns were fixed to the false black sky.
One was a sickly, guttering orange, like a dying streetlamp.
The second was a crackling lattice of trapped lightning, buzzing behind glass.
The last was a spinning black void, a perfect circle of nothing that quietly consumed the light of the other two.
Ash looked up at them. Strange as they were, everything appeared as it should. This was how things always looked here.
Then the black water rippled. The reflection's lips moved, and the familiar voice of the soul space rose. It was a voice... a voice resembling his own, but stripped of warmth and flat across the silence:
"The Soul's Records."
The water shifted. The reflection dissolved, replaced by lines of stark, luminous text. The voice continued in its toneless cadence:
Name: Ashley Burns
Realm: Core
Vessel: Human
Vessel Tier: 5th
Soul Stage: 1st
Soul Pool: 2500 / 2500
Soul Essence: 97%
Your soul is currently at the stage of awakening.
---
The letters dissolved. The reflection's indifferent face returned.
Ash regarded it.
"Do you have to perform the entire readout every time? I didn't ask. I'm familiar with everything on that list."
A pause.
"Including the embarrassing parts."
The reflection said nothing. It held its expression with the patience of something that had never once been in any hurry.
Ash sat down on the still water, which bore him without complaint, because the rules here were different and always had been. He let out a slow breath.
"I know you don't want me here. You've made that plain enough over the years."
He paused.
"I only wanted to check on you. That's all this was."
The reflection offered nothing.
"Right."
Ash looked up at the three cores.
"Yeah. Okay. I shouldn't have come."
A longer silence.
"I don't think things are ever going to be the way they were. Are they."
It wasn't really a question.
The reflection held still.
Ash looked at it a moment longer. Then he stood and took one step forward on the black water. The image of his present self shattered, dissolved, was gone. In its place, clear and small and vivid: a little boy. Wild black hair. Standing very still. Staring down into a dark puddle at his feet, into the face of a wide-eyed, smiling stranger wearing his skin, thinking nothing at all. The wonder was too large for thoughts.