acatalepsy (n.) the impossibility of comprehending the universe; the belief that human knowledge can never have true certainty.

For the briefest moment, in that water, Inanna Nirari had been tempted to drown.

Then, right before her, she had seen it: a serpentine thread snaking through the water before her. It was not floating with the weightlessness of her own hair; it just hung there, linking something below her to the surface above. Was it even a thread? It glowed, very slightly, like a thin chain of sapphire – a deep blue almost invisible among the waves of the ocean. It was the merest ghost of a thread, and Ina had found that she could not catch it in her hands: it had slipped through her fingers, phantom-like.

Slipped through her fingers, like a ghost.

She might have written it off as some hallucination of grief or drowning, but for the fact that she could see it again now: a thin thread encircling her wrist like a ghostly bracelet, linked to a knot around Zoran's little finger. When she moved her wrist, it stretched, though it was so light upon her skin that she could not feel it there at all; when she focused closely upon it to try and determine the material from which it was made, it faded from view like it could not sustain scrutiny; and when Zoran spoke to her now, and she looked away, it disappeared entirely, and she could almost believe that she had totally imagined it.

She didn't want to think about it. She could feel her curse lying upon her, like a physical weight – not like a mantle, as Decebal had once described it, but in her chest. She had thought she would feel hollow, but instead it felt like her heart was made of lead. She could have believed the weight in her heart would have drowned her; something so heavy could not be merely metaphorical. A burial at sea – Kaapo Hämäläinen might have approved.

Where were they going to bury Pekka? Would he go into the same anonymous mass grave as the eighteenth generation, spend eternity rotting beside Jaga and Matthias and Avrova? Or would they put him with Eero? What had he been thinking when he went?

His final words to her: I love you.

Her final words to him: Pekka, I promise.

She had promised. So much good it had done. She had promised, hollowly, and this was the result.

And he had said he loved her, and now he was dead.

"Ina?"

She glanced back up. Zoran was standing in front of her, wearing that damn hollow-eyed look he had not shaken since initiation. He shouldn't have been looking at her like that – there was nothing wrong, was there? Not for him. He was alive. The world in which they lived had been tilted off its axis, but she didn't expect him to notice.

No, that wasn't fair. Pekka was – had been – a good man. Of course the other Warriors would miss him.

Miss him? That wasn't enough. That wasn't a large enough word. It didn't sum it up.

There wasn't a word that could do it, not properly – sounds and letters and none of them added up to a sentiment that made sense. This was something so utterly bone deep; it went to the very core of her being. This was more than merely missing someone. This was a numbness and a sense of incompleteness; this was the aching feeling, immediately after a fall, when you knew that it would hurt soon but the pain was still deepening, still developing, still richening. This would be a rich agony; she felt like she was barely keeping it at bay, lashing it to her ribs like something feral so that it couldn't get free just yet.

When? When? When?

"Ina." Zoran had spoken again. How often had that happened? Had he been speaking to her all this time? She felt like she had retreated into herself; she was looking at the world through a tunnel, like looking at the stars through a telescope, or looking down at the world from the stars.

Pekka had been the one to teach her the names of the stars. Kaapo's father had been a seafarer; he had navigated their way to Irij by constellation. And he had been the one to teach his grandson, as his grandson had taught Ina. She could remember him tracing out the shape of Cancer, distinguished by the brightness of its grounding star Tarf; his favourite star to name, when they were young, had been Zubeneschamali.

He had always liked the sound of it; he had delighted in teasing Ina with the prospect of using it as a child's name. "Zubenesch for short," he said, "I am a reasonable man, after all, Ina. Ina?"

"Ina," Zoran said again, "Ina, you're scaring me."

She stopped walking, and looked at him. They had been crossing that great grass plain which formed the plateau, at the base of which Zoran had washed up – no, not washed up. Ina had pulled him ashore. She had seen that thread, linking him to something deep below the ocean, and she had found anew that there was strength in her limbs to pull him from the water.

