Flashes tore through his mind, too fast to be called memories, too sharp to be only dreams. A consciousness that wasn't quite his own had spent centuries perceiving this place without ever being able to close its eyes, or choose where they landed.
The bench, motionless under a sky that never quite changed color. Then the same bench, a crack now running along the seat, thin as a pencil line. Then the crack wider, wide enough for green moss to nest inside and climb up the leg, a patient hand taking its time. Then no bench at all. Only a shape, under snow. A blue snow that hadn't existed yet, the first time. Then the snow melted, and the bench still there, cracked, in a pitiful state, the moss having finished the work nothing else had come to speed along.
A student, somewhere on the lawn, caught at the edge of his sight, lying on his back, eyes open on that same frozen sky. He wasn't moving. He still wasn't moving, but his cheeks had hollowed. There were no cheeks left at all. Just a pale angle of bone emerging from a pile of fabric that the grass, growing inch by inch, had finally swallowed whole.
The ground beneath his own feet, the same stone slab he had always known. A crack already ran through it, thin as a hair. The same crack, widening over the decades, wide enough, years later, to let a root through.
A silence so total it became a sound in its own right, an even pressure on every nerve, season after season, with no voice ever coming to break it.
Something was counting, somewhere inside that silence. Not the days, there were no more days left to count, only flashes between which everything had shifted a little further. Something kept counting anyway, stubbornly, terrified of forgetting how counting worked.
Then, all at once, nothing.
Atlas opened his eyes on the canvas ceiling of the wagon, breath short, a cold lodged behind his ribs that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air.
He stayed still for a moment, his heart hammering harder than he would have liked, letting the ceiling settle back into its ordinary shape before he dared close his eyes again.
That wasn't a dream. So this whole time, I was there?
He felt it before he could explain it, something visceral, almost sickening, nothing like the calm cold certainty that usually came with his conclusions. He just didn't know yet what it was a memory of.
They stopped at midday, in a clearing wide enough for the Moribonds to catch their breath without chewing into the surrounding brush. Tête Brûlée got down first, scanned the area with an eye that trusted nothing, then called out, without turning around.
"Sparring. All three of you. I want to see you move before your legs forget what they're for."
He turned to the other guard traveling with them. "And you, we're placing a few small bets."
No one argued. Arguing, with Burn-Head, had never led anywhere but to a worse version of whatever you were trying to avoid.
"Hercles will win for sure, 10 Coujou no it" Head-burn said to the other gard
"Tchh"
Hercles took his place across from Atlas without a word. Nothing in his eyes had changed since the day before, or if it had, he wasn't letting it show. He said nothing about what had happened that night. He didn't need to.
One look was enough to tell that he'd already filed it away somewhere, and was simply waiting to see what Atlas would do with whatever he'd just been handed.
The first exchange was different from every one that had come before it. Atlas felt his fist leave before he'd consciously decided to throw it, and for the first time since he'd started training bare handed, he felt every fiber along his forearm tighten one after another, in a precise order, as if he could finally read the score his own body had always been playing without ever showing it to him.
Hercles didn't quite dodge it.
It was nothing, an inch too far in one direction, an angle that wasn't quite the one he usually aimed for, but Atlas saw it, that fraction of a second where Hercles's fist closed a beat too late to intercept his cleanly. The blow slid off his shoulder instead of meeting empty air.
Something lit up on Hercles's face. Wider than usual. The look of a man who has finally found a problem worth his interest.
"About time" was all he said.
The fight went on longer than any before it, Hercles reclaiming every inch he'd given up with an almost methodical precision, as though he were testing a hypothesis rather than simply winning.
It ended the way it always ended, one blow, enough to lift him off his feet and send him rolling through the dirt a few meters away, the breath torn clean out of his lungs. But it took Hercles far more than ten dodges, this time, to find the opening he needed, and he made no effort to hide it.
"Not bad," Hercles said, getting up, a real smile on his face, not a trace of worry behind it. "Looks like I'm going to have to stop holding back with you, Atlas."
He didn't say anything more.
Dran, for his part, almost refused to step in front of Atlas at all.
Burn-Head had to physically shove him into the circle they'd traced into the dirt with a heel, a barked order that left no room for negotiation.
Dran raised his fists with the conviction of a man bracing to take blows rather than deal them, his eyes never quite leaving Atlas's face, as if he expected, at any second, to see something cyan there again.
The fight, if it could be called that, lasted under a minute.
Dran threw punches without putting any weight behind them, backed away before Atlas had even finished his motion, and when Atlas finally dropped him with a simple leg sweep, almost embarrassed to have needed nothing more, Dran stayed down a beat too long, eyes shut, as if he were waiting for something other than the end of the fight.
Atlas held out a hand to help him up. Dran looked at it before taking it, a hesitation that lasted only a second, but one Atlas noticed all the same.
He's not afraid of losing. He's afraid of me. Why?
Understanding that didn't sit well with him.
Burn-Head, with his usual bite, jerked his chin at Dran because he lost his bet and shoved him toward Hercles.
"You too. And stop being scared, dog. Fight, or I'll kill you myself."
Dran hesitated a beat too long, then took up position across from Hercles with the same low, precise guard he'd shown against Atlas. This time, he didn't look terrified. Just focused, like a man who knew exactly how wide the gap was and had decided to measure himself against it anyway.
