Dawn—in the Grund—was an agreement, not a color. Dark-green light seeped through the slats and woven seams of the walls, the kind of light that looked like it had passed through leaves and water and old decisions to get here. The little hut breathed as it always did, timbers clicking, canvas answering, a slow chorus to the deep, patient hum of the Schlund under everything.
Breuk sat on a crate that had decided to be a chair. The black-leather book lay open across his thigh and the crate corner, pages sagging under their own years. On the inside cover, someone had scratched a symbol hard enough to bruise the leather: circles within circles, three short lines reaching inward. He'd traced it enough times that his fingertip remembered the path without help.
Lig stood behind him, shoulder to a rib of metal, saying nothing, wearing the silence like a uniform. Smoke clung to him even when he wasn't smoking. Dust had chosen him as an ornament.
Breuk tapped the page with a knuckle. "Here," he said, and the word left a small fog in the chill. Diagrams sprawled over the paper—hand-drawn coils, neat arrows, labels in a taught hand. A central shaft had been sketched straight as a command and named what everything here named it in the end: Schlund. From that throat, lines fed outward into rings. The rings were annotated with a mechanic's poetry: intake—field—separation—return.
"This is the core," Breuk said. His voice had spent the night practicing being steady. "If this thing stops, everything tied to it unravels. The wall, the rain, the way the city pretends to breathe. All of it."
Lig leaned in. In the poor light, his eyes held the flame whole, a trick Breuk had never learned. "Then it has to die," Lig said softly, like you tell a friend a kindness they won't thank you for.
"It's a machine," Breuk said. He wanted it to be only that. "Not a creature."
"Everything that breathes can die," Lig said. "Even if the breath is made of metal."
Breuk shut the book and rubbed his face with the heel of his hand until his skin stung. The coin at his chest answered the pressure by being colder. "Even if we could stop it," he said, "we'd collapse their world. This one. The village. The rain would fail. The field would flicker and the upper levels would panic and—" He cut himself off because speaking the ultimates always made them real.
Lig came off the wall and sat on the crate's edge, close enough that their knees argued over the same inch of floor. The candle between them did its thin best; its reflection ringed the dark in Lig's eyes like a target. "This isn't a life, Breuk," he said. "This is a hole with walls made of a story."
Breuk met his look and found his own anger there, wearing Lig's face. "And what about them?" he asked, a tilt of chin toward the hut seams and the barely waking village beyond. "They believe in it. It holds them together."
"Sometimes you burn a sky," Lig said, almost smiling. "So people can watch the smoke and finally learn what it was."
Breuk's mouth went hard and flat. The book felt heavier on his thigh now that it was closed, like it had acquired mass from being read too many times. He slid a finger under its edge and let it fall shut with a careful thud. The sound sat between them. Neither of them moved it.
The night before had peeled itself long and slow and hadn't ended so much as changed masks. They had taken the book out to the fire where the damp ate sparks as fast as the wood could birth them. The Grund's sounds had been patient: the drip from root to root, the small sigh of something settling that was not quite stone.
Lig had watched the diagrams with the same attention he used on locks and men. "You know you have to tell them," he said, not looking up. His voice carried the weight of obvious things.
"And if they don't believe a word of it?" Breuk asked. He wanted an answer that absolved him.
"Then they'll believe you," Lig said, finally lifting his gaze. He wore the past for a moment: the old easy grin, the schoolyard charm that shifted rooms. It sat on him like a coat he wasn't sure fit anymore.
"I don't want to hurt them," Breuk said. He didn't try to hide the crack in it.
Lig's hand found his shoulder. It was the same grip as when they were boys and someone else's trouble needed both their names on it. "Then do it for them," he said. "If you say nothing, they die down here thinking the wall is mercy."
The flame licked up and made his eyes more coin than human. For a breath, for less than that, something else moved behind them—a flat conviction with no softness in it. Breuk didn't know if the flicker belonged to Lig or the fire.
The elder's hut was a circle pretending to be a home and a verdict. Wood ribs; stone teeth; panels of metal patched into plates like old armor. Inside, the air held smoke and water and a smell of old paper. Jakk sat cross-legged near the low fire, boots off, hands loose on his knees. The old man of the pipe leaned in shadow, the pipe itself unlit, as if he were saving fire for a sentence that needed it. Two others—faces Breuk knew now by the work they did with their hands—completed the ring.
Breuk stood with the book under his arm like a confession. Lig stood half a pace forward and half a head taller than his calm.
"We found something," Lig said first. He traded his charm for the voice he used in rooms where he needed men to remember the words later. "Something you deserve to know."
Breuk lifted the book, palms open to show he had brought both hands to it. "This tells the truth about the Fallen," he said. "Not the fireside version. The one he wrote with his own choices."
The old man with the pipe turned his head like a clock changing its mind. His eyes were not dim. "The story has been told since the Grund learned to breathe," he said. "Why should strangers pronounce it better?"
"Because the story lied to you," Lig said. He didn't step closer. He didn't need to. He had brought his words instead. "It made your prison sound like a promise."