Maybe he hadn't needed her help, but it had felt good to give it. She could not have given up on herself if that meant giving up on Zoran as well.

"I'm sorry," she said. It was a struggle to find the words. Like her heart, her tongue felt like lead. "I'm just thinking."

At the cusp of this strange plain – it was not a kind of grass that Ina recognised, thicker than the stuff at home in Irij and interwoven with tiny pink flowers forming an S-shape – the woods stretched out, thick and dense. At least, Ina had been thinking of it as a woods; as they drew closer, however slowly, she could see that she had been wrong to think of it as anything but a forest and a forest most ancient at that. The trees stretched higher than anything natural that she could have imagined; they blotted out the sky utterly. These trees superficially resembled redwoods; they could not have been less than one hundred metres tall each, clustered so close together that their interiors seemed utterly without light. There the druj lay. Some part of her that was not fully Ina murmured, are you well-acquainted with your nightmares?

There was some trace of Avrova clinging to Ina's thoughts; it was like detecting the faintest scent of her perfume on the wind. It distracted; it rankled. It was a scab forming like a film over her thoughts, barely there until she remembered that it was there and then seeming enormously obvious. How had she ever forgotten?

Which parts of this grief were hers and which were Avrova's? It all weighed so horribly – Ina felt like her own sorrow was buried beneath the rest. Perhaps that was why she felt so numb. Her mourning had been entombed.

She said again, "I was just thinking."

Zoran said, concernedly, "we can stop here, if you're feeling..."

"No." Ina's voice was colder than she had intended it to be; it sounded like so much snapping ice. "No." She couldn't be the reason that they slowed down; she couldn't be the reason that they lost the others. What would Pekka have done – if it had been her, rather than him? He would have got the job done. He would have done his part, and remembered their oath, and protected the others as best he could.

If he could not, then in his place, Ina ought.

She meant it. She really did. But her heart was so heavy.

"No, let's keep going."

Zoran said nothing further, only adjusted the straps on his bags and nodded. She hated that look on his face: it was clear that he thought her unwell. Delicate, or unbalanced – she wasn't sure which was worse. She was fine. Pekka had always held her together, her broken ceramic reformed with his gold. She couldn't let herself fall apart just because he wasn't there. What would he think?

What would he have thought?

She looked down at her wrist and there it was again: that thread. It was a pale silver, fading into something like red as it came close to Zoran's skin. A thread, she thought – this did not seem like the mark of a Hierophant. Did this mean it had something to do with the Lovers' Curse? Or was this some artefact of the Warriors' bond as xrafstars, linking them together in some near-invisible bond? After all, there had been the blue thread earlier, linking Zoran to something beneath the sea…

Maybe these had always been there, and she was only seeing them now. Had there been such a ribbon tying her and Pekka together, from childhood to initiation? For a split second she could see it. It would have been gold, she thought, like the material of a Swendway wedding band, like the colour of his hair.

Severed, now.

They kept going. The plain sloped down into the woods; Ina could feel the claustrophobia of it all as they crossed the threshold into what felt like another, much more ancient dimension. The trunks of the trees dripped with moss; the earth was pockmarked with enormous boulders, so that Ina and Zoran could advance no more than a few hundred metres into the woods before they were resorting to climbing, and clambering, upwards, their hands giving way under fistfuls of what looked to Ina's eye like green barnacles.

When they reached the top, only Zoran's arm, thrown out like a seatbelt, caught Ina in her tracks. Her instinct was to look down, to search for whatever misstep she was about to make, but then she looked up, in the same direction that Zoran was staring. The trees were clustered together thickly here; there was none of that mist which had shrouded the ocean surrounding Illéa, but there was a certain grey-green quality to the light, like perhaps they were still underwater and merely dreaming of breathing. She would not have been surprised to glimpse fish swimming through the light – but she was surprised to glimpse what had drawn Zoran's eye.

