Morning in the Grund did not arrive; it seeped. A thin green soaked out of the walls where fungi kept quiet hours, a glow soft as a held breath. Between roots that remembered being cables and cables that had learned to behave like roots, the village moved at the speed of a nod.
Children carried buckets—two hands, one slosh, a step, a grin at the spill—toward basins hammered from old machine bellies. Women rinsed cloth in water that tasted faintly of iron and leaf, wringing in practiced twists that left the fabric talking to itself. Men hunched over sheet and pipe, riveting and patching and promising usefulness a second life. Sound was a murmur, never a shout. Tools spoke in vowels.
Breuk shouldered wood.
One sleeve hung empty, pinned neat against his ribs; the other held the small, stubborn rhythm of work. He balanced the bundle against his hip, shifted, stumbled, recovered. A boy hopped sideways to give him room, bucket grinning, and Breuk angled a thank-you with his chin. A woman straightened from the basin, eyes gold in the green light, and gave him the half-smile people here reserved for anyone who helped without making a speech.
Sweat tracked a new map down his temple. His shirt was more patch than cloth. He didn't count loads. He counted the silence between breaths and tried to keep it even.
Days here pass without noise, something in him noted, not unkind. Like waves without direction.
A pump coughed awake. Far off, something dripped in complicated time. The Grund kept its pulse.
He stacked the last pieces at the communal rack and stood very still while the world settled back around him. His chest clicked once and calmed. The empty sleeve tugged with the faint wind of other people moving past.
Nobody asked him if he was all right. It was a kindness.
Evening made a ring and set a small fire in it.
They gathered in the usual way—whoever had finished, whoever had not begun the next thing. Jakk sat with one knee up, chewing on a strip of something the ground pretended was meat. An older man smoked from a pipe he'd carved out of a broken handle, the stem wrapped in wire to keep a crack from remembering itself. Children drifted at the edge of the light, their play quieter now: stones stacked into cities, string looped between fingers into shapes the air approved of.
A pot hung over the fire. Steam rose with the smell of herbs, clean and complicated. The stew inside was the color of patience.
Breuk watched the flames like they might decide a direction for him. "How did you all get here?" he asked, voice low so the question wouldn't be frightened.
Silence made room. The old man's eyes climbed to Breuk's face and stayed there long enough to be respectful. He drew on the pipe, exhaled a ribbon that went where smoke goes when it knows a roof by heart.
"And you?" the old man asked, smile somewhere under the beard. "How did you end up where you came from?"
Breuk's mouth opened and closed, a hinge checking its duty. He had answers that sounded like jokes and answers that sounded like war. None of them belonged to this fire.
So he said nothing. The crackle did the talking for him, bright at the ends, dim in the middle.
The old man nodded as if silence had been the correct reply all along. "We didn't come here," he said at last. "We were already here."
Breuk blinked at the coals. Already…?
A woman with sleeves rolled to the elbow leaned forward, palms to her knees, voice soft and free of complaint. "Here you're born," she said. "Here you live. Here you die." She lifted one shoulder. "What's up there doesn't belong to us."
A younger man, all wrists and grin, laughed once, not unkind. "You above folk got it harder," he said. "Too much room to dream. Makes a mess in the head."
Breuk let his gaze run around the circle: Jakk, chewing and not looking away; the old man, pipe a small lighthouse; the woman, hands made for wringing and holding; the boy at the edge, mouth open around a story he hadn't yet told. No bitterness lived in their voices. Not even resignation. Just the clean, dull shine of a tool that knows its use.
He shaped a sentence and left it unmade. For a second he felt the pinch of pity—then something that was not pity at all, something like respect that had stopped trying to be anything else.
They don't complain, he thought, the words lodging in him without barbs. Because they don't know anything else.
The fire made his eyes bright. He tasted the thought again and found another flavor under it, harder to admit.
Maybe that's happiness.
No one moved to correct him.
The old man knocked ash from the pipe with a careful tap and refilled it from a pouch that smelled of earth. "Everyone belongs somewhere," he said, as if he were discussing a bolt that needed a matching thread. "Some know it. Some look their whole life."
Breuk lowered his gaze. The stew in the pot made small wet breaths. A moth circled the light and negotiated terms with its fate. Jakk shifted, the movement barely a sentence.
And some fall… the narrator in him said, the one he never admitted to, until they land where they never meant to be.
Work made days. Days made a pattern.
He learned the pump line—how to listen before tightening, how to smear resin along a seam so the water would agree to be guided. Jakk showed him the way a valve wanted to be turned, not just the direction; Breuk felt foolish and then grateful. The empty sleeve taught him where to put his weight. The body listened as if it owed him an apology and was trying to pay it back in balance.
When a pipe sang too low, he learned to hum into the metal until the tone woke. When a child ran past with a bucket, he learned where to step to steal a slosh less. When a plank argued with its fastenings, he learned which knot soothed and which knot provoked.
