CHAPTER 8 – Beyond the Gate

The light had no source.

It came from everywhere and nowhere at once — from the sides of the trees, from the ground, from the spaces between branches where shadows should have been and were not. Harjin stood and watched how this world held light differently, as if it were not cast by external things, but created by the things themselves through their mere presence.

The trees were trees.

And yet different.

Their bark had a different texture. Neither coarser nor smoother, as if every little fissure had a depth that extended beyond the surface. The roots on the ground were older. The moss between them was darker, wetter, with a scent that was not merely dampness, but the memory of dampness — of all the rains that had come here and stayed.

Harjin took a step.

The moss beneath his boots swallowed the sound. Almost no step made a sound of its own. As if the landscape demanded silence by muffling his walk on its own. Harjin walked slowly because the pace adapted by itself. The environment took away his hurry without him ever asking.

Water sounded clearer than outside.

Harjin stopped and listened. The rustling was closer, as if the stream were directing its movement with greater awareness. It was the difference between music heard through a wall and music in the room.

He walked toward the sound.

Among the trees, the landscape opened into a depression where the timber receded, leaving space for low grass, damp soil, and a narrow flow of water. The brook, only a little wider than Harjin's foot, flowed over pebbles with a calm precision. The pebbles at the bottom were lighter than any Harjin had seen by the Rokytka. Almost translucent, like pieces of amber or old glass.

Harjin squatted by the bank.

He ran his finger across the surface.

The water was cold.

Cold like a stream in September, like a spring in the woods. That calmed him. Things that are cold simply are.

He stayed by the brook.

Fog lay low among the trees. It wasn't dense, nor was it impenetrable. Rather, it was like a delicate layer of gray that drifted on currents of air too slow for Harjin to feel on his skin. The fog moved in its own way, flowing around trunks, creeping low to the ground, pooling in hollows.

Harjin watched it move.

Then he noticed the girl.

She was standing between two trees on the opposite bank of the stream — so close that Harjin saw her all at once, completely. And yet it seemed as though she were standing someplace a little farther away. As if distance in this world operated differently.

She had long white hair, with a beige tint where the light caught it from the sides. She looked down at the water of the stream. She stood quietly, without moving, with her hands resting loosely at her sides.

Harjin rose and remained standing on his bank.

Then the girl raised her head.

One of her eyes was amber—deep, with that directness of gaze that struck Harjin straight in the chest.

The other eye was light. Milky and clouded, with a mist over the pupil that did not block vision, but altered its focus.

Harjin stayed standing.

Water flowed between them.

The girl watched him with her amber eye.

„Harjin," she said.

Her voice was quiet. She said only that word. His name across the distance of the stream.

Harjin opened his mouth. He closed it.

The girl tilted her head slightly — to the left, by a centimeter, with a movement that was not shy, but quiet and precise.

Harjin knew that movement.

Then she stepped back.

As if giving him space.

Harjin crossed the stream over three stones, wet and a little unsteady under his boots. He stepped up to her within arm's reach.

Up close, more was visible. Hands by her sides, small, with fingers slightly curled into her palms, as if she were about to hide or show something and hadn't decided yet. The white fabric of her garment — simple, unadorned, with no color other than white and a beige tint in the folds. Bare feet on the moss.

Harjin looked into her eyes.

An amber and a milky eye.

The shape of a memory came without warning. Beige spots. The delicacy of the auricle. The shape of a head tilted at precisely this angle.

Harjin held his breath. His heart beat once harder.

The girl watched him. In the amber eye, there was something that neither drew closer nor moved away. It was there like light on the water—present and in motion, without any intention of being caught.

„„You,“ Harjin said. Just that word, because he couldn't find another and this was the closest.

The girl didn't nod, but a light moved in her eye—a flash, quick, as if she agreed.

Harjin opened his mouth again and closed it.

He wanted to ask: is that you?

But the sentence would sound nonsense, or too meaningful, or both, and Harjin didn't know what to do with the answer he would get.

So he remained silent.

The girl moved.

Quietly, flexibly, without unnecessary movement, she stepped up to the root of the tree and sat down. Exactly the way Amaril used to sit at his feet — not intrusively, not far away. Beside.