It was a deer; that was to be expected, from what little Ina knew of the woods. But it was larger than any animal had any right to be – standing on this boulder, some ten metres in the air, they still were not level with the joint of its hock. It rose, taller than some of the buildings in Opona, its shaggy mane trailing nearly to the ground, its amber eyes glowing with some light that it did not deign to share with the rest of its surroundings.

And those antlers – they stretched out, dozens of yards long, arcing back over its hindquarters in an ever expanding design of intricate curlicues. The ivory was inscribed with strange, whirling patterns that reminded Ina again, quite potently, of the constellations in the night sky over Opona. In this animal seemed to be contained the whole spirit of the night; it made her think of all the nights before, the nightmares and the guilt and the warmth of Pekka's body next to hers and the scent of his hair.

And somehow, her heart felt a little lighter. This was not, she thought, a druj; it did not have the same dark energy as the things that had attacked their boat. But it was something which, like the xrafstars, ought not to have existed; it was a beast which contravened the iron-bound rules of reality. It should not have been, and yet, it was – and it had been, for more years than any of them could fathom.

It looked like Zoran was thinking the same thing as her. For a very brief moment, it was as though initiation had never happened; as though they had never been candidates for the curses at all. This was the world from which the curses had been hewn; here, and only here, could they hope to make some sort of sense.

Glancing down at her wrist, Ina saw that the silver thread linking her to Zoran had deepened, richened; it looked almost real now, almost tangible, though again when she moved her hand it disappeared anew.

They didn't dare breath. After a moment, the enormous cervid turned its head – the light within its enormous eye was like the sun setting over dark water – and then, just as slowly, it moved; it moved with the languidity of something which is certain it has no predators, with a gradual gravity. It moved like the tectonic plates of the earth itself, and it was many minutes of silence before it had disappeared back amongst the trees and Zoran exhaled a breath Ina hadn't known he was holding.

"You look a little better," he said, glancing at Ina and smiling weakly.

Ina nodded. She could feel it as well; there was some colour coming back to her cheeks. She still felt lead-boned and concrete-ribbed, but it was no longer such an overpowering cloud of gloom. She could move forward – for him, she had to. "I… I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologise for."

She thought again, Pekka, I promise.

They clambered down from the boulder slowly; what little light leaked in from the grassy plain behind them was blocked off now. They were in the darkest shadow of the forest. Zoran offered Ina his hand, as he had on the day of initiation when they were leaving the truck, and without quite knowing why she drew back her hand and jumped to the ground herself with a grin. She was not willing to be rude to her old friend, but nor was she ready to be touched – and she could not quite say why. She thought, sometimes, she could still feel the phantom of Pekka's arms around her; it felt like, at any moment, he would lean over her shoulder and murmur, you look like you're composing poetry in your head.

She always turned to press her face against his, their noses aligning, her eyes pressed against his hair. What does that look like?

You don't expect a poor carpenter to know, do you?

The soil was soft underfoot; it did not feel as though it had rained for many days. There were mushrooms sprouting on every spare patch of ground, in toxic hues of darkest greens and dourest purples. Ina glanced behind them, and found that, despite the softness of the soil, they had left no footprints behind them. That was good, she thought – but who would be tracking them out here?

She wasn't sure she wanted an answer to that question.

There was a humid cool to the air; they moved through the forest for maybe a mile, silently, avoiding the twigs and the crispest leaves, trying to make sure they remained as silent as possible. Sometimes, in the distance, she thought she saw something moving – pointed shadows curling without obvious source, something that might have been an animal moving in the undergrowth, the suggestion of a thing watching them from above that was nowhere to be seen when she tilted her head upwards. The forest was alive, and it was inhabited by living things; they were not alone, but they could not see why.

Were they going in the right direction? The Schreaves dwelled in a walled fortress; they could not be going too badly wrong, as long as they were still forging their way through the woods, rather than getting lost within the trees. She hoped the others had chosen this direction also; she hoped they would cross paths. Azula, she thought, Ilja. They would be okay – Khalore and Ghjuvan would ensure as much. And Hyacinth… drowned?

