"You're doing that thing again," Sael said, dropping onto the bench beside me with the particular gracelessness that had always been his defining physical characteristic, a kind of cheerful indifference to his own body's relationship with the world around it. He set his bread and his cup down on the table and looked at me with the expression he reserved for what he called my faraway moments — not unkind, not entirely patient either, somewhere in the warm middle ground that had characterised our friendship since we were eleven years old and he had sat next to me at the Greyveil schoolhouse simply because every other bench was taken.
"What thing," I said.
"The staring at nothing thing. The philosophical crisis thing." He tore a piece from his bread. "The Nighdy thing."
"I'm looking at the market."
"You're looking through the market." He gestured at the square in front of us — the morning crowd moving between the stalls, the usual smell of river damp and woodsmoke and the particular sweetness of the bread woman's cart that had occupied the same corner every morning for as long as either of us could remember. "There's a difference. Normal people look at things. You look at whatever is behind things."
I considered this. "That's not entirely inaccurate."
"It's completely accurate. It's what you do." He drank from his cup. "My mother asked about you, by the way. She wants to know if you're coming to the river festival."
"When is it?"
"Twelve days. Same as every year. Same as it has been every year since before either of us was born, same as it will be every year until the river finally decides it has had enough of Greyveil and changes course entirely." He looked at me sideways. "Which you would know, if you paid attention to things that exist in the actual present rather than whatever layer of reality you're currently visiting."
"I pay attention."
"You pay attention to some things." He said it without accusation. That was the particular gift of Sael — he could observe your failings with complete accuracy and complete affection simultaneously, as though the two were not only compatible but in fact required each other. "You pay attention to the things that interest you. The rest of it you let go past."
The morning crowd moved around us. The bread woman called out her prices in the same cadence she always used, a kind of song she had sung so many times it had stopped being a performance and become simply the sound of that corner of the market. A child ran past chasing something — a dog, a rolling thing, I did not quite catch it. The hills beyond the rooftops were the particular grey-green of early autumn, that colour that always seemed to me like the world exhaling.
It felt completely, ordinarily, entirely like itself.
I did not know yet that it would not feel that way for much longer.
"Tell your mother yes," I said. "I'll come to the festival."
Sael smiled — the uncomplicated, unguarded smile of someone who has never once in his life questioned whether he belongs in the story he finds himself in. "Good. She'll be pleased. She worries about you, you know. Says you spend too much time alone with your questions and not enough time with people who'll answer them back."
"The questions I have," I said, "don't really have answers."
He considered this for a moment with genuine seriousness — that was the other gift of Sael, that he took the things I said seriously even when he didn't entirely follow them. Then he shrugged, the way he shrugged at most things that existed beyond the immediate and practical, with a kind of cheerful philosophical surrender.
"Maybe that's the point of them," he said.
I looked back at the market. At the light moving across the stalls. At the bread woman's cart on its familiar corner.
Something at the very edge of my perception shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with any of the ceremony that Aethermoor's mythology would have assigned to a moment of significance. Just a small, sourceless wrongness — the way a word sometimes looks strange if you stare at it long enough, as though the letters have quietly rearranged themselves into something that only resembles what they were before.
I blinked. The market was the market. The light was the light. Sael was beside me, finishing his bread with characteristic efficiency.
I told myself it was nothing.
I was wrong.
We stayed at the market bench longer than either of us had practical reason to. This was a habit between us — not laziness exactly, more a mutual unspoken agreement that the day could wait a few more minutes before it required anything of us. Sael had work at his family's cooperage by mid-morning, and I had a delivery to make for the cartographer on Vessel Lane who employed me three days a week to carry documents and packages to addresses he considered beneath his personal attention. It was not distinguished work. It suited me.
"Maret is asking after you as well," Sael said, after a comfortable silence had stretched itself out between us like a cat in sunlight.
I looked at him.
