From the outside, it looked like any other supply wagon.
A structure of raw wood, banded with tanned leather at the joints, thick tarps fastened along the sides that could be closed against the weather or left open depending on the driver's mood. Two Moribonds pulled the whole thing from the front, their six-legged gait producing a steady roll that absorbed almost every jolt. On the road, no one gave it a second look. This kind of convoy was far too ordinary for that.
It was only on the inside that you noticed the rings fixed into the floorboards, and the chains attached to them.
Burn-Head sat beside the driver, his back turned, and hadn't said a word since they'd left the Crahar, early that morning.
Still no sign of Isaac.
Atlas had noticed the absence, but there was nothing to be done about it. He would have to wait a while longer for his chance to ask his questions, if Isaac ever deigned to reappear at all.
The Arena city vanished behind them in under an hour. First the outskirts, those buildings that had never quite decided whether they belonged to the city or to whatever lay beyond it, walls half stone and half salvaged wood, roofs patched in too many different directions to hold any coherent shape anymore. Then the edge, blurred, almost invisible, past which the buildings simply stopped existing and everything else began.
The sky stayed that same anthracite gray, barely letting night be told apart from day. Through the bars of the wagon, Atlas caught glimpses of shapes flying overhead, unable to tell if they were birds or something else entirely. He wasn't sure of anything anymore, not since he'd watched those six-legged horses pull their own harness.
Atlas said nothing for a long while, content to watch the landscape roll by, caught up in every detail as though his eyes were trying to make up two thousand years of lost time all at once. Nothing left in common with the world he had known.
Everything changes so fast. A few hundred years can feel like an eternity, but against the scale of history it's nothing at all. And yet...
What he saw wasn't what he had pictured.
He had expected destruction, ruins, everything that centuries of a broken world should have produced. There was some of that, true enough. Barely recognizable ruins, stones worn smooth by time until nothing was left but foundations, stretches of road swallowed by vegetation that no longer quite resembled anything he'd known, half-collapsed structures no one had bothered to finish tearing down or rebuilding.
But there was also the rest of it.
Fields of what looked like rye, Not much to look at, not laid out with any order, but functional, alive, worked by people bent at the back with a quiet efficiency that had nothing to do with the agony he'd pictured. Well-built villages of wood and stone, small, dense, laid out according to some logic that escaped him but was clearly a logic all the same. And everywhere, that strange vegetation he didn't recognize, plants with leaves a shade too dark, stems growing at angles that made no sense, as if they had adapted to the new rules of the world faster than the humans had.
The world kept going. It always kept going, with me or without me...
There was nothing comforting in that. But it was real, a kind of real that the walls of the Crahar had kept him from ever seeing.
Hercles sat across from him, eyes half closed, with that way he had of looking asleep while staying perfectly aware of everything around him. The third man lay in the opposite corner of the tarp, as far from the other two as his chain would allow, his back against the wood, his eyes fixed on his own hands.
His name was Dran. That was all they knew about him, the name a guard had spoken while shoving him inside, no ceremony to it, the way you'd announce a delivery. He looked to be in his thirties, maybe, hard to say. His face carried something Atlas struggled to name, not trauma, not in the way he understood the word, and not the cold absence he'd seen in the Crahar on people who had witnessed too much either. More a permanent vigilance, turned inward rather than outward, like someone keeping watch over something inside himself he wasn't sure would stay in place.
He hadn't spoken since they'd left.
Hercles opened his eyes after a long while, watched the landscape roll past beneath the raised tarp, then let his gaze settle on Dran with a patience that carried nothing like a question in it.
Dran eventually felt it.
"The South," Hercles said, without preamble. "What's actually down there?"
Dran didn't answer right away. His hands closed slightly on themselves, a brief, almost invisible gesture.
"Settlements. Vegetation, as far as the eye can see. And arenas, obviously. Like everywhere else."
"But you didn't leave to go look at arenas."
A silence. The wagon jolted over a rougher stretch of road, all three of them absorbing the shock without a word.
"No," Dran admitted under his breath, straightening up to face them. "We never made it to the arenas."
Atlas decided not to step in. Hercles was handling this better than he would have, with that particular patience of people who know how to wait without letting the waiting turn into pressure.
"What stopped you?"
Dran looked up. His gaze went to Tête Brûlée, still turned away at the front of the wagon, then came back. He hesitated before speaking, his mouth as if sewn shut by fear.
"They called themselves the Primitives. I couldn't describe them, everything happened so fast..."
He stopped on that sentence as though he'd only just noticed it himself. "Apparently they've lived in the South since before the Great Elevation. Maybe since before there were men, in the way we mean it."
"Mutants?" Atlas asked, curiosity burning at his lips, almost relieved, for once, to have a good reason not to know.