Harjin turned and looked at her.

She was sitting on the root, looking into the forest. Her milky eye was half-closed. The amber one watched the movement of the mist among the trees.

Harjin sat down on the ground. The moss was cold and damp. His jeans soaked up the water. He didn't mind.

They sat.

The stream behind them flowed.

Birds were singing — not one, but several, from different places, with different voices, as if the forest were surrounding its own quiet conversation. Harjin heard them, but didn't distinguish them. They formed a background, dense and calm.

Then the girl turned her head. She looked at Harjin. The amber eye was direct and deep. Harjin felt a heaviness in his chest that shifted. Not outward. Rather like a liquid spilling from one vessel to another. It doesn't disappear, it just changes position.

„Where were you?“ he asked softly.

He didn't know what he was actually asking.

The girl tilted her head — this time to the right, but the angle was the same. Harjin knew it by heart. In his palms, his shoulders, the place behind his breastbone where the awareness of another person settles.

She didn't answer with words.

She raised her hand and pointed into the forest. As if she were saying, I am further, deeper, beyond what can be seen.

Then she dropped her hand.

Harjin followed the direction.

Beyond the trees was a forest. Different and at the same time more of a forest than any he had ever seen. In its depths moved things that could not be named. Shadows, light, a breath of air from elsewhere.

When he turned back, the girl stood up.

She moved lightly, almost weightlessly, as if the moss beneath her feet were merely a surface she was passing through, not walking upon. She stepped closer to the tree, traced her fingers along the bark—slowly, from behind, with a motion that says: I know you—and then she turned.

She looked at Harjin.

In the amber eye, for the first time, was an expression he could read. It was uncertainty. The feeling of someone returning to a place they had been, and being unable to be sure if the place still knew them.

Harjin stood up. He wanted to say that he knew her, but words were not enough for that. Because he knew her differently—in a different shape, with a different weight, with a different warmth—and this body before him was a girl, not Amaril, and both things were true at the same time.

The girl looked away. She moved further into the forest, silently, with white hair down her back, with bare feet on the moss. Harjin followed her. The forest changed with every minute. It was still a forest—trunks, roots, branches, needles, moss—but the layers were shifting. Older trees receded further and younger ones drew closer to the path. The mist hung higher now, not near the ground, but in the intermediate space between the earth and the crowns. Like a layer between worlds.

The girl walked ahead of Harjin. Always a bit further. Always visible. Never too close.

Harjin felt it as the pain of someone following someone they want to catch, yet knowing the distance is not accidental.

Then the forest opened up. The trees receded into a circle, and in the middle of the circle was silence. A strange silence. Like a quiet room from which the music has left, but the air still vibrates with it.

In the middle of the space, a figure was sitting.

The old woman was small and hunched. She sat on a stone by the remains of a hearth—by the glowing embers beneath a layer of ash, with a faint light that survived more by the will of divine providence.

The woman had her hands in her lap. They were different from the rest of her body. The skin on them had the color and texture of stone—gray, cracked, with smooth spots where normal skin would have wrinkles. As if her hands had turned to stone and the rest of her body had not.

The woman did not raise her head.

Harjin stepped closer.

The white-haired girl stopped at the edge of the circle. She stood there quietly, like someone who knows that this place belongs to another.

„„Sit down,“ the woman said.

Her voice was deep and husky, like that of people who had long spoken differently and were slowly getting used to this speech. But her voice was precise, and every word she uttered was precise.

Harjin sat down on the ground beside the hearth.

The embers glowed a warm red-orange, softly, in a rhythm that wasn't breathing, yet resembled it. The scent of ash and something older drifted through the air.

The woman finally raised her head.

She looked at Harjin.

Her eyes were gray and clear, with a calm depth that does not judge, but sees. She let her gaze sweep over the tattoo on his face — calmly, without haste — then over the bare skin of his skull, then back into his eyes.

„"You have come from afar," she said.

Harjin wondered whether it was far or near.

„"I don't know," he said.

The woman nodded. As if it were an answer one could work with.

She ran one stone hand over the other. The movement was slow, methodical, like the motion of someone washing their hands knowing the dirt isn't coming off.

Harjin looked at her hands.

