Darkness cracked.
For a long time there had been only warmth and weight: a patient pressure that held him from every side, the slow hush of a heartbeat that might have been his or the world's. Time had been a thick river moving without banks. He had drifted inside it with no edges, no questions, no language except the one the body speaks to itself when it is busy being alive.
Then the warmth tore.
Cold kissed him. Not a breeze—nothing that gentle. Cold like wet stone, like a hand that had waited for hours to touch him and finally did. Light came next, not bright, but present, a smear through haze. Sound followed after, in pieces: a catch of breath, leather rasping against leather, water ticking in a patient measure, the whisper of something soft sliding over stone.
He fell forward out of himself. The membrane gave way and he slid with it, slick, the world turning under him, his palms grating against grit and pebbles, his chest taking the shock. The skin of him felt both new and too thin, as if the air could read right through it.
Faces blurred around him—pale ovals in a dim that was not darkness. Shapes held long things that could only be weapons. A low murmur ran the circle, too jagged to be wind. Somewhere, a child breathed fast through a mouth held shut by someone else's hand.
His throat burned. Words pushed up like things that had been waiting their turn.
"Rylan…?" The sound of his own voice startled him. It came out hoarse, a dry hinge. "Asha? Elric?"
The faces went still, like animals spotting a ripple on the surface of a pond.
He dragged breath into lungs that didn't like being dragged at. The chamber tilted under him and righted itself. His hands left damp prints on the stone. The liquid that still clung to him cooled quickly, making the air feel sharper.
"Where are you?" he asked, louder because the silence felt like pressure. "Rylan! Elric!" The names were anchors tossed into a lake that did not answer.
The circle reacted—not with recognition. With recoil. Spears lifted by increments. Someone hissed a word through teeth. Another answered in the same strange cadence, cut-short syllables and a throat-sound like pebbles turned with water. He caught none of it. The language came to his ears as texture only: cloth ripped slowly, wire plucked with a blunt nail. Meaning was present, but behind a door.
A man stepped closer. Tall. A pale scar prowled across the left eye and took his mouth into its custody. The spear he held had a haft like bone, a point oiled dark. The man said something short and hard, aimed like a blow.
Another caught his arm. Broader shoulders, one leg dragging the other by habit rather than failure. He answered with fewer edges, voice like a brace placed under a beam: carrying weight without advertising it.
A woman drew a boy in, pressing him against her side; her forearm glowed faintly through torn cloth with a light that didn't belong to light. The boy stared with both fear and the stubbornness children use to hide fear from themselves.
Two figures held still near the center of it all. Women, younger than many of the others; each had a smooth black strip tied over her eyes—not torn cloth, not an accident, a choice. Their heads were angled toward him in that way people have when they are listening with more than ears. The skin across their knuckles was pale where fingers were folded around prayer.
He tried to stand. His limbs protested like tools left a long time without use. The first push made his elbows shake. The second killed the angle in his knees. On the third he got halfway up and the world moved sideways, and the floor came up with the same patient speed as a tide. He let his body go down rather than lose it to panic. The stone was wet beneath old dust; the smell of it was iron and a sweetness that felt out of place.
He swallowed. His mouth tasted like the back of a coin.
"Can you—" he began, and stopped, because asking a question in a language no one else understands is an act for the benefit of the question only.
The scarred man—that one—made a sound that, if it had been his language, would have been a curse or a verdict. He cut the air with the point of his spear, more as punctuation than threat. The man with the dragging leg said something that made the spear hesitate but not lower.
"What did you do to me?" Dorian asked, not to either of them. "Where—"
Memory nudged him. Not the clean cut of a remembered moment. Fragments. Wet cobbles shining under a sky that had three colors in it. Laughter between breaths in cold air. A hand gripping his forearm in a crowd, firm, familiar. Someone shouting his name from a distance with exactly the tone that meant you would live if you answered now and wouldn't if you didn't. Rylan's crooked smile; Asha pushing hair out of her eyes with the heel of her hand because her palms were bloody; Elric lifting something too heavy for him and making it look like dignity anyway. Heat. A gate like a mouth. A roaring that had no throat.
His chest squeezed. He tried their names again, softer, as if intimacy would make the distance shorter.
The circle of faces did not change.
The scarred man said a name—two syllables that landed like dropped stone—and Dorian, somehow, knew it belonged to the broad-shouldered one. You can learn a name by the way someone throws it. You can learn another by the way the other catches it and doesn't flinch.
Another voice spoke where the black cloth shone. One of the blindfolded women—a little taller than the other—tilted her face, and the whisper that came made the hair along his arms lift. It wasn't that the word meant anything. It was the way it went through the air, a thin, bell-like thing wrapped in breath.
She moved forward with a grace that didn't fit this place. Not carefulness—assurance. The ruin made room for her without appearing to do so. The other followed, steps smaller, fingers testing the path with the backs rather than the pads, tracing the edge of a crack near his knee. The taller knelt. Her blindfold turned the world into black glass where her eyes would have been. Her hands were clean. Her palms smelled faintly of something green he could not name.
She slid one palm under the back of his head and lifted him off the stone. He let her, because the tenderness of the motion announced itself in a language that needed no translation.
