Chapter 3: The Thread

Chapter 3: "The Thread"

In the depths of silence, there was a sound. A single drop of water, falling rhythmically onto a hollow stone, like a bell tolling inside Oryn's skull.

He opened his eyes… but the darkness did not open with him. He lay on a cold, damp ground. He couldn't tell whether the moisture came from the cave itself… or from his bleeding body. He tried to scream, but his throat did not respond. Everything in him trembled—not just from the cold, but from a strange sensation… as if something within him had broken during the fall.

He exhaled a pale breath, then began moving his fingers.

The mud beneath his hands was rough, wet—but there was something else. Slowly, he ran his hand across it until he touched a carved stone on the wall, as if someone had etched a story in a language that didn't belong to this time.

He lifted his head, trying to see, to understand, to remember… but the cave was more than a cave. It was a memory—or the echo of something that belonged to him, though he couldn't say how.

His eyes began to adjust. The light was almost nonexistent, trickling in from a narrow crack in the ceiling, where thin strands of sunlight crept through… a distant sun, as though it dared not approach this sorrow.

He took a deep breath and tried to stand. His body felt heavier than he imagined. As if the fall had not been through space… but through himself.

He reached again toward the wall, fingers brushing against the carvings.

"He ran his trembling fingers along a cold wall and felt the roughness of the engraving. Circles within circles, twisted columns, resembling letters—but unreadable."

The symbols were familiar… Yes, the box. The same patterns, the same strange pulse. His heart jolted. How had these markings ended up here? Had someone come before him? Did this place… know him?

In a nearby corner, there was something resembling a stone bed. Dilapidated, layered with still dust. As if someone had lain there centuries ago… and forgot to wake.

He approached it with hesitant steps. Sat at its edge. It was cold. Colder than his trembling heart.

Then… came the voice.

Not a clear voice. Not entirely human. It was more like a murmur whistling through the cave's hollows, or wind exhaling across an ancient wall. But it wasn't external.

It was inside him. Inside his bones. A whisper that asked: "Who are you?"

Oryn didn't answer. He couldn't.

His hands trembled, sweat beading on his spine despite the chill. He feared not only the place… but the idea that he didn't truly know himself. Not completely.

He felt the blood throb in his ears. Heard phantom footsteps? A shadow? No… maybe a person? But there was no one here. Was there?

He reached for the ground, grabbed a handful of mud, squeezed it. Tried to feel reality.

Question or answer? He didn't know.

Then he looked up—and his eyes froze. On the opposite wall… a new carving. It hadn't been there before. Or maybe he hadn't seen it clearly.

Eyes.

Eyes carved with strange precision, in a shade darker than the clay… as if whoever had etched them… knew him.

The whisper came again:

"All paths lead inward… if you dare to look."

He stepped back. His foot struck the bed's edge, and he fell to the ground. Sat there, panting, every part of him screaming to flee.

But he didn't know the way.

Not yet.

---

Then he heard a sound.

But it wasn't the same voice. Not like the whisper that had invaded him earlier—the one from the walls or from his own bones. This was something different. Rougher. Less cryptic… and closer to reality.

While Oryn was lost in a whirlpool of hallucinations and unraveling questions, dragging his thoughts in a daze, trying to make sense of the tangled symbols on the cave's walls… a new voice cut through his inner noise.

It wasn't the pulse in his head. It wasn't some distorted echo of an unknown memory. No. This was entirely different. Heavier.

Footsteps. Heavy. Unsteady. Belonging not to a creature that knew the earth, but to legs that had forgotten how to serve the body.

Labored breaths seeped from the darkness. And something like a glass bottle striking stone. These sounds were not illusion… they were real. Real enough to threaten.

Oryn, still seated on the stone bed, froze.

"Is it him? Or another? Or is the cave toying with me?" he asked himself, shivering.

Shadows began to appear, moving along the walls like independent creatures.

Then came the figure.

From one of the side passages, a man emerged. Tall, but his hunched gait ruined his stance. Broad shoulders sagged. His bare chest bore intersecting scars.

His face was obscured by tangled, wild hair and a beard encrusted with old vomit and dirt.

And in his mouth, clenched between his teeth, was a bottle of liquor.

He stopped. Looked at Oryn with clouded eyes… then gasped, as though discovering a treasure.

"Ahhh! A visitor, finally! What brings you here, you dumb deer? Or are you just another pig? Look at those pitiful features."

Oryn recoiled, body primed to flee—but his legs wouldn't move.

The man didn't approach. Instead, he slumped onto a nearby rock, throwing his body down as if it no longer belonged to him.

He laughed.

A loud, mad laugh, without context.

"I don't know why all the pigs end up here… Were they running too, like me?"

He took a long swig from the bottle, then wiped his mouth with a ragged sleeve and said in a half-sorrowful tone:

"But you're lucky, friend. I only kill one a week."

He closed his eyes.

A moment of silence.

"Just kidding, just kidding… maybe."

The drunken warrior glanced around the cave. His eyes didn't focus on anything, as if sight had long ceased to be a tool of perception.

Then he spat beside him.

"These carvings… I didn't make them. But they look like a tattoo I once saw on the back of a damned woman."

Suddenly, without warning, he shouted into the darkness:

"Damn you, you lying witch! And the wretched man who believed you!"

Oryn flinched. He didn't understand the context—didn't understand anything—but he sensed the man wasn't yelling at a woman… but at his past.

A man like this doesn't live in the moment—he runs from it.