He looked back at me with the careful neutrality of someone who has introduced a subject and is now watching to see which direction it will run.
"Is she," I said.
"She is. She mentioned your name twice in the same conversation last week, which, for Maret, is essentially a declaration." He picked up his cup, found it empty, set it back down with a small expression of disappointment that he transferred immediately into the conversation. "She asked whether you were attending the festival. I told her I didn't know. She said she hoped so. She then changed the subject but not quickly enough to fully erase the hoping."
Maret Voss worked at the apothecary on the eastern edge of the market square, three stalls and a turning from where we sat. I had known her for four years, which in Greyveil was long enough to constitute a full and established acquaintance. She was precise and clear-eyed and had a particular way of listening that made you feel as though everything you said was being genuinely considered rather than simply waited out. I liked her considerably. I had not known, until this moment, that the feeling appeared to travel in more than one direction.
"You could have told me sooner," I said.
"I could have," Sael agreed pleasantly. "But then I would have missed this." He gestured vaguely at my face.
"What expression am I making."
"The one where you're thinking about something simple as though it's complicated." He stood, gathering his things with the brisk efficiency of a man who has successfully deployed information and is now withdrawing before it can be questioned. "It's endearing. Maret clearly thinks so too." He dropped a coin on the table for his cup and looked at me with something that was not quite advice but was adjacent to it. "Go past the apothecary today. On your delivery route. You go past it anyway."
"I go past it anyway," I confirmed.
"So it's not even an effort. It's a redirection of existing momentum." He shouldered his bag. "Even you can manage that."
He left in the direction of the cooperage, waving once without looking back — the signature goodbye of a man entirely comfortable with the world and his place in it. I watched him go with the particular mixture of affection and mild envy that Sael had always inspired in me. Not envy of his circumstances, which were ordinary enough. Envy of his ease. The way he inhabited his life without any apparent awareness that inhabiting it was something that required effort.
I turned back to the market.
The bread woman's cart was on its corner. The morning crowd was the morning crowd. The hills were grey-green beyond the rooftops.
And then, for just a moment — so brief I could not be certain it had happened at all — the bread woman called out her prices, and the cadence was wrong.
Not wrong in the sense of different words or a different melody. Wrong in a way I did not have vocabulary for. As though the sound had arrived slightly before she had opened her mouth. As though the call and the calling had come unstuck from each other by a fraction of something smaller than a second.
I stared at her. She was already moving on, pulling a wrapped loaf from the cart for a customer, completely herself, completely unaware that anything had occurred. The customer handed over coins. The transaction completed. The world continued in every visible way to be the world.
I stood up slowly. Collected my own bag. Told myself, again, that it was nothing. That I was a person who looked for meaning behind ordinary things and sometimes I found meaning that wasn't there, and that this was one of those times.
I walked toward Vessel Lane. I went past the apothecary. Through the window I could see Maret at the counter, her dark head bent over something she was measuring with the focused attention she gave to everything she did. She did not see me pass.
I did not stop. Not because I didn't want to, but because the wrongness from the market had followed me, clinging to the edges of my perception like smoke that doesn't quite dissipate, and I felt suddenly, irrationally, that stopping — that inserting myself into someone else's morning with the full weight of my strangeness — was something I should not do until I understood what was happening to me.
Which I did not.
Not yet.
The cartographer's name was Edvin Prose, which was either a fortunate accident of family naming or evidence of some ancestral ambition that had finally, after several generations, produced the appropriate occupation. He was a small, precise man who smelled of ink and had opinions about map borders that he expressed with the intensity most people reserved for genuine grievances. I had worked for him for two years. We had an efficient relationship built on mutual usefulness and the shared understanding that neither of us was particularly interested in the other's inner life.
"Three deliveries," he said when I arrived, not looking up from his table. He slid a wrapped package and two sealed envelopes across the surface toward me without ceremony. "The package to Aldersham House — give it only to the steward, not the staff. The envelopes to the Registry and to Councillor Veth's office on the square. The Councillor's office first, then the Registry. Order matters."
