The celebration happened the way settlements celebrated — improvised, organic, the assembly of people who had been frightened and were no longer frightened and whose relief required expression. So there was fire, food and noise.

  Someone produced a flute. An old man — the same old man who produced a flute at every gathering because his flute was his contribution. It was reedy and imperfect and exactly right.

  Food came from the communal inventory of a settlement pooling its resources — dried meat, preserved vegetables, the good rice that someone had been saving for an occasion. Auntie Huang cooked with her usual high volume but extraordinary quality.

  The fire was central, the gathering point around which bodies arranged themselves in the ancient geometry of community — the circle, the warmth, the democracy of a ring where everyone was equidistant from the heat.

  Wei sat in the middle.

  Not with me at the edge, my cup in my hand, back against a wall, the architecture of proximity-without-participation that was my register. He was in the middle. Among people. Part of them.

  He was talking. Animated. The post-crisis narration performed with the commitment I had documented across three parts and seven lynx-retellings: embellishment as craft, exaggeration as enthusiasm, truth as skeleton and fiction as flesh.

  "And the qi was PULLING—" His arms demonstrated the pulling. Significantly more dramatic than reality, where it had been subtle and directional and had required concentration rather than arm gestures. "—and I had to channel EVERYTHING into the node and the node was—"

  "Tell us about the rumbling!" said Auntie Huang's son from somewhere in the circle. Bouncing.

  "I'm GETTING there—"

  He described the stabilization. The settlers listened. Not because the description was accurate — it had some truth to it, but overall it wasn't. It was because Wei was the person who had saved them and saved-people got to describe things however they wanted.

  "And then—"

  The sentence.

  The thing that happened.

  Mid-word. Mid-gesture. Mid-grin. His voice changed.

  "—the crack in the qi was—"

  Deep. The word dropped an octave. More — the tonal shift that went beyond pitch into timbre, into the thing that made a voice a voice and that had been his and was momentarily not.

  Older. As though the mouth producing the sound belonged to someone else — someone adult, someone whose vocal cords had been weathered by decades rather than formed by fourteen years. A voice with no business emerging from a boy sitting cross-legged in firelight.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  One sentence. Less than a sentence. Duration: roughly a second and a half.

  The settler beside Wei — a carpenter, forty-something — looked at him. The look of someone who had heard something wrong and was processing it. Confused. Briefly. Then: dismissed. Because dismissing was easier than investigating and investigating led to questions that nobody wanted at a celebration.

  Wei continued talking in his normal voice. The words absorbed into the narrative, filed as irrelevant. He hadn't noticed. Not the shift. Not the look. Not the window during which his voice had been someone else's.

  I sat against the wall with cold tea in both hands, the cup gripped tight.

  Not his voice. What was it?

  Could it be his core distorting physical output. Qi-instability expressing through the vocal cords, producing a temporary alteration. Mechanical. Explicable.

  It may have been also his future self. The voice of who he would become if his body survived — an older Wei, a deeper Wei. The Wei on the other side of fourteen. If fourteen had an other side.

  Or something frighteningly. Something was speaking through him. The core as conduit rather than source.

  This required investigation and investigation required context I was avoiding.

  The carpenter looked away. The celebration continued. The flute played. The food was eaten. The fire burned.

  Wei grinned. Talked. Was Wei.

  I held my tea. In the cold cup. In the tight hands. In the quiet.

  Stage 2. The clock that had started with warmth and prickling and two-second pauses. That had progressed to trembling hands and clenched fists. That now included his voice.

  What comes after voice?

  I didn't want to think about it.

  The fire crackled and Wei laughed and someone passed more food. The flute played its reedy, imperfect song.

  The carpenter — the one who'd noticed and dismissed — took over the narrative space. Every settlement kept its legends and legends came out at fires the way moths came out at lanterns.

  "There's a story about this place," he said, leaning forward. The posture of a man preparing to deliver something he'd been told and retold and polished. "Hundreds of years ago. A woman — a wanderer — passed through here. She called water from the earth. It burst from the ground—" He gestured. The grand sweep. "—right where the old well stands. A fountain. They built the well around it, to hold what she'd given."

  The circle nodded. The story had the shape of stories — smooth, worn by retelling, the edges rounded into their most satisfying form.

  "The version I heard is different," I said, with a challenge in my voice.

  Quiet. From the wall. Heads half-turned — the peripheral woman who hadn't spoken all evening, speaking.

  "She pointed at the ground and told them to dig. They listened and dug. And after three meters, they hit a water vein and built the well for easier access." I drank my tea. "That's all."

  The carpenter looked at me. The look of someone whose story had been deflated by a woman sitting against a wall drinking cold tea.

  "How would you know?"

  I was the one pointing. "I've heard it told that way."

  Silence. The kind that follows a correction no one asked for.

  "The fountain version is better," Wei said.

  "The fountain version is always better," I said.

  The flute resumed. The fire settled. The story returned to its fountain version, as stories always returned to their better versions, because better versions survived and accurate versions didn't and eight hundred years from now it would still be a fountain and the woman who'd pointed at dirt would still be a miracle worker and the three meters of digging would still be a burst of water and that was fine, because that was what stories did.

  I sat. Against the wall. In the cold. In the knowing.

  Alone in it.