The walker had been moving for close to an hour by then, and Ashe had spent most of that time at one of the round windows, her shoulder resting lightly against the frame as her gaze followed the slow passage of land below.
Cressa and Halen had given her that space. Cressa had retreated to the bench along the far wall, absorbed in a ledger, while Halen had settled at a small panel that served as an improvised desk, something Ashe hadn't even noticed until he had pulled it from a recess in the side wall. He was making notes, cataloguing something from memory. They had quarreled twice already, mostly over measurements Cressa thought were wrong and Halen insisted were correct.
She had watched them for a while, studying their rhythm. They were two people who had woken up in this world with nothing and had nonetheless managed to build something between themselves that resembled routine and affection. She didn't know what that felt like, or if she had ever known it herself at some point and simply forgotten. But watching them made her want to.
After a while though, her attention had returned to the window. The vegetation grew thicker as they advanced and the light kept moving through them creating playful shadows around her.
She was still watching those shadows when Cressa's voice came from close beside her, startling her slightly as she had not heard her approach.
"The sun's going to set soon," Cressa said, looking out through the same window panel. She had noticed her reaction but chose not to make it a topic, something which Ashe silently appreciated. "Nightfall always draws the Drifts out. But we're safe inside here, so don't worry about that."
Ashe nodded once, steadying herself. "Yeah."
After a few minutes of simply sharing the silence, a thought surfaced that had been coming and going in her mind for a while now. She had been considering whether it would be wise to voice it at all or not.
"Have you ever heard of… Threnos?" she finally decided to ask, not looking at either of them in particular. After a moment though, her gaze moved to Halen, who had looked up from his desk at the sound of her voice.
There was a brief exchange between the siblings. Then Halen shook his head and Cressa turned back toward Ashe repeating a similar motion.
"No," she said. "Never heard it. Is it a place?"
"I think so," Ashe replied. "It's where someone I know is from."
Cressa waited for a moment to see if more would follow. When it didn't, she let it settle without pressing further. "I see."
Unlike his sister, Halen was triggered by this. He set down whatever he had been writing and moved to the bench, drawing attention upon himself.
"Where did you say you were from?" he asked, watching her more closely.
He still found her strange. Not with the same suspicion as before, but certainly with some curiosity over how little she seemed to know, and at the same time how much she kept to herself when asked.
Ashe lowered her gaze, letting her eyes settle on the floor. She realized there was no version of this that she could delay any longer and, frankly, she was starting to get tired of it anyway. She was hiding from something she had no understanding of.
"I don't know," she said. Then, more quietly. "I don't remember."
Halen opened his mouth, ready with an automatic "oh." But then something landed properly in his thoughts and the full weight of what she had said finally reached him.
"Oh…"
Cressa gave him a light nudge.
"Are you…" he began.
"Yes," Ashe interrupted. "I think the word is Emergent".
A brief silence followed as each of them processed that word and what it meant in their own different ways.
"Hey," Cressa said, after a moment, with a voice quieter than she used to have. "It's okay, we understand." She paused briefly, then added: "It explains a lot, though, just so you know."
"Yeah," Ashe replied.
"I didn't think people were still emerging," Halen said, trying to reconcile this new piece of information against everything he thought he knew. "It hasn't happened in a long time… not as far as we know."
Ashe had no answer, she couldn't have known. But there was something she did want to know, something she had been wondering since she first saw them together out in the open.
"Can I ask how it was for you? When you emerged, I mean."
Cressa and Halen exchanged another look, longer this time and full of meaning.
"We woke up in the same room," Cressa recalled. "It was in one of the tall buildings in the east sector of Lethon. Neither of us knew anything about anything back then. We had no clue where we were or who we were. We struggled to find food for a while and then understand which Drifts were reactive and which ones were passive. We were two idiots dropped into the open world."
"Hey," Halen said, shooting her a complaining look.
Cressa chuckled. "Alright, I'll let you pick a better word, but if I don't like it, it's still 'idiot.'"
He scoffed, then let out a reluctant laugh before returning to his notes.
"We don't know exactly where inside Lethon we came out," Cressa continued, and the humor disappeared naturally from her voice. "We never went back to find that specific room again. There's no way to map that place properly anymore anyway. It's too big and the Drifts settle there in large numbers after dark."
She glanced out the nearest window briefly.
"Nobody goes in there anymore, except them."
"Lethon…" she repeated.
"You'll see it soon enough," Halen assured her. "We're going to reach the outskirts before long."
Ashe turned toward the closest window beside her and looked out.
The world outside had changed completely while she had been focused on the conversation. The open plains were gone. The light had continued to fall, and in its place an eerie mist had come up from the ground, blurring everything it touched. The vegetation on either side of the walker's path had grown dense and tangled, but between the gaps in it, she could see the shapes of things that did not fit the natural shape of any landscape she had seen so far during the walker's advance. She narrowed her eyes and tried to focus through the mist.
The silence in the compartment set in quickly making it all feel even deeper. Halen had set his notebook down looking outside as well and expecting the inevitable.
Ashe kept her eyes on the window, watching the outline of Lethon begin to emerge from the mist and the dark.