It smells sharp. Not of fire or old urine, but of a potion Brother Fidelis once kept locked in his chest. Back then he dripped it onto open wounds. A single drop, and the air filled with bitterness. But here… here there is no life in it. No herb. No breath. Only a cold, foreign scent that drives out all that is pure, all that cannot be seen.
I sit still while Marit argues with the woman. Her voice is strict, like old iron. She doesn’t speak—she barks, like Tara, Alina’s dog, when she wanted something. Self-assured, commanding. I don’t understand all her words, but I know the tone. They sound like blows.
“No valid insurance? Then we cannot admit you. Rules are rules.”
The words are strange to me. Not all of them, but the cadence—I know it. From another time. The shoemaker’s wife at the village well, her cheeks red with rage, her lips never carrying a kind word. Her mouth moved endlessly. The same energy. The same coldness.
I draw my shoulders in, just barely. The light in this hall is too bright. Everything is glass and that Silver stuff . I see no wood, no fire. No shadow. I grasp little. The meaning of words, the devices, even the light itself that comes from no candle. How can people live like this?
These things have no names in my mind. Only shapes. Sounds. Motions. Some remind me of before. Others slip away like water through fingers.
And yet I grow used to it. Used to wonder. Used to accepting that I cannot understand.
And perhaps, I sometimes think, that is the strangest thing of all: that my mind does not resist. That it bends. As though it had already learned, once, to take in things not of this world.
A doctor comes. He must be a doctor—doctors always have that quick step, that assured stride. It was the same before. He speaks with the iron woman, short and firm, then turns to Marit.
“Mrs. Nyborg? We’re expecting you. Your companion is listed. Please, come this way.”
The unfriendly woman blinks, surprised. I see it. I also see Marit breathe out, relieved. Her hand rests softly against my back.
Everything is arranged, though I do not understand it. But I do not like this place.
The air smells of nothing. Not of earth. Not of fire. Not of life. Only of a cleanliness that burns in the nose.
We climb stairs. Flight upon flight. Glass, stone, a silver-colored railing at my side. The walls shine like wet slate. Our steps echo.
Marit pants behind me. “So many… stairs… we could have taken the elevator…” she mutters to herself. Her hand clings heavy to the rail, her brow shining from the climb.
I do not turn, but I hear it in her voice—her weariness, her age, her weight. Perhaps all at once.
In my own body, I feel none of it. Only this strange lightness. As though I am not entirely made of flesh.
At the top step, the doctor turns. Clear gaze. Pale hands. “Dr. Preuß. I’ll be with you,” he says. “We’ll start with imaging. An MRI of the head. Then we’ll see.”
I understand none of it. But he speaks kindly.
Before us stands what seems a wall of glass, or two walls pressed together, like Marit’s windows but thicker. Only these do not show the world outside, but a room within, where people move like forest ants. All in white trousers and pale blue shirts.
The doctor must be a powerful man here. At his presence, the walls slide away left and right, soundless, as if moved by spirits. Marit and I follow him through a white door marked with a number.
Inside, a small room. Nearly empty.
In the middle, something vast. A giant of light and metal, a gaping maw. Perhaps a fireless oven? Something to swallow me, or to hurt me. Strange that even with these thoughts, I do not fear. Not anymore.
One of the women in white trousers and blue shirts hands me a cap, a strange thing, soft and clear, with straps and little dots. I place it on my head. The fabric presses gently at my brow. Not painful. Just present.
“This helps us record the movements of your head. Please lie down here. Stay very still.”
The bed is narrow. Cold. A small jolt, and I slide inward, just a little.
A low hum, a metallic click. I close my eyes.
I do not know what I will see. But I know something will return.
“This is the pit,” I think. “Or the maw. Or the eye.” In this world, nothing surprises me anymore.
I feel the cap pressing my head. Not pain. Just strangeness.
“Just lie very still,” I hear a voice. “I’ll leave you now and slide you further in. It may jolt a little. And you’ll hear hammering, that is normal. Do not be afraid. Do not move.”
I nod. I am not afraid. Not of the light above, not of strange hammering, not of metal.
The hum begins again. A click. I close my eyes. Another jolt, and I am drawn deeper into the maw.
The sound is steady. Indeed, a hammer, far off on stone. Then a pause. Then that rumble again, shaking through marrow and bone.
I lose the sense of up and down. Only my heart beats, out of time, in the wrong body.
I let myself fall back again, into a memory, where I truly belong.
First there was the wine. Matthes had brought it home. Heavy, red, foreign. Not like the wine Brother Fidelis poured at meals. The jug was carved with a sign I had never seen before: two circles, a tree, an eye, a star with a tail.
“A gift from the brothers,” Matthes said, his eyes sliding away from mine.
Brother Fidelis. His step had grown heavy of late. He said the pain worsened. I gave him salve of juniper and comfrey, yet he smiled little.
Once it was not so. He would tell Alina merry tales, teach her the letters, secret on cloth. Alina drank them in, as other children drank the morning blessing.
She would laugh. And the monk would laugh with her. Their secret. Kept until the end.
In winter came the long quiet evenings.
The light pressed down upon the house like a hand. The smoke clung flat to the walls under the wind. We three sat in the chamber.
Matthes, weary from the sea, salt in his hair. Alina, her eyes alight. And I, heart full of wonder.
My child, my flesh, sat with a charcoal stick in her hand, scratching signs onto a board of wood. It was like sorcery.
“’Tis an A, Mother. See, this is how ’tis made.”
Matthes shook his head, eyes full of pride, a small smile upon his lips. Few in the village knew their letters, not even Jan, the innkeeper’s bold son, who boasted he knew all things and strutted like a rising wave. Yet here we sat, the three of us, by the fire in the warm room, feeling ourselves secret kings while the fire crackled and the shadows danced. And from signs grew words.
Secret. Sacred. None must ever know.
For whoso knoweth too much becometh a light.
And lights are snuffed out.