„„What happened?“ he asked.

He didn't know exactly what he was asking about. The hands, her, or the place.

The woman looked at her own hands.

„„Once I didn't say no,“ she said. „And then I stopped saying it. Stones are growing out of me from the inside.“

Harjin to slyšel.

He didn't know what that meant, but it carried toward him like a warning.

The woman didn't pursue him with any more words.

She sat.

Harjin sat too.

Beyond the edge of the circle was the forest. The girl with white hair was still standing there — Harjin saw her out of the corner of his eye, motionless, with her arms at her sides. The fog around her moved, but it didn't touch her.

The embers glowed.

Harjin watched their light.

He thought of Amaril. She was simply there, as always — in the place behind his sternum where things settle that don't get lost just because we stop thinking about them.

„You lost someone," the woman said.

Not as a question.

„Yes," Harjin said.

„Did the warmth stay with you?"

Harjin swept his gaze across his own hands. Fingers, knuckles, skin with the marks of work.

„"Yes," he said again.

The woman nodded.

„"Then he isn't gone," she said. "He's only changed."

Harjin heard the words and felt how true they were. At the same time, they hurt him precisely because of that truth. Because a changed thing is not the same thing. And he wanted the same thing. He wanted Amaril in the basket by the radiator. He wanted the claws on the tile and the little chin on his elbow and the breath that adjusted itself to his breath.

He wanted it the way it was.

Not changed.

The woman wasn't looking at him when she said it. She was looking into the embers, as if she didn't want to see him at the moment when that thing inside him touched the place that didn't yet know how to let go.

Harjin let out a slow breath.

„I know," he said.

It was both the truth and a lie.

He knew it and didn't know it at the same time.

The woman reached into the ash beside the hearth.

She pulled out a small, rounded pebble — smooth, light gray, with a whiter vein running through the center. She handed it to Harjin.

Harjin accepted it.

It was heavier than it looked. Cold and precise in the palm.

„"For the road," the woman said. "Cold things help when you're getting lost. They remind you where your hands are."

Harjin closed his palm around the small stone.

The cold surface beneath his fingers.

The weight.

The precision of its shape.

There, where hands are.

He got up slowly.

The woman did not turn around. She looked into the embers again. Their light was calmer now, as if the hearth itself had settled.

Harjin stepped closer.

„How should I address you? he asked.

The woman smiled slightly.

„Nobody has to call me anything,' she said. 'But if you want, just call me old woman. I don't mind.'

Harjin nodded.

He turned around.

At the edge of the circle stood a girl with white hair. She was looking at him. In her amber eye was the expression Harjin had seen before—uncertainty.

He stepped toward her.

They stood close enough to feel each other's breath.

Harjin looked into the amber eye and then into the milky one. The milky eye gazed slightly off, clouded and calm, with a mist that did not obstruct, but rather shifted the focus.

The girl tilted her head.

To the left.

A centimeter.

Harjin felt something old contract in his chest with the movement.

„You're here," he said quietly.

The girl watched him.

Then very quietly, almost breathlessly, she said:

„I am."

And that was all that was said.

And it was much more than Harjin could bear all at once.

 

He turned and walked further into the forest.

Beyond the circle, the light was faster. Every flash through the leaves was shorter, more intense, more immediate. Harjin walked in silence. The pebble was in his closed palm, cold and heavy.

Then he caught sight of movement.

To the side, between two trees. Too fast for mist, too bright for a shadow. Harjin stopped and turned toward the spot.

There was nothing there.

Or there was the space left behind by something that had just moved.

Harjin waited.

The movement came again — from the side, from the ground, from knee height. A faint flash of light color, translucent, shifting like a child who runs away the moment you look directly at them.

Harjin did not move.

A sound echoed among the trees. Soft and brief. Not a voice, but something close to a voice. Almost a laugh, or air passing through a narrow space, or a thing that had not decided what it wanted to be.

„"Who are you?" Harjin asked quietly.

Silence.

Then movement again — this time a little closer, from the side of the old beech tree. Harjin caught sight of a track on the moss. A small barefoot imprint, leveled by the vegetation a moment later, as if the moss didn't want to reveal who had been here.

Harjin stepped up to the trunk.

