Weeks passed. Time moved differently in the Dead Zone.
Not forward. Not backward.
Just deep.
Ravine had locked herself in the small, high room of the old outpost—the one facing the basin. No one disturbed her. Not the caretakers. Not the silence. Not even Arana, who knew that grief had its own tides, and that to interrupt them was to drown with the one you were trying to save.
Each day, Ravine sat by the window, staring into the ruin-scattered valley where the expedition had first faltered. The stone ring below remained weathered and broken, half-swallowed by dust and vine. The wind moved in spirals here. The birds did not come.
She didn't write.
She didn't read.
She didn't speak.
She just watched.
And remembered.
The first time she opened her eyes in this life, she had been desperate to know who she was. Every step forward had been a question. A reaching.
Now she remembered too much.
And the questions had become heavier than the silence.
The irony of it all lived sharp and quiet inside her ribs: how she had begged for memory, chased it like salvation.
And how now, holding it fully, she wanted nothing more than to forget again.
She let her fingers trace invisible runes into the frost of the windowpane. She whispered names into the cracks of the stone walls. Names she had once spoken as a leader, as a thread-binder, as the one who had believed too much.
Tovin.
Eryn.
Kaesa.
Niva.
Lysa.
Not out loud. Not as prayer.
But as offering.
A part of her wanted to believe there was still a ritual left to do. Some symmetry that might undo what had been broken.
But the truth had settled in her chest like lead:
Knowing had not brought peace.
It had only made the wound visible.
She pressed her forehead against the cold window.
She whispered, to no one:
"Was it the knowing that broke me? Or the need to know?"
She thought of her journey. The strangers she'd met. The questions she'd asked. The grief she had stirred in others by chasing her own.
What if the truth was not the final gift?
What if it was a cost?
The days blurred.
She counted them only in light. In the way the shadows fell across the basin. In the colour of the dusk when the wind shifted direction.
She ate only when hunger nagged too long. Slept only when her body gave out.
Some nights, she thought she saw movement near the ruin.
Figures. Shapes.
But when she looked again, they were gone.
Or perhaps never there.
She whispered more names.
And her own.
Not Ravine.
Not Maelon.
Just something in between.
The one who remembered.
The one who endured the remembering.
On the fourteenth morning, she finally stood and left the room.
But not yet to speak.
Just to breathe different air.
To begin again, even if only by a single breath.