She was parched. As Zoran considered their next path to navigate past another enormous boulder, Ina dropped to her knees and pulled open her pack, rifling through her things in search of her canteen. She would give it to Zoran first, she thought, because the silence between them was stifling and she knew that he would not ask her for anything for as long as he thought she was silently suffering – but before she could lay hands upon it, she found that she was instead holding a small bundle of letters, tied with butcher's twine.

Oh. She and Zoran must have switched bags at some point in all the panic.

Were these… Matthias' prophecies? She glanced at Zoran. Had he even opened them? Did he dare? He was the Hierophant now – the future was his domain. Was that scary? She could imagine it would be. What an awful burden he must have been holding, she thought, to carry and carry alone knowledge of their fates… and she felt abruptly guilty for how detachedly she had been behaving. They were all suffering. She was not alone in that – it made no sense for her to act as if she was.

And then she looked down at the letters in her hand and felt her heart drop.

These notes… they were nonsense, Ina saw, nonsense and gibberish and nothing. Words repeated, over and again; letters arranged into long strings that could not make any pronounceable phrase; long stretches of paper occupied by punctuation alone, commas and dashes and brackets without cousins. This was it? These were their prophecies? This was all they had to rely on? Ina could not help herself; something had come over her, some invisible hand grasping her heart and squeezing, squeezing tightly with something like panic. She flicked desperately from page to page: all the same. In some places, there were long grey marks, like a pencil running astray across the face of the page. In others, the pages had stained slightly, ink dripping from one page to another like so much blood.

"This is it? This is all we have?"

She could not help but fall to her knees, heedless of the dirt and the fungus that stained her knees; she desperately continued to search through the pages – for her own name, for Zoran's, for any hint of the others. Had Matthias sent them all this letters for nothing? Had he known what he was sending, or had his illness blinded him in absolutely every sense?

"Ina, stop..."

She wouldn't. She couldn't. Page after page. Strings of words without meaning – like here, hook moon heart trace xye wall hide – the heart? Did that mean the Lovers Curse? The Moon was Kinga, and Kinga was gone, hadn't he been able to tell that she would be gone? The wall? And the sentence after that, just letters, pagbdnaipsvioukanefdmnvcozbnvio... On and on and on, utterly senselessly, to the point that you could see where Matthias had gone on typing even after the page had been taken from the typewriter's clasp, the ink bleeding along the edge of the sheet. It was pages upon pages of nothing.

Zoran was saying, "it won't help..."

Ina stopped, very suddenly. Pekka's name. He'd known? That bastard had known and still… he had known what would happen and he had watched Pekka take the Tower and he had said nothing and he had known. And here, he'd written his name: Pekka Hämäläinen. The umlauts had been punched in by pen, so hard that the nib had gone through the page in two places. But over that Matthias had written another name: Ragnar Kaasik. The letters of each overlapped and interwove, like he had purposefully forced the cylinder back across the page rather than correcting his error. And that made as much sense as the rest, which was none. Ragnar was back in Irij. Was this about Pekka's fight with Nez?

He had sent them nonsense prophecies about things that had already happened?

"They're useless," Zoran said softly, sadly. He had dropped down to crouch beside her, and now he put his face into his hands. "That's why I didn't…"

He hadn't told anyone. They had all been so desperate to believe that the key to Irij victory lay within these letters, these notes, these prophecies, and then to find that it was useless…? How could he have hidden this from them? No – how could he have ever found the strength to tell them? She could not blame him. How could he have ever dashed their vainest hopes?

"They're useless," he said again, into his fingers. "They're totally useless."

Ina took a deep breath, feeling the air rattle into her lungs like something rusted, and watched the thread between them pulse slowly with a pale green hue. She set her jaw and then set her hand, very gingerly, upon her old friend's shoulder. She smiled, as sweetly as she could, and said, "well, it's a good thing we have you, Zor, isn't it?"