If it is night in their minds, then it is night.
The fire has burned down to only a tiny flicker of amber flames.
“Rye and I will take first turn at watch,” the First announces as the crowd begins to disperse, each to their own carefully hidden burrow or warren. The First and Rye—a tall youth of no more than fourteen or fifteen—bid the storyteller a good rest and move off in opposite directions, each one carrying two large bells. No weapons or shields.
In an attack from those things that live in the dark, a single sentry’s last remaining moments are best spent warning the others. Against such power, a single life cannot be expected to accomplish much.
“I can’t tell you how overjoyed I am that you’ve taken my offer,” Praise says, the lone person to stay behind. Everyone else has lit torches from the fire and walked off into the dark. “We’re all so thrilled that you’ve come, and it’s a mark of honor to host you in my humble home.”
He wasn’t so poetic last time, the storyteller notes. Perhaps he is more anxious this time. Or maybe it is just that he is older, closer to death, more afraid of the darkness and what it promises an old man like him. Whatever it is, the storyteller does not mind this new layer of dissembling. The world is made new and anew in every place he goes, and it is enough to keep the dust from settling entirely on his mind.
“Lead on,” he says, leaving behind the empty makeshift dais and his half-full glass of water. It will still be there in the morning, he knows.
He follows Praise along the ruin-filled path that, in a previous life, had been a street, shaded for much of the day by buildings on either side. The buildings are mostly rubble now, covered by vining growths or wiped away clean, replaced by the world-breaking reach of grey-green obelisks rising into the darkness, like columns holding the roof of the sky high, high overhead. The street is always in shadow now, but still the storyteller can see its past.
“We are doomed to live in the remains of a past we cannot get back,” he says, breaking the silence. He can feel Praise’s anxiety; the quiet has that bitter quality that grows in held breaths and racing hearts.
“I suppose,” Praise says, cutting left between the empty shells of two buildings. One is almost totally stripped down to the frame, but the other still has most of a thick wooden door intact, half-filling the black of a doorway, and as he passes by, the storyteller can see the bare flecks of paint that once made up a flower.
“How many days do you expect your tale to take?” Praise asks as they emerge from the alley and cut toward a series of low, squat homes. Praise’s is the third one in.
“Two, I imagine,” the storyteller lies. “Just this day and tomorrow should do it.”
“Hmm,” Praise grunts, his poetic flair gone.
They walk in through the empty space that once held the door. The torch Praise carries combines with the luster of the storyteller’s skin to light this first room, which is just as clean and spare as the last time. A table. Two chairs.
Three doorways lead off, though only one of them has an actual door filling the space.
“Toilet,” Praise says, pointing to the first empty doorway on the left before moving on to the next. “Through there is where I sleep. And this last room is your bedroom.”
It’s the room with the door, which is thick wood, strangely sturdy in this place where everything made or constructed seems to fade with each moment.
But, of course, some things are never allowed to fade, and some things are never given space to change.
Inside the room is a hammock—woven together out of a mixture of cloth and twine and grass, strung from rusting bolts driven long ago into the stone of the walls. Other bolts, unused as of yet but rusted with time all the same, dot the walls like eyes.
The hammock is new, but the peaceful rot in the room is not, nor is the almost perfectly concealed place along one wall where a window once was.
“It’s a lovely room,” the storyteller says, stepping inside and putting one hand on the hammock, which begins a slow sway. “This will do me just fine for my stay.”
“It was my sister’s,” Praise says. It was his brother’s the last time.
“Oh? And where is she?”
“Gone,” Praise says, after a heavy silence. “She was on watch, and no one heard her bells . . . or her screams . . . until it was too late. The roaches left her in pieces.”
The storyteller takes a step toward Praise and puts a hand on his shoulder. Emotion blanches Praise’s voice, and the storyteller sees the beginning of tears in the old man’s eyes.
“She raised me,” Praise continues. “Taught me everything I know. Our parents died when we were only kids, and so she was my whole world, my everything, ever since I was a little boy. And then she was gone, just like that. No sense to it, no reason. Just gone.
“And I couldn’t even bury her, of course—the smell of what they had left behind was likely to attract something else that might not be so likely to get scared off by the ten or so of us who showed up with torches and weapons.”
Tears fill the aged cracks and ravines of Praise’s face as he talks.
“I couldn’t even say a real goodbye. Instead, I had to drop my only family, the only person in the world I loved, off the edge. The darkness took her just like it takes everything.”
Praise drops his head in grief, and the storyteller pulls him into a rough hug.
It’s all a lie, of course. Praise never had a sibling, not really, and his parents died well into his adulthood. The storyteller met them two visits ago.
But lies are flowers that grow from a seed of truth, and the storyteller doesn’t doubt the emotion in Praise’s voice or the truth of the tears still wetting his face. He has almost definitely seen someone he cares about ripped from life too soon by some monster in the darkness. He and every person in Twist have seen horrors that would bend the mind and warp the soul.
And the storyteller grips the man hard for these truths hiding behind the lies.
Praise sniffs and takes a step back.
“I’m sorry. It’s a tough life. I suppose it’s the reason we’re all so grateful to have you here. For just a little while, we can live without being in constant fear for ourselves and those we love.”
The storyteller nods. Finally, the first step.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider staying on here in Twist a bit longer than tomorrow, would you?” Praise asks after a moment in which he must gather his courage. “Three of our people just had babies, and the whole community could really benefit from moving and building and gathering freely. One of the mothers—Four Wish—still doesn’t have a decent home, and it would mean the world if we could all help her and the little one out without having to post guards and always be watching the dark.”