"Does it," I said.
He looked up then. This was unusual. Edvin Prose rarely looked up from his work during the delivery briefing; he considered eye contact an inefficiency. "The Councillor's office first," he repeated, with the careful emphasis of someone ensuring a message cannot be misinterpreted. "Before the Registry."
"Understood," I said.
He held my gaze for a moment that lasted precisely one beat longer than it needed to. Then he returned to his maps. "Go."
I went.
The Councillor's office occupied a building on the north side of the market square — a broad, stone-fronted structure that had the self-important gravity of all civic buildings, as though architecture could confer authority. I had delivered here before. The clerk at the front desk took the envelope from me with the bored efficiency of someone who receives many envelopes and has long since stopped speculating about their contents. He made a notation in a ledger. I left.
Standing in the square outside, I paused.
The market was still in full morning flow around me. I stood for a moment watching it — the movement of people between stalls, the calls of sellers, the particular layered noise of a crowd that has no specific purpose beyond the collective one of getting through the morning. I was looking for it. I admitted that to myself. I was looking for the wrongness again, trying to locate it, to catch it in the act of being wrong so I could examine it properly.
The market was entirely, stubbornly, normal.
I was still standing there when I heard her voice behind me.
"Nighdy Hightower standing still in the middle of the square. You must be thinking very hard about something."
I turned.
Maret Voss was standing three feet away, a basket over one arm and the particular expression she wore when she had caught someone doing something she found interesting. She was not quite smiling. With Maret, the smile was often a thing held just behind the eyes, present but not yet deployed, waiting to see if the situation warranted it.
"I'm working," I said.
"You're standing still."
"I'm working in between the standing still."
She looked at me for a moment with that quality of listening she had — the kind that made you feel genuinely considered. "You look like something is bothering you."
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said something was bothering you. The two aren't mutually exclusive." She shifted the basket on her arm. "I'm getting supplies from the dry goods seller. Walk with me."
It was not quite an invitation and not quite an instruction. With Maret, most things occupied that middle space — offered rather than demanded, but offered with the calm confidence of someone who expected the offer to be accepted. I fell into step beside her.
"Sael told me you were asking after me," I said.
"Sael," she said, with the measured tone of someone selecting their response carefully, "has the discretion of a market bell."
"He mentioned the festival."
"He would." She stopped at the dry goods stall and began examining a selection of small paper-wrapped parcels with the focused attention she brought to everything. "Are you coming to the festival?"
"I told him yes."
She looked at me sideways, a quick assessment that she then returned to the parcels. "Good." A pause that contained something she was deciding whether to add. "I'm glad."
We stood for a moment in the comfortable silence of two people who have known each other long enough that silence does not require management. The dry goods seller was a wide woman named Otta who had been occupying this stall for as long as the bread woman had occupied her corner, and who regarded the market and everyone in it with the benevolent authority of long establishment. She wrapped Maret's parcels without being asked, already knowing what was needed.
"How is the apothecary?" I asked.
"Busy. There's something moving through the lower streets — not serious, a chest complaint, the kind that comes every autumn when the river damp gets into the houses. I've been making the usual compound." She paid Otta and tucked the parcels into her basket. "How is the cartographer?"
"Precise," I said. "He had opinions this morning about the order of my deliveries."
"He always has opinions."
"These felt different. More emphatic than usual."
She looked at me properly then, turning to face me with the full quality of her attention. "Different how."
I opened my mouth to answer and stopped.
Because it happened again.
Not the bread woman's cadence this time. Something else. Something that I can only describe, even now, with the vocabulary of wrongness rather than any more specific term. Maret was looking at me — her face entirely familiar, entirely itself, the slight tilt of her head that was characteristic of her listening posture — and for one moment, one fractional and sourceless moment, I saw her face twice.