Oryn, as if the sentence escaped his lips without thought, said: "You… you're not him."

It wasn't a statement of certainty or deduction—it was something softer, spontaneous, like finding a glimmer of light in darkness.

Oryn's eyes, fixed on the man, stopped at his own.

Earthy gold… unblemished. No strangeness. No eerie shimmer. None of the imbalance he saw in the dream.

Oryn whispered again, without repeating himself: "You're not him."

The man froze.

He turned slowly. Stared at Oryn as if hearing a voice from another age.

"What did you say?"

He cackled:

"Damn it… have animals started talking? Or have I drunk more than I thought?"

He took a step forward, then sat on the ground abruptly.

"What's your name?"

Oryn said nothing. Not out of refusal—but uncertainty.

"Doesn't matter… I won't remember it tomorrow anyway."

Then he raised his bottle to the cave's ceiling and said in a voice as if addressing drunken gods:

"To life! To falling! And to the caves that shelter us when the world casts us out!"

Oryn didn't move.

But something inside him did.

The man… wasn't him. That was clear. But there was something.

Something he had to know, even if it seemed worthless now.

---

The shock had passed, leaving him hollow.

Sitting at the edge of the stone bed, Oryn's eyes still followed the movements of that drunken man, who seemed to have stepped out of another man's nightmare. But as the warrior drowned in his surreal monologue, Oryn's focus returned to the walls.

There—between encrusted cracks—something glimmered.

A thread? No… it looked like a ray from above, unfitting to the cave's gloom.

He turned his head slowly.

There… from above, in a half-hidden corner, a single hair of light stretched downward. As if someone had forgotten to shut the door to the outside world.

Oryn approached.

His trembling hands searched the cold wall. Its texture was slimy, soft like diseased flesh. With eyes half-closed from exhaustion, he discovered a rope hanging down.

It wasn't thick, but it felt firm.

Behind him, the drunken warrior still babbled: "Of course! Why would the pig stay with a mad drunk? Hahaha!"

Oryn didn't answer. Didn't laugh. Didn't think. He just climbed.

His hands gripped the rope. His feet found traction on the slippery wall. Slipping was inevitable, but his spirit climbed with him.

With every inch, he moved away from madness. With every gasp, he expelled fragments of fear.

Darkness behind him. Light above.

The warrior's voice faded. But the last thing Oryn heard was:

"If you come back… bring something to drink!"

He didn't know if that was a farewell… or a threat.

But he emerged.

And with him, breaths he didn't know he had been holding.

---

The drunk was laughing—maniacal, loud—growing louder and louder, and with him, Oryn's heartbeat surged, as if his heart was being ripped from his chest. The laughter echoed in the cave's hollows like a demonic buzz, ringing in Oryn's ears until it became an inhuman scream. He felt his chest tighten, and the cave's walls tightening with it, as if every stone mocked his weakness.

Then… amid the clamor, another sound.

The creaking of a taut rope echoing in the waterfall's hush.

Oryn burst from the waterfall's slit like fate's spit, gasping, soaked to the bone, his eyes clinging to the light after too long in the dark. Two strong hands caught him from above, yanked him hard—he crashed against a chest steeped in the scent of ash and firewood…

Theodore.

He said nothing. His face was stern, but in his eyes, something flickered—an unspoken worry… or perhaps disappointment.

Oryn stood unsteadily, pulling himself off the ground with difficulty. Water dripped from his robe, his knees trembled from cold and exhaustion. His hair clung to his forehead, his eyes wide, still seeing something that hadn't left.

In a moment of quiet isolation, Titi landed on Oryn's shoulder, as if to console him. He made no sound, only stared at him with deep, black eyes—eyes that understood more than words. Oryn didn't move, just let the crow stay, as if its presence alone held him back from collapsing.

He tried to speak, but his voice emerged torn, as if his throat had forgotten how:

"There was… a man. Not him, but… someone. And there were carvings… the same ones on the box… and a bed… and…"

He was trying to catch the dream before it vanished.

Theodore remained still. Didn't interrupt—but didn't believe him either.

Oryn looked at him with a child's pleading, hoping confession would validate what he saw.

Finally, Theodore said, in a voice more like a slap than speech:

"I told you not to wander."

A short, killing silence followed, as if the air between them froze. Oryn raised his head, face trembling between fear and protest—but before he could speak, Theodore pointed at him, voice firm:

"What you saw… was a hallucination. The cave doesn't exist. It's a shadow in your head, nothing more."

Oryn tried to respond, but words stuck between his mouth and heart.

"You fell into the water… hit your head… that's all. No one's there. Nothing is there."

Silence.

Then he continued, slowly, as if dragging a knife through living flesh:

"And if you go back there again, I'll break your legs. Understood?"

It wasn't anger. It was cold certainty. A threat beyond argument.

Oryn lowered his gaze. A heavy weight grew inside him, as if the cave hadn't left him… but entered him and stayed.

From afar, the waterfall's sound slowly returned, whispering to him alone.

He looked back… toward the watery curtain that had hidden that place. His heart pounded, something inside him insisted on the truth.

"It was real… I saw it… I felt it."

But his lips didn't move.

Theodore gathered the coiled rope, folded it as one folds a page from the past, then turned without a word.

Oryn hesitated a step… then two… He looked at his bleeding hand, water-wrinkled fingers, then at the gray sky—on the verge of weeping.

And walked.

But every step away from the cave… brought him closer to it.

He knew he would return.

But not today.

And maybe… not alone.