Atlas watched, from the outside this time, and what he saw surprised him almost as much as the fight he'd just gone through himself. Dran took hits, gave them back, hunted for openings that Hercles had to actively shut down one by one. For a while, it wasn't a slaughter. It was a real fight.
Then Hercles decided playtime was over.
One motion, almost lazy, and Dran was on the ground, winded, never having seen the blow that put him there. Champion of the Crahar for longer than anyone could remember, and it showed, even in the almost careless way he'd closed the distance.
"Well fought" Hercles said, offering a hand, not a trace of condescension in his voice. "Really."
Dran took it, still catching his breath, without looking up.
Burn-Head watched the whole thing without a word, arms crossed, his burned face as unreadable for once. He glanced up at the sky, judging the hour with a glance as sharp as a clock.
"We've already lost enough time. If we're not in Tra by tomorrow night, I'm the one who'll have to explain it, not you. Everybody back in."
No one argued. They climbed back into the wagon in a hurried silence, the tarp dropping shut behind them, and the Moribonds were moving again before the dust from the sparring had even finished settling.
The landscape started rolling past under the raised tarp again, indifferent to everything that had just happened, the way it always had been.
Fear.
The word settled into him without his having gone looking for it, with that strange certainty that offered no comfort at all, the kind you feel recognizing your own handwriting at the bottom of a letter you don't remember writing.
That was the name he had to give this thing he now carried somewhere between his chest and the back of his neck, he was certain of it without knowing why, the same way he now knew dozens of small things about his own Qualia he'd never had the chance to learn. It was strange, this knowledge with no source.
Like waking up with the intact memory of a language you'd never studied.
The chains rattled against the floorboards with every jolt of the road.
He tried to piece together what he thought he understood.
Fear wasn't new, Fear had existed since the very first instant, that exact moment when the Tohotsi's voice had split his skull open on that university bench, when a part of him, too fragile to absorb what was happening, had broken off from the rest to absorb it in his place, like something declaring its own independence. An emergency split, rather than an accident.
Dran kept avoiding his eyes, sitting as far away as his chain would allow.
Then there had been the waiting. Long, motionless, in a place Atlas couldn't quite name, only feel the echo of, that too-total silence, that too-slow erosion. Fear had spent it alone, gathering whole centuries of pure terror, with no one to show it to, no body to feel it fully, just one small consciousness watching the world rot around it, season after season, storing up an experience he himself had never actually lived through.
And then, at his brutal waking, something had sealed itself shut, as if afraid to face him directly. Fear had walled itself in. Maybe out of some instinct for self-preservation, maybe simply because a terror like that has nowhere to go in a body that has only just opened its eyes again. That was probably why his own panic, that first day, had lasted only a fraction of a second before disappearing behind that wall of ice he had never actually built himself.
I thought I was the one who'd walled it up. But really, even then, I had no control over any of it. It wasn't me. He was the one who'd walled himself up. Fear.
He remembered, with a new clarity, that night in the blue snow, facing the first mutant, when his mind had fractured for the very first time and a voice, one that wasn't his, had begged for the pain to stop. He'd chalked that up, at the time, to shock.
That wasn't me begging. That was already him.
Which left last night. That, at least, he could explain without having to guess. He had tried to force his way toward the pale blue, another of his consciousnesses, he had worked out, and his will, pulling back too fast, must have shaken loose far more than the one shade he'd been aiming for, tearing open, in passing, the door behind which Fear had locked himself away since the very first day. How that loose panic had ended up absorbed rather than simply set free, that, he still had no idea. He only remembered the sensation, Fear spreading through him like ink through water, with no edge ever coming to stop it.
I let loose something I didn't even know existed, and I still don't know how I sealed it back up.
What troubled him most wasn't losing control, again. He was starting to get used to that idea, uncomfortable as it was. It was something else, something harder to admit. He no longer felt the faintest trace of terror, not even the memory of the night before's, and yet he didn't feel hollowed out by its absence. He felt, against all logic, a little more whole than before. As if some piece of himself, lost for centuries in a place he couldn't name, had just found its way home.
He didn't like the thought. He kept it anyway.
It was Hercles, at the end of the day, who broke the silence that had settled between them since the sparring.
"Sleeping well, with your new colors?" he asked, not looking up from the piece of bread he was crumbling between his fingers.
The question, asked like that, could have passed for idle to anyone else's ears. Dran, curled up on the other side of the wagon, didn't even lift his head.
"I don't know yet what I got out of it," Atlas answered, choosing each word with the same care Hercles had put into his. "Just that it's nothing like what I had before." He closed his hand slowly, fingers folding in one at a time, as if checking that nothing had slipped underneath without his noticing.
I can feel it. Something, almost imperceptible. The source of my will. The source of what I am.
Hercles nodded, slowly, as if the answer had confirmed something he'd been dreading.
"Mine never gave me anything back," he said finally, so quietly that Atlas had to lean in slightly to hear him. "It takes. It dominates. That's all it knows how to do."
He didn't say what it had taken, or for how long. Atlas didn't ask.
The wagon carried on toward Tra, the chains rattling with every turn of the wheels, and somewhere between his chest and the back of his neck, what he had brought home was finally sleeping, for the first time in centuries, a sleep that felt like nothing but rest.