"Slow," Bren said, not unkindly.
Dorian nodded, which is how you tell a stranger you have heard and will try to be the sort of person whose hearing is worth their breath.
The ruin arranged itself around him while he learned how to sit. He watched, because watching is the first work of being somewhere. He watched the way the hunters kept their spears within half an arm's reach. He watched the way the boy's hands kept straying to the place where the spear's haft felt thicker and then corrected themselves because he had been told and had remembered. He watched the elder's mouth move and saw that not all the words had to do with gods—some had to do with numbers, and some with luck, and some with making a bargain with a place that refused to write anything down.
He watched the leader.
The man leaned as before against a pillar, arms folded, the whole shape of his body occupying space with the quiet of a tool that knows its work. His eyes had moved very little and seen everything. His silence did not dominate; it invited silence to reveal itself in others. When Dorian's gaze touched his, it felt like touching ice that did not apologize for being ice.
"You dropped out of a white thing," Garrick said, like a man reading a label on a jar he didn't want to open but had to. "It burned ghouls. We don't have names for what burns ghouls without burning us."
"Light," someone said. It might have been the elder; it might have been the ruin.
"Light is not on our side," Garrick snapped. "Not down here."
The taller priestess tipped her head. The black cloth caught less of the dim here and more of something else. "Not all light is the same," she said. She did not sound like she was arguing. She sounded like she was describing a fact she could touch.
The shorter priestess took one small step closer. Her hand hovered over the center of his chest and did not touch. He felt the ghost of the touch anyway, the way skin sometimes knows a hand will be set down before it is. Her breath changed, lightly. The tiniest pause.
"Do you hurt?" she asked him, without lifting the softness out of the question.
He took inventory. The ache in his limbs was honest. The rawness in his throat had a plan to leave soon. There were bruises planning themselves under the skin. But pain as an identity did not present itself. "No."
"Good," Bren said quietly.
"Why are you calm?" Garrick demanded. "You fell out of a thing none of us have a word for, into a place most men die in, surrounded by people with reason to break your neck before they sleep, and you're… steady."
He could have lied for Garrick. He could have said the calm was a trick of the body, a leftover from the warm dark. He could have said he was shaking where the cloak hid him. He could have said anything that would make Garrick's shoulders find a more comfortable place to be.
"Because panic won't fetch my friends," he said simply. "And neither will fear."
No one told him that was the wrong answer.
"Friends," the elder repeated, tasting the word with more teeth than tongue. "Old ones? From before?"
"Before?" Dorian asked.
A breath went through the circle that was also a flinch.
"Before this," Mara said. She kept her eyes on the boy, but her voice traveled without needing her attention to guide it. "Before the tunnels were all the sky we had."
He looked up at the ceiling that wasn't one. The haze made the height an idea rather than a measurement. He tried to imagine sky from this angle. He could, because he had held sky in his eyes once, because he had known what colors wake up when a day decides to begin. The memory hurt as if he had breathed in a laugh that wasn't his.
"Where are we?" he asked. It was a small question carrying a bigger one on its back.
"Home," the elder said, and grinned in a way that told the truth while misbehaving. "Or the nearest thing that isn't outside."
"Underground," Bren added, the word landing flat and real. "We move at fog. We sleep at luck."
The shorter priestess's hovering hand lowered a fraction, then lifted again. If she had touched him he would not have known what to do with his gratitude. If she had not considered touching him he would not have known what to do with that either. Somewhere behind her blindfold something resolved and put itself aside for later.
"Why the cloth?" Dorian asked before deciding if he should hold the question. It was not tactful. It was true.
The taller priestess tilted the shape of a smile—small, private, the kind the mouth makes when the heart chooses to split a secret into half and give you the smaller piece to hold. "To remember," she said.
"What?"
"That the world does not belong to sight."
Garrick snorted. "Priest riddles."
"Priest ropes," the elder said, amused, "to keep men from walking off cliffs."
Mara breathed out through her nose in something like a laugh and then winced because the marks under her sleeve answered it with heat. Dorian saw the pulse in her jaw and understood it without learning anything new about her life except that it contained too much pain for the size of her bones.
"I don't know your rules," he said to the circle, to Garrick, to Bren, to the priestesses, to the leader, to the boy who watched him over the rise of the spear. "But I can learn them."
"You'll learn them or die of them," Garrick said.
"That's the way we teach," Bren added, not unkindly.
The leader pushed himself off the pillar with the easy decision of someone who does not waste motions. He didn't come closer, not yet. He turned his head a fraction, and the ruin's weight shifted to accommodate the new angle of the man's attention.