Not overlapping. Not doubled in the way of a visual disturbance. More as though there were two versions of this moment existing simultaneously — the version I was in, and another version, running just behind or just beside it, in which the same face held a slightly different expression. In which the same morning light fell from a slightly different angle. In which Maret was in the same place but the question she had asked had been a different question, or had been asked a different way, or had not yet been asked at all.
It lasted less than a breath. Then it was gone.
"Nighdy."
I realised I was staring at her.
"Sorry," I said. "I — sorry. I lost my thought."
She was watching me with a careful expression. "Are you sure you're all right."
"Yes." The word came out more firmly than I intended, pushed by something that was not quite certainty and not quite its opposite. "Yes. Just tired. I didn't sleep well."
This was not entirely untrue. I had slept, but the sleep had been strange — full of a quality I could not name, a sensation of being slightly displaced from my own unconsciousness, as though I had been dreaming someone else's dreams and could not quite remember them on waking.
Maret looked at me for one moment longer with the expression of someone who is accepting an answer while reserving the right to return to it later. Then she settled the basket more securely on her arm. "Walk me back to the apothecary. You're going past it anyway."
"I am," I said.
We walked. The market moved around us. The morning was entirely, stubbornly, completely itself.
But I was paying attention now in a way I had not been before. Not the usual quality of my attention — the contemplative noticing, the philosophical looking-behind-things. Something more acute than that. Something almost involuntary, like a sense that had been switched on without my permission, scanning the world around me for the thing I had seen twice now and could not explain.
The bread woman's stall as we passed it. The sound of her call, arriving precisely when it should, cadence intact, nothing wrong.
The cobblestones of the square, each one exactly where it had always been.
The sky above Greyveil, the particular pale grey-blue of an autumn morning, clouds moving at the pace clouds move.
Everything entirely normal. Everything entirely itself.
And at the very edge of my perception, so faint I might have been imagining it entirely, the sourceless, persistent, smoke-like feeling that beneath the everything-normal, behind the entirely-itself, something was looking back at me.
I made the rest of my deliveries in a state of what I can only describe as heightened ordinary. The Registry received its envelope. The steward of Aldersham House received his package at the door with the practised blankness of a man who receives many packages and regards their contents as none of his business. I returned to Vessel Lane. Edvin Prose was still at his table, still bent over his maps, and received my confirmation that the deliveries had been completed in the correct order with a single nod that managed to convey both acknowledgement and dismissal simultaneously.
I sat at the small desk in the anteroom where I spent the idle hours between deliveries copying notations from old maps into new ledgers — work that required a steady hand and a tolerance for repetition, both of which I had in reasonable supply. The work was soothing in its way. The careful translation of one set of marks into another. The requirement to be present and precise. The particular quiet of a room where serious work is being done.
I copied. The afternoon moved around me.
The wrongness did not return.
By the time I left Vessel Lane in the early evening, the quality of the morning felt like something I might have constructed — a product of insufficient sleep and too much time spent looking for meaning in things that contained none. This was a known failing of mine. Sael had documented it. My mother, before she died, had observed it with affectionate resignation. I had a tendency to find the seam in things, to press at it, to wonder what was on the other side — and sometimes the seam was not a seam at all but simply a shadow falling in an interesting direction.
I walked home through Greyveil in the early evening light, which was doing something particular and golden with the river and the rooftops that I noticed and appreciated with the ordinary pleasure of a person who notices such things.
I ate. I read for an hour from a book about the early Celestia-readers — a history I had acquired from a stall a month ago and been working through slowly, more for the texture of the world it described than for any specific information I was seeking. I went to bed at a reasonable hour.
I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to Greyveil doing its evening things outside — the distant sound of the river, the occasional voice, the sounds of a town settling into night with the comfortable routine of a place that has been doing this for a very long time.
I thought about Maret. About the festival in twelve days. About Sael's expression when he'd told me she was asking after me and the particular satisfaction he'd derived from the telling of it.