Warmth bloomed. Not heat. A careful warmth, like hands around a cup.
Light came from her skin. Not much—a faint gold that might not have been there at all if the ruin hadn't already decided to be generous with its dim. The sound of it was a thread through cloth; he could hear the noise of it because there was a noise of it, even if the ear doesn't usually have a box to keep that sort of sound in.
"Be still," she whispered.
He understood the shape of the instruction before he understood the word. His body, on its own, obeyed.
Another voice answered from the same angle of air. The shorter woman, a little nearer his left shoulder, was saying something that the others around the circle took into themselves the way people take a promise or a warning. It moved through them with the tense calm of a river in flood.
The scarred man—he would have named him Garrick if the world had asked him for a word right then—spat a sentence that made several shoulders set. The broad-shouldered man—Bren (the sound of it placed itself, as if his mind had been saving a space)—answered with as much weight as a rock set gently where it cannot roll. The woman with the faintly glowing arm—Mara, but he didn't know why the shape of that name seemed already familiar—hushed the boy and slid her hand up his neck until her palm covered his ear.
The taller priestess's palm held his head as if it had always been meant for that shape. The warmth moved from skin into skin and then upward into skull and then inward into a place where blood and breath and understanding take turns without asking each other's permission. The gold threaded through the air behind his eyes, and for a moment he saw nothing but the color and the idea of the color. When it receded, it took something with it that he did not miss until he tried to hear again.
The voices changed.
They were the same voices. The timbre didn't shift; the bodies making the sounds were still exactly themselves. But the sounds fell into grooves inside his ears that had not been there a breath ago. Edges softened in the right places, corners showed, doors opened in the angle between one consonant and the next.
"—curse it, Bren, I said hold—" Garrick's words arrived whole, wearing their anger like a practical coat.
"It's not demon tongue," Bren answered. He didn't move his weight from the leg that favored him. His hand didn't leave the spear-haft he wasn't going to throw. "Not that I've heard. Let her finish."
Mara's voice threaded through from somewhere a little behind them. "Keep your eyes on me," she murmured to the boy. "Don't watch the man. Watch me." The marks under her sleeve pulsed with the fog that lingered in the ruin, and she swallowed a soft sound that was not a word.
The elder chuckled, and the sound had a wetness in it that meant too many years had been pushed through too small a straw. "Ahh," he said to no one. "So we're playing those games again."
The taller priestess's hand did not leave his head. The shorter's fingertips grazed his temple, light enough to convince him he had imagined it. The second voice—quick, precise—slid close: "Do you understand us now?"
He had a thousand questions, which is to say he had none. There is a kind of bewilderment in which all inquiries die of each other's company. One word survived. He used it.
"Yes."
A ripple went around the circle like breath coming back to a body. Spears tipped notched down by the width of a knuckle. Someone let out air too quickly and then felt foolish about it and tried to cover the noise with a cough, which failed.
Garrick didn't lower his point. "What are you?" He asked it like a man testing the strength of an unfamiliar rope with his weight ready in the right place if the fiber gave.
Dorian blinked. The name that belonged to him had not been spoken in so long that it felt like something he would have to fetch from a drawer. But the question was not his name. The question was a cave. It had no floor.
"I—" He thought: alive. He thought: cold. He thought: there was a gate. He said, because the mind will usually choose the door with the least resistance, "I'm… looking for my friends."
"Friends," Bren repeated, without adding the shape of judgment to the shape of the word.
Ruin's air moved in a way that meant people were looking at each other instead of at him.
"Rylan?" Dorian said, because making something specific gives it a better chance not to dissolve. "Asha. Elric. We were together." He tasted the memory of them like the taste of a fruit he had eaten many times once and then not at all for an age: the idea of sweetness more than sweetness itself.
Blankness came back. Not indifference—he could have forgiven indifference. This was the silence people use when they are looking for a place to set a heavy thing and can't find one that will keep it from rolling.
"What tongue was that?" the elder asked mildly. "The first words. Like a bird with a metal throat."
"Not ours," Garrick said.
"Not theirs either," Mara added, her gaze on the boy's eyes, not on Dorian. "Not like mark-speech. This was… clean."
The shorter priestess shifted her attention with the fractional movement of a head. "He doesn't speak what we speak," she said softly, and then, because what she had already done had done what it meant to do, "He does now."
The taller released his head by degrees, as one lets go of a cup one has warmed for someone else in one's hands so the heat is not wasted. Her palm hovered above his forehead for a breath more before lifting away. He felt the lack of it immediately, the way skin feels the absence of sun when a cloud passes.
A cloak found his shoulders. He hadn't seen who had the idea first; he only knew there was fabric and that someone had thought of decency before he had thought to be ashamed. It smelled faintly of smoke and a root the tongue would recognize even if the brain did not. He pulled it around himself without apology. The cold stepped back one pace.
A water-skin bumped gently against his hand. He looked up into eyes that would not look long at his, then took the skin and drank. The water tasted like stone that had been taught to be kind. He coughed once after it went down, because bodies that are coming back online remember the catalog of their reflexes in the wrong order.