Dran shook his head, slowly, the fear creeping back into his eyes.
"No. Not mutants. Mutants lost something. These people, they never had what we lost in the first place. It's not the same. I got lucky, getting out at all..." His eyes drifted off somewhere, no one could say where.
The tarp on the side snapped softly against the wood in a gust of wind, then settled. The landscape outside had changed. They were dropping into lower ground, less cultivated, where the vegetation was taking back its territory more openly. Trees with twisted trunks lined the road, their branches tangling overhead into an imperfect vault.
Atlas pressed on, sensing that Dran was losing what little momentum he'd found to keep answering.
"And Isaac? He was with you, wasn't he? He left with you."
Dran looked up and met his eyes directly. "Isaac? No, he never came with us. I thought he was with you. Especially you, Hercles." He turned toward him.
Hercles, genuinely caught off guard, raised an eyebrow. "With me?"
A hard jolt shook the wagon, the road growing more and more twisted. Tête Brûlée turned to check that everything was fine in the back, which forced the three gladiators into silence.
Strange. If he wasn't with them, and clearly not with Hercles or with us either, where could he be? At Tra? What are you playing at, Isaac?
Atlas changed the subject quickly, not wanting to lose him. "So, concretely. Why were there only three of you, mute and terrified like this?"
Dran didn't answer right away. His hands, flat on his knees, didn't move, but something in his forearms tightened slightly, as if it took effort to keep them still.
"We... we crossed a forest." His voice was shaking, every scrap of composure he'd found gone in an instant. "The leaves were white, a pure white, almost unworthy of our presence there. White. Like they'd never known any other color. I knew we shouldn't have taken that path... I told them so!"
No one interrupted him.
"We hadn't gone a hundred meters in when the guards started falling. Not all at once, one after another, at regular intervals, like something was counting. They didn't scream. They just stopped, looked at their hands, and fell." A pause. "Then they exploded... They exploded!"
His voice had risen too fast, too suddenly, and Hercles and Atlas clapped a hand over his mouth at the exact same instant. Hercles pressed a finger to his lips for silence. Up front, Burn-Head had turned around, and shot them a dark look.
The wagon kept jolting over the road but no one seemed to notice anymore.
"From the inside" Dran went on, shaking. He could barely hold their gaze anymore. "Like something in their bodies had decided to get out. No visible wound before it happened, no warning at all. Just... the explosion, and then death."
Atlas felt something settle low in his stomach.
"The Primitives appeared after the first one, after, like they'd been waiting for it to start. They didn't run. They walked, between the white trees, and I couldn't hear their footsteps on the ground. Not one sound."
"They attacked you?" Hercles asked.
"No." Dran looked up for the first time since he'd started talking. "They watched, Just watched. While the guards kept falling, one after another. Like it was... a ceremony. A rite. They made a strange sound with their mouths, and they tapped out some kind of rhythm with their feet." He searched for the words a moment, eyes lost somewhere in the distance. "Like we were an offering..."
"And the gladiators?" Atlas said.
Dran lowered his eyes again.
"The others, Pierre, Dru, Loi... they didn't explode, but the Primitives took them, one at a time. We got separated, there was nothing we could do. One by one, they'd take one of us, lead him off between the trees. You'd just hear screaming, and then you wouldn't see them anymore. They never came back."
His throat tightened. "And us, the three left, we were the last ones. We ran. Tried to get away. That's all we did. We ran without stopping until we were out of the forest, until the trees turned ordinary again and the light changed. And the moment we crossed the treeline, nothing. Not a single trace of them left."
He stopped, shaken by his own account.
"I don't know what they did to the other seven, and I don't want to know." His resignation was almost touching.
The silence that followed had nothing in common with the ones before it. Atlas didn't know how it was for Hercles, but even though he could no longer really feel fear, something close to dread twisted in his gut. It was the silence of three men in a closed space with something none of them knew how to put away.
Hercles watched Dran without a word. Atlas watched the landscape roll past under the tarp, ordinary trees with ordinary leaves, and wondered how far off the South really started.
The Tohotsi. People who worship the Tohotsi the way children still know their parents. And who offer them bodies that burst open from the inside like an evening prayer.
"In your opinion, are they Awakened?" he finally asked, less to get an answer than because the question refused to leave him alone.
Dran thought for a moment, surprised by the question, but took the time to answer anyway.
"I don't know what to call what they are. I'd guess they must be Awakened, but the Qualia is a will imposing itself on reality. What they have is different. It's like reality already belonged to them. Like we were the intruders in something that had been theirs since the beginning..."
The road went on toward Tra, and the sun, somewhere behind Odyssey's permanent clouds, began its slow descent toward a horizon Atlas still didn't recognize.