I thought about the bread woman's cadence, arriving before she opened her mouth.
I thought about Maret's face, doubled for one fractional moment in the morning light, two versions of the same instant existing beside each other like two pages of the same book pressed together until the ink bled through.
I thought about Edvin Prose looking up from his maps and the extra beat in his gaze and the careful emphasis on the order of deliveries, and I thought that there had been something in that emphasis that I had registered at the time as unusual and had not returned to since. Something that now, in the dark, with the day's ordinary reassurances stripped away, felt less like professional precision and more like — warning. As though the order of the deliveries mattered not for cartographic reasons but for some other reason entirely, one he had not explained and I had not asked about.
I stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling was the ceiling. The dark was the dark. Outside, Greyveil was going to sleep.
And somewhere — not above me, not below me, not in any direction that the word somewhere was actually built to describe — something that had no dimension and no name and no understanding of what it had done was still, in some sense that precedes the word still, present.
I did not know this yet.
I felt it.
I told myself, for the third time that day, that it was nothing.
The dark sat on my chest with a weight that felt, for just a moment, like the weight of being read.
Then it passed. And I slept. And the night was entirely, ordinarily, completely itself.
Until it wasn't.
I woke before dawn to the sound of rain on the window and lay for a moment in the grey half-light listening to it, the way rain sounds different in the early dark than it does in daylight — more deliberate, somehow, as though it has the world to itself and knows it.
Then I became aware that I was not alone in my own head.
Not in any dramatic sense. Nothing so clear as a voice or a presence or a distinct sensation of intrusion. More like the feeling of walking into a room and knowing, before you have seen anything specific, that someone was recently there. A quality of the air. A slight displacement of something that had previously been undisturbed.
I sat up.
My room was my room. The grey pre-dawn light through the curtains. The desk with the book I had been reading still open on it. The chair with yesterday's coat over the back of it. Everything in its place, everything as I had left it.
But I was aware, with a clarity I could not account for and could not dismiss, that something had happened while I was sleeping. Not to the room. Not to the house or the street or the town. Something had happened to the space between me and the world — some membrane or distance or distinction that I had not previously known existed, because it had always been there, taken for granted the way you take for granted the wall between you and the weather until the wall develops a crack.
It had developed a crack.
I did not know yet what was on the other side.
I got up. I dressed. I went to the window and looked out at Greyveil in the rain, the streets empty and grey and glistening, the hills invisible behind low cloud, the river audible somewhere in the middle distance doing what the river always did.
And the wrongness that had followed me through yesterday — the cadence, the doubled moment, the smoke at the edges — was gone.
In its place was something else entirely. Something that I did not have a name for and would spend a long time trying to find one. Not wrongness. Not unease. Something quieter and more total than either of those words.
The feeling of being, for the first time in my life, completely and precisely and irreversibly seen.
Not by anything I could point to. Not from any direction I could identify. Just — seen. The way a word is seen by the eye that reads it. The way a character is seen by the mind that holds them.
I stood at the window in the grey pre-dawn rain and felt the gaze of something enormous and sourceless settle over me like light.
And somewhere in the part of me that had always asked the question behind the question, the part that looked for the seam and wondered what was on the other side — something answered.
Not in words. Not in anything so contained as language.
Just a recognition. A single, terrible, quiet recognition, arriving in me the way a stone arrives in still water.
You are being written.
I stood very still.
The rain came down on Greyveil. The river ran in the middle distance. The world was entirely, completely, stubbornly itself.
And I stood at the window of my ordinary room in my ordinary town and understood, without knowing how I understood it, without knowing yet what it meant or what it would cost or what it would make of me, that something had changed in the night.
That I had been touched by something that did not know its own name.
That I would never, in any sense that the word never can fully contain, be the same again.
Outside, without drama, without ceremony, without any acknowledgement of what had just occurred in the room above Greyveil's empty morning streets, the rain continued to fall.