Muhan pulled his coat on and went out before Scarlett said anything about it.
The morning air hit him the way it always hit him here — cold that belonged to the forest rather than the season, carrying the damp of moss and old wood and underneath both the thin thread of whatever had been in the air outside the door all night and hadn't dispersed with the dark. He stood on the cabin's threshold for a moment and looked at the road.
The village was still.
Not the stillness of sleep. The stillness of a place that had gotten through another night and hadn't yet found the energy to perform the ordinary movements of a day beginning. The shutters were still closed on most of the buildings. No smoke from the chimneys yet. No movement at the well. Just the road and the cobbles and the moss and the rusted iron and the grey light pressing down on all of it with the indifference of a sky that had never once been asked to be anything other than grey.
The child's shoe sat between its two cobblestones.
Muhan looked at it.
Then he looked at Rey's door standing open at the road's far end and he walked toward it.
The door had been opened from outside.
He could see it clearly now — up close, the angle of the hinges, the way the door rested against the interior wall at a degree that a person leaving in a hurry would not have produced. Something had come through this door from outside and the door had been left as it was because whatever came through it had not been interested in closing it after itself.
He stood in the threshold and looked into the interior.
One room. Smaller than Scarlett's cabin, the walls darker, the moss-packing in the joins thicker and older, the kind of wall that had stopped trying to keep the damp out and had simply incorporated it. A sleeping mat in the corner — undisturbed. A shelf carrying three objects whose nature he couldn't determine in the interior dark. A table with nothing on it.
And in the floor near the table's base a seam.
Not the ordinary seam of planks that had shifted over time. A deliberate seam — cut rather than settled, its edges too clean for natural movement, running in a rectangle just large enough for a person to pass through if they moved carefully.
Muhan crossed to it and crouched and knocked twice on the wood beside it.
Silence.
He knocked again.
A long pause. Then the sound of something being moved from beneath — a bolt, the scrape of it. The rectangle lifted from the inside, hinged at its far edge, and Rey looked up at him from the dark below with the expression of someone who had been in a small underground space for several hours and was only now allowing himself to consider the possibility that what was above him was morning rather than something else.
His eyes found Muhan's face.
He exhaled.
"You're still here," he said.
"Yes," Muhan said.
Rey looked past him at the open door. Something moved across his face at the angle of it — the recognition of a man reading information he had hoped not to find confirmed.
"Come down," he said. "Close the floor behind you."
The underground was older than the cabin above it.
The walls were stone rather than wood — dark, dense, fitted without mortar in the way of things built to last rather than things built to be finished. The ceiling was the underside of the floor above, the planks' grain visible from below, and the space was just large enough for two people to sit across from each other without their knees touching.
Muhan saw the candle the moment he lowered himself through the opening.
It sat in a holder fixed to the stone wall — iron, old, the surface of it carrying the particular darkness of metal that had been exposed to smoke and time for long enough that the two had become indistinguishable from the material itself. The candle it held was not new. Its wax had the colour and texture of something very old, ivory deepened toward yellow at its base where the years had worked on it, its surface carrying the faint layering of something that had been burning and cooling and burning again across a duration that wax wasn't meant to record but had recorded anyway.
The flame was straight.
Completely straight, in the underground air, with no draft anywhere in the stone space to move it. Burning with the steadiness of something that had been burning for a long time and intended to continue, and the light it gave was warmer than the candles above had been, carrying a quality that arrived in Muhan's chest before he had processed it as visual information.
He looked at it.
He couldn't stop looking at it.
He didn't understand why — not the candle itself, not its steadiness, not the warmth of its light specifically. Something about the combination of those things in this space, underground, in a place that whatever moved through the village at night had not entered, produced in him a quality of attention he hadn't given anything since he arrived in this Trauma. A pulling sensation, low and persistent, the kind that belongs to things that exist at the edge of what the mind can account for and keeps returning to the edge because the accounting keeps failing.
Rey watched him look at it.
"It doesn't go out," Rey said. Simply. The tone of someone stating a fact they had stopped finding remarkable because they had been living with it long enough for remarkable to become ordinary.
"How long," Muhan said.
Rey looked at the candle.
"I took it from the ruins," he said. "Before the last of the temple walls came down — there was a section at the back, further in than the rest, that held longer than anything else. The foundation stones were deeper there." He was quiet for a moment. "It was raining the day I went in and took it. I remember because the rain made everything look the way things look when they're being seen for the last time." He paused. "I cried. I didn't plan to. I just — stood there in the rain with the candle in my hands and I cried, and I didn't fully understand why, and then I brought it down here and I lit it."
He looked at the flame.
"That was a long time ago," he said. "It hasn't gone out since."
Muhan looked at the flame.
He looked at it for long enough that the underground's quiet had accumulated around them before he looked at anything else.
On the floor between them, spread across the stone with the careful arrangement of something consulted regularly, lay strips of cloth covered in handwriting — thin careful script moving in rows across the pale fabric, the characters dense and deliberate, each one placed with the precision of someone who understood that what they were writing was more important than how quickly they wrote it. Some of the strips were older than others, the fabric more yellowed, the ink carrying the faded quality of something written in an early translation attempt and returned to repeatedly since. Others were newer, the ink darker, corrections visible at the margins where Rey had revised his understanding of a character and written the revision beside the original without erasing either.
Muhan looked at them.
Then at Rey.
"How long have you been down here," Muhan said.
"Since last night." Rey sat against the stone wall with his knees drawn up and his hands loose in his lap. "I heard her at the door. I knew from the sound of it — the way she found the mechanism, the way she held it — that she was going to come through." He looked at the closed floor above them. "So I came down."
"How did you know she wouldn't follow," Muhan said.
Rey looked at the candle.
"She can't," he said.
Muhan looked at the candle too.
"Why," he said.
Rey reached for the nearest cloth strip and turned it toward Muhan without handing it to him — the handwriting facing outward, the characters running in their careful rows.
"Because Hyeonsil told us she couldn't," he said.