He ran his hand over the bark.

Nothing.

But the air around was warmer by a centimeter, carrying a scent that resembled a childhood bedroom or an attic where things lay from a time when the world was tilted differently.

Harjin slowly turned around.

And caught sight of him.

Boy.

He stood a short distance away, right on the edge of visibility—where light ceased to distinguish details and things merged into shapes. Small, slender, with tousled hair and bare feet. Harjin couldn't quite catch his face. Only the outline, the movement of his eyes, the way he stood.

The boy was looking at Harjin.

Then he smiled.

Harjin saw that smile for just a fraction of a second before the boy turned and walked away among the trees.

Harjin followed him.

Three steps.

Four.

The boy vanished.

Just vanished.

He was between two tree trunks and then he wasn't. The moss where he had been standing had a deeper shade of green, as if it had been freshly saturated with moisture.

Harjin stopped.

Then he caught sight of something on the ground.

Small.

Almost invisible.

A feather.

A single one, light, with a steel-bluish tinge. It lay on the moss like something left behind intentionally or by chance, and the difference between intention and chance here was too thin for anyone to tell apart.

Harjin picked it up.

He turned it between his fingers.

Light and precise. Steel-blue color on the pads of the spokes, a pale shaft.

Harjin slipped it into his pocket.

He raised his head.

The branches moved above him.

A bird.

Larger than the one that had led him here. Dark, with feathers in which the light broke with a steel sheen. It flew low, among the trees, and landed on a nearby branch.

He looked at Harjin.

Then he turned and continued on.

Harjin followed him.

Soryn was in the clearing.

Harjin saw him from a distance — a man moving among the trees with the ease of someone used to being outdoors in any weather. He was slender, of indeterminate age, with dark hair with a copper sheen and lightly tanned skin.

He held a branch in his hand, and a bird sat on the branch — different from the one that had led Harjin. Light-colored, with white feathers and one dark spot on its wing.

Soryn did not notice Harjin immediately.

He was looking at the bird. Not like a hunter or a scientist. He was simply looking, with a focus that wanted nothing, only accepted.

Harjin stepped closer.

The bird on the branch shifted an inch, but did not fly away.

Soryn looked up.

His eyes were steel-blue. Harjin saw them and a memory skipped in his chest — of Tarn, standing in the hangar and letting his gaze sweep over a component whose condition he already knew.

The exact same type of silence.

The exact same type of presence.

„The bird brought you," Soryn said.

„Yes," Harjin said.

Soryn lowered his hand and the bird fluttered from branch to branch closer to the treetop. He watched it for a moment, then turned to Harjin.

„You walked far."

„I don't know how far."

Soryn nodded.

He delivered nothing.

He walked up to the stone at the edge of the clearing and sat down. Harjin came and sat down too. They were silent for a moment.

Another bird flew to the edge of the clearing. Then a second, a third. They settled without haste, without rivalry, with the calm of things in their proper place.

Harjin watched them.

„Where are they from?" he asked.

„From here," Soryn said. "And from elsewhere."

„And did they come for me?"

Soryn looked at the birds.

„One brought you here. That's enough.“

Harjin swept his gaze across the birds on the branches.

Then a white-haired girl stepped forward.

Harjin didn't hear her. She was simply there all of a sudden — at the edge of the clearing, by the first trees, with her arms at her sides. She watched the birds. One of them moved to a lower branch, exactly at the level of her shoulder.

Then it landed.

On her shoulder.

The girl half-closed her eyes.

Harjin saw it from the other side of the clearing. He saw how her shoulder barely moved beneath the bird's weight, how her lips parted slightly, how she stepped entirely into that moment, with a devotion Harjin knew from the small white animal that used to sit by the brook and close its eyes when the light was just right.

The bird on her shoulder remained.

He sat.

Then it flew away.

The girl opened her eyes and looked across the clearing at Harjin.

In the amber eye was an expression Harjin could not read, but he felt it in his chest like a different kind of pain. The pain of closeness that distance still belongs to.

Soryn was silent.

Harjin was silent.

The girl turned and walked back into the woods.

Harjin got up.

„Wait.“

He said it aloud, into the clearing, to the girl.

She stopped.

