The second after that, I knew I am cooked.
Scene changed. I found myself keeping my hands where the room could see them, palms resting lightly on the table's edge, as if a dream could take fingerprints. The rice steamed exactly how it should. The steam rose in straight lines. The glass of tea wore the right sweat. Everything was competent. That was the problem. It was like everything had been systematically designed to make me feel at ease. I have seen enough therapy rooms on TV to recognize patterns. With a supernatural element involved, it seemed I was being artificially forced to relax.
I listened.
Behind the kitchen's small noises, the tick of the wall clock and the soft hiss from the stove, there was another rhythm. It was not sound. It was a presence. Left of the stove, low to the floorboards, under a plank with a hairline crack. A weight that weighed nothing. My heartbeat tried to match it before I gave permission. Again, that artificial influence. I could feel it. It was too subtle if I was not expecting it, but I knew what it was doing to me. It was a hunch, or maybe I was paranoid, but I could not take chances.
"Eat," the woman said again. The voice had been worn into kindness by use. Pride sat folded beneath it like a napkin.
"If I do," I asked, "does the ringing stop?"
The clock ticked. The steam rose. Her hand did not move. For an absurd moment I almost felt rude.
The floor breathed beneath the stove.
I shifted my eyes to the spoon beside the plate without turning my head. The metal kept the shape of light but not of me. It was not a blur. It was refusal.
Outside the window a prayer-flag fluttered once. The wind did not touch the tree next to it.
"I am not hungry," I said.
The room made a small adjustment that I felt more than saw, like a person who smiles without liking you. The tea warmed by half a shade. It felt the exact temperature of skin.
From the place that pretended to be outside, I heard the muffled sound of children playing. Counting too fast. Breathless voices that tripped over the numbers. A game of hide and seek that never ended.
I did not turn. Looking gives things acknowledgement, and acknowledging them gives them room to influence. No. Not yet. I did not have the necessary counters.
Her hand settled on my shoulder. It was warm. It granted permission. It performed absolution. Someone had practiced this gesture a thousand times, and none of those times had been real.
The animal hinge in my stomach opened. No, it was not hunger. It was acceptance.
"Sorry," I told the hand, and stepped out from under it.
The chair leg ticked against tile. The clock answered one beat late from what I could tell. Outside, the prayer-flag lifted and stayed caught in the air, as if a breath had been held too long. "A glitch?"
I knelt beside the stove. Hairline crack. Left plank. I tapped the wood once with a knuckle.
The bell answered with the smallest complaint. It was not sound. It was a pattern. A circle inside a circle. I felt it more than heard it, the way a scar pushes back against a fingertip. A kind of ringwork nested under the floor.
"Is this where you live?" I asked the floor.
"Eat," the woman said. It did not sound like her. It sounded like an answer that had put on a person's shape.
I stood and pushed the chair back under the table. The scrape went a fraction too long, then stopped a fraction too soon.
The counting outside jumped to twenty and stayed there. Small feet pattered past the window and cast no shadow.
First, I needed to slip off the bell's rhythm. I breathed in for four and breathed out for six. I did it again. I watched my chest refuse the bell's rhythm. "You follow me," I whispered. The other rhythm sulked.
"Eat," the voice repeated. The kitchen warmed by another degree. The spoon looked polite.
"No."
The tea glass fogged over completely, like an eye filmed white.
The clock reached a minute and did not tick it. The flag outside held the same breath. The counting cut off mid-number, as if a mouth had been covered by a hand.
The bell chimed under the floor.
The room blinked.
I was under roots again, knees to my chest, breath fogging a small private cloud. Cold returned in a mean way. Iron settled on my tongue like a coin. The mist beyond the shelter moved the way thinking moves when it does not want to make noise.
I waited. Breathed In. Out. I counted. Five. Six. Seven.
"Status," I tried.
Nothing? Does her ability also hinder the status window? No. That whatever Will that that conduct the trial sounded too powerful to be suppressed by some witch. Something else was at play. I closed my eyes, tried to feel the rune. And yes, I could feel it. I still had it. Goddamn it, if I had time I would meditate or something that could help with my rune. First, I needed to conclude the rules the witch plays by. Her artificial relaxation, I could use it to plan, to attune to my rune. It was a double-edged sword. Attuning to the rune might give me something that helps in this supernatural environment, but if she accomplished whatever she was trying to do with me first, then I was screwed. And succumbing to that relaxation would only hasten it. Move and observe.
A leaf shook loose from the root above me. It turned edge-on and hung there a fraction too long before gravity remembered its job.
I slid out on elbows and knees. The forest had shifted a little. The slope was mirrored. The crooked trunk I had marked leaned the other way. The prayer-flag I had seen earlier was not torn anymore. Its edge was clean, like weather had never been invited.
The bell chimed from a hollow that was not where I remembered it. The same note. Closer now. It lived in the soft part of my neck.
I touched the spot. My pulse answered like a polite guest.
"Not this time," I said. My voice was thin and flat. A tool, not courage.
I walked toward the hollow that had moved. I let my feet make noise on purpose. The mist folded, then closed, then opened again, always one breath late.
The basin waited, filled with milk-thick fog. The branch with the flag matched the one from the kitchen window perfectly. The wind remembered to touch it once. Then it forgot again.
I stepped down. One step. Two. The bell throbbed up through my shoes like a buried vein.
"I know where you are," I said, and set my palm on the fog as if it were a plank I could lift.
The fog behaved like fog. Cold beaded on my skin.
"Fine," I told it. "Different door."
Heel to toe, I scraped a line across the mud. Then I drew a second line that crossed the first. The bell chimed. The crossing smoothed away like a hand wiping chalk.
A giggle ran around the basin. Children, or something that used children to carry sound.
"Have you seen my mother?" a small voice asked from three directions at once.
I kept my eyes on the place where the bell lived. "Not today."
The fog tilted. The ground felt like it was thinking about turning over. My knee bent to catch my balance.
I picked up a flat stone and dragged it across the mud again. One line. Then the cross. The bell chimed the same patient note. I put my palm over the crossing and held it there.
"No," I said. "We are keeping this."
Cold soaked into the ground under my hand. A moment later the cross remained, faint and stubborn.
Something soft moved closer, the sound of cloth without weight. Another bell answered far away, then nearer, then under my palm. The circle inside a circle pressed up through skin. The ringwork had a pulse.
"Ra," the note tried, shaping itself into the start of a name.
"I thought so," I murmured.
I set the stone gently on the mark. In my head, I pulled the kitchen chair back and listened to the scrape until it stopped a little wrong.
"Eat," the not-voice suggested from behind me, warm as a hand.
"Later," I said. "Ring first."
For once, the bell hesitated.
I breathed, in for four, out for six. "You follow me," I told the rhythm.
The next chime came late.
The fog thinned a fraction over the center of the basin, and I saw it for the first time. A bell made of bone and woven hair, half sunk in black mud, tethered to nothing.
The hairs on my arms lifted. A fine current ran down my legs. My neck prickled like a stripped wire.
"Got you," I said softly.
The kitchen flared over the basin for a blink. Polished tile slid like water over the mud. The light stuttered and fell away.
You have resonated with [Nestbreaker]
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