No one thanked him more than once. He liked that.
Sometimes, bringing a bundle to the fire, he'd catch faces turned up—not to a sky that didn't visit, but to the ceiling with its dark seams, toward a something that flickered sometimes and then didn't. He'd feel the necklace like a coin against his chest and want to drag it into the light to force it into declaration. He never did. Secrets have weight; this one had purpose.
At noon, when the Grund counted itself, someone would pass a cup. The water was never cold, never hot; it tasted like exactly what it was. On those days he didn't think of bowls in other hands. On those days he did not measure the distance between the here and the above with inches of ache.
At night, the stories traveled in low loops. The old tale of the one who fell and said he wasn't an angel. The shorter tale of the one who climbed and didn't come back. The practical tales: how to harvest the light-leaf without making it sulk, how to cut bark for rope and leave the tree its humor, how to spot the place where the ground becomes a mouth.
Breuk did not offer a story. He held the silence in both palms and kept it warm.
A week might have passed. Or three days. Or more. Time in the Grund wore other clothes. He slept when his body agreed. He woke when the village needed shoulders. A bandage came off; a scab silvered and fell; a phantom itch said hello and refused to leave. He learned how to tie his shoes with one hand without swearing. He swore anyway, sometimes, privately, for sport.
Jakk checked the stitches with a craftsman's eye. "You heal ugly," he said. "But you heal."
"Never promised pretty," Breuk said.
"No one did," Jakk said, and handed him a piece of bread that remembered being grain.
Sometimes Breuk climbed as high as the Grund allowed. There was a platform that made itself proud of being useless—too far from anything to be practical, too close to nothing to be safe. From there he looked up until his neck complained. The dark tried to be blank and failed. Far beyond sense, a coin of light pretended to be a sun pretending to be a god.
He threw a screw up once. It rose, slowed, decided, came back. He caught it because it felt like a favor.
Later, at the fire, the young man with the grin asked him what it was like above, and Breuk almost answered honestly. Loud. Hungry. Full of rules that pretend to be choices. Instead he said, "Bigger." The boy nodded like that proved something.
The woman with the rolled sleeves handed him a bowl thick with stew. "Eat," she said. "You look like a story that forgot its ending."
He ate. He tried not to look like anything.
The old man smoked and watched him over the bowl's edge. "Belonging isn't a promise," he offered to the flames. "It's a practice."
Breuk lifted the bowl and let the steam clean the inside of his head. What if my practice is leaving, he wondered, and the thought sat next to him like a friend who knows you're lying and loves you anyway.
He was calm, almost. He was not at peace.
He slept with his hand over his chest, palm a guardian, and dreamed of ladders that refused to be climbed and bridges that did not lead away but across.
On a morning that felt like any other because the Grund did not care about occasion, Breuk walked to the edge platform again, drawn as ever by a hatred he could almost name. He looked up until the coin of light ghosted his eyes and left an afterimage.
"Thinking?" Jakk asked, arriving without effort.
"Bad habit," Breuk said.
Jakk leaned on the rail that had once been a shelf. "You can stay," he said, the way a man says there's a spare chair. "We'll find the work that fits. There are worse fates than being needed."
Breuk didn't answer.
"Or you can keep trying to go where the air refuses you," Jakk went on, not pressing. "Sometimes people have to fail honestly to find their way of living."
"I don't know my way," Breuk said.
"No one does," Jakk said. "We learn a place, and then pretend we were always meant for it."
Breuk watched the screw in his palm, the one he had caught yesterday. He flicked it up, easy. It reached a point, thought about it, and returned. He caught it again, gentler this time.
"Everyone belongs somewhere," the old man had said. Some know. Some look.
Breuk tucked the screw into his pocket and turned from the dark. He would work the west line. He would carry wood. He would listen to pipes and hum until they recognized themselves. He would not stop looking up.
The fire that night felt warmer than usual or he was colder. He ate, and laughed once when the boy taught him a string trick that took two hands, and managed it anyway with one and a knee. The woman clucked and called him stubborn. The old man smoked and looked pleased to have guessed correctly about something.
Breuk's eyes found the flames. The light in them was the kind that does not choose a side.
And some fall, the inner voice repeated, slow and even, until they land where they never meant to be.
He did not know whether the sentence accused or absolved. He held it the way he held everything here: carefully, like it might break if he wanted it to.
The night wrapped them all without asking who they were. The Grund breathed. Far above, the coin of light blinked. Far below, where roots hid their own small fires, something hummed that might have been a machine or might have been the earth remembering its song.
Breuk closed his eyes a little while and listened. He told himself he was resting. He told himself he wasn't staying. He did not argue with either voice.
The bowl emptied. The fire dropped into coals. The circle thinned and did not break.
Somewhere between the two worlds, a wall of air waited, patient as a god, indifferent as a rule.