She didn't turn around. She just stopped.

Harjin approached across the clearing. Across the moss, across the roots, past the place where Soryn had been sitting. He stepped up to the girl and walked around her so that he stood before her.

He looked at her.

Into the amber eye.

To the milky one.

The girl watched him.

In the amber eye was a question she didn't say: do you see me as me, or as someone else?

And the answer hurt in advance, because it wasn't simple.

„I don't know how to treat you," Harjin said.

Silence.

„Because you are not Amaril as I know her. But at the same time —“

He stopped.

The girl waited.

„At the same time, I recognize you," he finished. "From things I have no way of knowing about a stranger."

The girl tilted her head.

To the left.

She remained leaning, as if it were a way of saying: I hear you, without the words simplifying the answer.

Harjin let his gaze sweep across her hair — white with a beige tint where the light caught it. Across the delicate line of her mouth, half-closed and present.

He wanted to tell her how glad he was that she was here. Except the fact that she wasn't the way she used to be stopped him. So he said nothing.

The girl moved. She stepped toward Harjin by a step — just a step — and stood by him. Beside him. As if she had taken a position calculated precisely for a small distance from his leg.

Harjin felt it everywhere a person remembers the warmth of a body that used to be there.

„“I know I'm not the same,” she said quietly.

Harjin did not move.

„“But I'm here.”

Harjin closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids was the light of another world—diffuse, shifting, source-less. He felt a presence beside him, at that exact distance, and that presence was not Amaril and yet it was what remained of Amaril, and not even this sentence could be the whole truth. But it was true enough for this moment.

He opened his eyes.

The girl stood beside him and looked into the forest.

Harjin looked too.

The forest was a forest.

And yet different.

And yet deep.

And yet full of things that moved on the edge of visibility.

The mist came later. Time lost its clear numbers, but had colors and densities. This time was grayer and brought another girl with it.

Harjin caught sight of her on the path.

She was standing by a tree, running her hand over the bark. Not the way people run their hands over bark out of habit. Systematically, methodically, as if searching for a trace of something. Then she pulled her hand back and stood still.

She had ash-gray hair.

Harjin stepped closer.

She caught sight of him from a distance — or she didn't, or she did and didn't know how to react. There was something translucent in her gaze. As if she were looking through something, not at it.

„Are you looking for something?” Harjin asked.

The girl swept her gaze across the tree.

„Always."

Her voice was soft and slow, with pauses where the words needed space.

„What?"

Pause.

„Things that got lost." She looked at Harjin, but her translucent gaze distanced her by another step, even though she stood close. "Lost things have their own shape. You can tell where they were."

Harjin accepted it.

„And do you find them?"

The girl let her gaze sweep over her own hands.

„I do." A pause. "But not myself." The loss of one's own name was something people lived with here.

Harjin thought about what to say. There was nothing he could say, so he said nothing. The girl didn't hold it against him. She stood by the tree and looked into the mist with a translucent gaze that pierced right through things, searching for their other side.

Harjin reached into his pocket.

He pulled out a feather — steel-blue, light, with a pale shaft.

He handed it to her.

The girl looked at the feather. She ran her finger across the soft vanes.

Then she accepted it. She held it out in her fingers, as if she were still figuring out what to do with it.

„What's your name? she asked.

„Harjin.“

She nodded.

„I don't know what my name is, she said. The moon took my name in exchange for a dream.

„„Grey,“ he said.

The girl turned around.

„“Let's call you that until you find another,” Harjin said.

Grey — the girl who had been called that only from this moment on — looked at the feather in her hand.

Then at Harjin.

There was a flash in her gaze. Brief, moving, like a firefly. Just once. Then it was gone again.

„"Good," she said quietly.

She turned and walked into the fog.

Harjin watched her until the grey silhouette merged with the grey air. Then he gazed for a moment longer at the spot where she had been.

The forest around was quiet.

The white-haired girl stood a short distance behind him. Harjin did not turn around, but he knew she was there. He felt her presence.

„"Strange, that Grey," Harjin said into the silence.

Then the girl said:

„"She searches for what was lost. But she cannot find herself."

Harjin nodded.

„"I know."

He turned around.

The white-haired girl watched him.