"We'll move when the fog tells us," Bren said to Dorian, as if he were telling him the time. "Until then, we hold this place."
"This place," Garrick echoed, the words dry enough to scratch. "With the thing that still drips ghost water from the ceiling onto our floor."
Dorian looked up at the torn husk of the white thing he had been. It hung open like a mouth that had said what it needed to say and now would say nothing more. The light was gone from it, or pretending to be. The inside of it had the texture of a thought that didn't want to be shared. A single thread of the clear liquid fell and struck stone; the sound of it was more a story than a sound.
"What is it?" he asked, because sometimes speaking the question out loud calls to mind the answer you were going to have anyway.
No one said a word the ruin would have respected as a name.
"You did not come out of any nest I've seen," Mara said at last, voice low. "I've cut nests open. They're meat and malice. This is not that."
Garrick's spear point made a little circle in the air that meant I will not agree yet but I also will not spend the strength it would take to disagree properly.
The taller priestess folded her hands again. The shorter stood very still, and in that stillness Dorian felt the idea of a hand that had hovered close to his chest and then chosen patience.
"My name is—" he began, and the name that lived inside him took the length of a heartbeat to climb out of its burrow. "Dorian." The second word arrived sooner. "Forst."
The elder tasted the syllables like a wine he didn't expect to be offered today. "Then it's a day for new letters in old mouths," he said, pleased with the sentence for its own sake.
"Dorian," Bren repeated, not to test it, but to set it where he could find it again.
Garrick didn't repeat anything.
The leader didn't either. His silence was not dislike. It was an instrument.
Dorian pulled the cloak tighter. The fabric creaked at the seams where it had been mended too many times with too little. He let the ache of his muscles have his attention for the length of a breath and then put it down where it wouldn't be underfoot.
"What now?" he asked, because people do better with something to point their bodies at.
"Now," Bren said, "we rest if we can."
"And if we can't?" Dorian asked.
"Then we pretend," the elder offered cheerfully.
The boy's spear had slipped lower. The boy turned his head to look at him without moving the line of his shoulders, which meant he had been told more than once to keep those shoulders where they were. Dorian gave him the kind of nod a person gives a dog that hasn't decided if it should like you. The boy didn't nod back, but he didn't drop his eyes, which was its own kind of reply.
The shorter priestess's fingers hovered once more over the center of his chest. This time he felt it plainly: a prickle just beneath the skin as if someone had drawn a letter there at some point during a season when the body wasn't paying attention and the skin had never quite made peace with it. Her head tipped. The taller turned toward her almost imperceptibly. There was a moment between them. It wasn't speech. It was agreement cataloged for later use.
Dorian did not ask. Some questions answer themselves when they are ripe; the rest go sour if you pick them early.
The ruin exhaled once, a long creak that was also a kind of welcome. The drip found its rhythm again. The fog breathed at the edges of the chamber as though watching sleep to make sure it kept to its side of the bargain.
Dorian lay back onto the cloak, not all the way, just enough to keep the world close and the ceiling farther. He closed his eyes and opened them again, because the darkness in this place had a different honesty than the one he had just left. The priestesses settled on either side of their silence; Garrick kept his spear in his hands; Bren shifted his weight and found the place where his leg could forgive him; Mara's tattoos pulsed and then dimmed; the elder's lips moved as if the mouth had decided to keep the habit even if prayer had gone to fetch water.
He thought of Rylan's crooked smile, and of the way Asha had always chewed the inside of her cheek when she was listening, and of Elric's laugh that made you forgive him for everything he did and everything he would never do.
He did not let the grief stand up. There was a time for letting grief stand. It would not be this hour.
"Dorian," Bren said again, as if testing whether the word would make trouble and hearing with some relief that it did not.
"I can work," Dorian said, though every part of him was a book left out in rain. "I can learn quickly."
"You'll have to," Garrick said, not looking at him.
"That's the world," the elder agreed. "It keeps the kind ones and the quick ones. Sometimes the quick ones keep the kind ones."
The taller priestess's chin lifted by a degree. "Be still," she murmured, and he heard again the first gift she had given him in this world.
He obeyed.
Sleep did not come. Rest did not either. But a halt—something like that—found him, and he stood in it without moving and let the ruin and the people and the part of himself that had not finished arriving decide whether to keep him.
Somewhere, deep inside the place where warmth had once been everything, a faint gold note lingered. It was not a sound. It was a promise that it would be made again.