Something subtle passed over the faces around the fire—the small tightening of skin that means a muscle is choosing to work. Jakk's gaze slid from Lig to Breuk and back again, confusion drawing a line between his eyebrows.
"What are you saying?" Jakk asked. He wasn't afraid yet. Just offended on behalf of a truth he had been taught to love.
Lig's voice went that quiet which makes men lean in. "The Fallen wasn't a savior," he said. "He was the devil who separated you. He built a wall to break the world. Not to heal it."
"Blasphemy," the old man said, not raising his voice. He let the word sit like a stone in the fire until the heat cracked it.
"No," Breuk said, too loud and then exactly loud enough, stepping into the part of the circle where the fire had left an opening. He knew he was being played by the part of himself that needed to speak first. He let it play him anyway. "He locked us down here," he said. "He banished us to a pit so we'd never look up again."
"Breuk—" Jakk began, hand half lifted, a gesture halfway between caution and comfort.
"You've been feeding the Schlund your whole lives," Breuk said, the words heating as they left him. "And up there they're thirsty. Every offering you throw in tightens the wall. Every gift makes the cage smarter."
Silence came like weather. It owned the room.
The fire worked on a knot of resin in the wood. It popped once. The sound was obscene, and then it wasn't.
The old man looked at Breuk for a long time, longer than conversation would usually permit. His gaze held a careful pity. "You speak as though you know what is good for us," he said. "But those who fall should be the last to judge the depth."
Lig lowered his eyes. His face did its clean blank thing; it was the look he wore when someone else's grief was going to be useful later. Breuk hated that he could tell the difference between Lig's kindness and Lig's patience.
Jakk rose. His palm found Breuk's shoulder, callus to cloth, anchor instead of leash. "Come," he said. "They'll think on it. That's all you can do."
Breuk wanted to shout it isn't. He didn't. He swallowed the word and tasted iron. He had learned too much lately about the price of shouting in rooms where belief had a seat.
Outside, the day had decided to be a day. Work talked in low voices and metal answered. Children volleyed a spring back and forth with more skill than sense. Far off, water made promises it had no intention of keeping.
Breuk stared at the ground like it might give him a different answer if he looked harder. "They don't believe me," he said. He didn't decorate it.
"Not yet," Lig said. He lit a cigarette and the smoke climbed with a confidence Breuk envied. Lig exhaled through a thin smile that didn't warm anything. The expression fit him the way some knives fit a hand.
Sometimes devils don't need bodies, Breuk thought. Sometimes they just need someone to agree they exist.
The thought wasn't about Lig. Not exactly. He wished it were that simple.
He took the book back to the hut and set it on the crate with less care than it deserved, then corrected himself and straightened it, guilt being a habit he couldn't unlearn. He opened it again to the pages that had drawn the Circle like an anatomy diagram of a sin. He read the labels out loud because hearing something in the air makes it harder to lie to yourself: intake, field, separation, return. He traced the ring that kept the wall alive. He found the place where the artist's hand had trembled, where the last sentence—the one that made everything neat—had been eaten by fire.
Lig stood near the door and watched the village move past the doorway like a slow river.
"What if the wall is a sentence," Lig said finally, voice mild, like he had only just thought of it. "Something the city keeps saying. We don't have to kill the tongue to stop the sentence. We can interrupt it. Change a word."
Breuk snorted a laugh that wasn't a laugh. "You going to write please in the margin and hand it back?" he asked. He tapped the diagram. "You said it yourself—pressure and field and kind. It recognizes us. It denies us because we're direction and heat and nerve."
"Then we stop being direction," Lig said. "For a breath."
"We tried that plan already," Breuk said, and pictured the metal shells, the weight, the timing, the way the Schlund's intake would try to make them part of its grammar. "We're coffins unless we're lucky. And I hate when luck has to be the best tool on the table."
Lig's mouth tilted. "You don't hate it as much as you say," he said. "You're devoted to luck. You just don't like admitting you pray."
Breuk shut the book again. The leather made its tired sound. His eyes found the seam in the floorboard where he'd hidden the last burned pages the first night, as if secrets got quieter underground. He wanted to tear the floor up, throw the crate out, throw the hut out, throw the whole quiet village into the mouth of the truth and then stand there while the devil counted what came back.
"Say we tear a node," Breuk said instead, practical because practicality kept blood inside the skin. "Salt water, current, drift. A thin spot in the membrane. We tip through on the flicker."
"Gentlest bad idea we have," Lig said. He had already said it the night before. Saying it again made it sound like a plan. "We do it after the noon offering. The wall's fed and lazy. It expects obedience. We pretend to be the last spoonful."
Breuk nodded. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Blood tasted like iron and relief. The coin lay cool against his sternum, as if denying what it had just done.
He thought of the old man's accusation—those who fall shouldn't judge the depth—and felt the exact disloyalty he had chosen prick his pride and then his conscience. He thought of Jakk's chin, the unsaid goodbye. He thought of the villagers' bowls tipping their small hopes into a mouth that kept books. He thought of the sentence Lig had offered him like a doctrine: sometimes you burn a sky.