In the milky eye there was light — shifting and calm, as always. Harjin gazed at it, knowing that eye did not see like the other. Yet he bore it as a memory of Amaril, who saw otherwise.

„What is your name?” he asked.

The girl moved slightly. As if the question had landed in a place where she didn't expect it.

„Naeve,” she said quietly.

Naeve.

Not Amaril.

A different name.

A different body.

A different voice.

And yet — that distance, that tilt of the head, that milky eye.

Harjin carried it like two things at once.

And both were true.

„Harjin," he said.

Naeve nodded. As if she knew the word — not for the first time, but from a different place, from a different form of the source.

Then she looked up.

A bird flew across among the trees — the steel-blue one, or another of the same species. It landed on a branch above them, looked down, and then flew off.

Naeve watched its flight.

Harjin watched Naeve.

Then the bird vanished.

Naeve turned to Harjin.

They looked at each other.

Harjin saw in her amber eye that she was afraid he didn't see her as herself. That she was just a replacement for Amaril.

And it was true.

Harjin saw her as both.

And he didn't know what to do about it.

„I don't know what to expect from you," he said.

Naeve stood still.

„Nothing," she said. "I am here. Just as I have always been. Only differently."

Harjin closed his eyes.

The pebble in his palm was still cold.

Where hands are.

He opened them.

He looked at the pebble—smooth, light gray, with a vein. Then he looked at Naeve.

He reached out his hand.

Naeve swayed slightly. Harjin placed a small stone in her palm. Naeve looked down. Then she closed her fingers. They stood like that — Harjin with an empty palm and Naeve with the stone — and between them was a distance that was not great, but was necessary. A distance one must walk alone, even when the other stands right beside you.

Harjin knew it would not be Amaril in a basket by the radiator. It would not even be the small white body in his palm in the hollow of the meadow. It would be different. And that difference he would have to accept entirely, with all its sharp edges, with all the places that hurt, with all the places where one could still pass through.

Naeve stood beside him.

The stone in her palm.

The forest all around.

Pohyblivé světlo.

And Harjin felt the first clear shape of realization — that what he was looking for did not exist in the form he was looking for it.

Amaril will not return as Amaril.

And that is something he is only just beginning to deal with.

Night came.

Or what passed for night in this light—a greater density of darkness among the branches, calmer air, colder. Harjin sat by a small fire that Soryn had lit at the edge of the clearing quickly and without a word, with the practiced movement of hands that had done this many times before.

Naeve sat beside him.

Not at his side.

Beside.

At a distance precisely large enough to make it clear that it was intentional.

Soryn sat opposite.

The old woman with hands of stone was not there. She had left, or she hadn't been there the entire time, or she had vanished the moment she was no longer needed. Harjin didn't know for sure.

The fire was small and clean.

Harjin watched the flames.

There was something in their movement that indoor winter fires avoided — a straightforwardness, a simplicity. The flames went upward because it was natural to go upward.

„Why did you come here? asked Soryn.

„"I was looking for her," he said.

Soryn nodded.

„"And did you find her?"

Harjin looked at Naeve.

Naeve had her eyes closed and was warming her hands over the fire. The little stone was still in her palm—Harjin could tell by the way she was closing her fingers.

„Otherwise," said Harjin.

Soryn then said:

„Birds sing when there is someone to listen."

Harjin let his gaze wander to the trees behind the fire.

„They sang today."

„That's true," Soryn said.

And that was enough.

Beyond the trees was the forest, and beyond the forest was the world from which Harjin had come. The apartment with the empty basket. Spruce. Rokytka. The hill with the stone.

Things that were waiting.

„I have to go back," he said.

Soryn nodded.

„All right."

„But not right away."

„Not right away," Soryn agreed.

Naeve opened her eyes.

She looked at Harjin.

In the amber eye was the firelight — shifting, warm, with the concreteness of things of the present moment.

Harjin looked back.

He knew it couldn't be accepted all at once. It would only go in pieces. Every piece would hurt differently. Every single one would be exact.

But he also knew that Naeve was here.

And that she was here differently.

The fire was burning.

The birds in the night were silent.

The forest around them breathed with the old, heavy breath of things that last longer than a single human sorrow.