The tree looked different when he found it again.
Not smaller this time, or older, or any of the ordinary ways things change when you see them twice. It looked expectant. As if it had been waiting—not patiently, but with the absolute certainty of something that knew waiting would eventually end.
Doran stood at the edge of the clearing for a long time before approaching. The journey back from Three Rivers had taken five days, and he'd spent every one of them trying to understand why he was making it. The man in the alley was still with him—not as a memory, but as a presence. When Doran closed his eyes, he could step back into that moment. Could see the young man's face, feel his hand, hear his final words. Could stay there as long as he wanted.
He'd tried it once, on the second night of travel. Just to see if it was real.
It was.
He'd sat with the dying man for what felt like an hour, though no time passed outside. The man didn't speak—couldn't speak, in that frozen instant—but his presence was enough. He was there. Still dying, still afraid, but also still existing in a way that should have been impossible.
Doran had left the moment changed. Not lighter—never lighter—but different. As if carrying the dead was somehow easier when you could still visit them.
He crossed the clearing and knelt before the tree.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
The tree didn't answer. It was a tree.
But the words inside were still there, carved into the wood, waiting for eyes to read them. Doran crawled into the hollow and sat in the same spot as before, looking at the same sentence.
Your name is Witness.
He understood it now, at least a little. The name fit him like a second skin he hadn't known he was wearing. All those years of remembering, all that weight he couldn't shed—it hadn't been a curse. It had been preparation.
"All right," he said. "I'm Witness. Now what?"
A sound behind him.
He turned.
The old woman stood in the hollow's entrance, blocking the light. She was solid, real, unmistakably there—and she hadn't made a single sound approaching.
"Now," she said, "you learn."
Her name was Yenna, and she had been waiting for seventy-three years.
Not in one place—she'd traveled, lived, aged like anyone else. But always within reach of the tree. Always ready to return when the time came.
"You're not the first I've waited for," she said, settling onto the root-covered floor across from him. "I waited for three others, over the years. None of them were you."
Doran stared at her. "How did you know I was coming?"
"I didn't. I knew someone was. The one who told me to plant the tree said a Witness would find it, eventually. Could be ten years. Could be a thousand. My job was just to make sure it was here when that happened."
"The one who told you." Doran leaned forward. "Who?"
Yenna was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was different—softer, heavier.
"A man came to my village when I was a girl. Thirteen years old, maybe fourteen. He was strange. Not dangerous—just... elsewhere. Like he was looking at things no one else could see." She paused. "He knew things about me. About my mother, who died when I was born. About my father, who beat me. About the brother I'd lost to fever the year before. He knew all of it."
Doran waited.
"He gave me a seed. Told me to plant it here, in this exact clearing. Told me a Witness would come, someday, and when they did, I'd know." She looked at him. "I didn't believe him. I was thirteen. But I planted it anyway, because he also told me something else."
"What?"
"That if I did, I'd see my mother again."
The words hung in the hollow between them.
Doran understood immediately. "You want me to witness her."
Yenna's eyes glistened. "She died giving birth to me. I never saw her face. Never heard her voice. My father wouldn't speak of her. There are no drawings, no paintings, nothing. She's just... gone." Her voice cracked. "But he said if I planted the tree, a Witness would come who could show me."
Doran felt the weight inside him shift again—that strange rearrangement that happened whenever something important entered his life.
"I don't know how," he said honestly. "I've only witnessed things as they happened. Things in front of me. Your mother died seventy-three years ago."
"You're a Witness." Yenna's voice was fierce now. "Figure it out."
She took him to the place where her mother was buried.
It wasn't a cemetery—just a slope behind what had once been her family's cottage, now a collapsed ruin overtaken by weeds and young trees. A single stone marked the grave, so old the carving had worn to nothing.
"Here," Yenna said. "She's here."
Doran stood at the foot of the grave and tried to feel something—some echo, some residue, some hint of the moment Yenna needed him to find. He felt nothing. Just earth and stone and the quiet indifference of the dead.
"I don't know if I can do this," he said.
"Try."
He closed his eyes.
Witness.
The word was inside him now, always. He reached for it, for the thing it meant, for the attention it demanded. He thought about Yenna's mother—a woman he'd never known, never seen, never had any reason to imagine. He thought about the moment of her death. The pain. The fear. The knowledge that she was leaving behind a daughter she'd never hold.
Nothing.
He tried harder. Pushed his awareness into the ground, into the bones beneath, into the space where a life had ended and something else had begun.
Still nothing.
But then—
A whisper. Not in his ears. In his chest. A thread of something, thin as spider silk, connecting this place to somewhere else. He followed it without understanding how, without knowing where it led.
And found himself standing in a room he'd never seen.
It was small. A peasant's cottage, poor but clean. Firelight flickered from a hearth. A woman lay on a bed of straw, her face grey with blood loss, her eyes half-closed. Another woman—older, a midwife or neighbor—knelt beside her, holding her hand.
"The baby," the dying woman whispered. "Is she..."
"She's perfect." The midwife's voice was thick with tears. "A girl. Healthy. Beautiful."
"Let me see her."
The midwife hesitated. Then she lifted a small bundle from a nearby table and placed it in the dying woman's arms.
Doran watched as the woman looked at her daughter for the first and only time. Watched her face transform—pain becoming joy, fear becoming love, death becoming something almost bearable because this moment existed, because this child existed, because she had mattered enough to create something that would outlast her.
"Yenna," she whispered. "Her name is Yenna."
Then she was gone.
Doran stood in the room, frozen, witnessing. The moment was complete now—held entirely, understood entirely, preserved entirely. He could feel it settle into him, another stone in the growing weight.
And he knew, somehow, that he could bring Yenna here.
He opened his eyes.
The grave. The slope. The ruin. Yenna watching him with desperate hope.
"I found it," he said. "Her last moment. She held you. She named you."
Yenna's legs gave way. She sank to her knees beside the grave, tears streaming down her face.
"Can I—" Her voice broke. "Can I see?"
Doran nodded. He held out his hand.
"Take my hand. Close your eyes. And let me show you."
She took his hand. Her grip was fierce, desperate, seventy-three years of longing concentrated into that single touch.
Doran closed his eyes and reached for the moment.
They stepped into it together.
The cottage. The firelight. The midwife's tears. The dying woman's face.
Yenna made a sound that was not quite human—a keening, joyful, broken thing—and fell to her knees beside the bed. Her mother didn't see her. Couldn't see her. This moment was frozen, unreachable to anyone inside it.
But Yenna could see her.
She reached out a trembling hand, stopping just short of touching her mother's face. "I'm here," she whispered. "I'm here. I'm your daughter. I'm Yenna."
Her mother's face—frozen in that final instant of love—seemed to smile anyway.
They stayed until Yenna was ready to leave.
When they stepped back into the world, the sun had moved. Hours had passed. But Yenna was different—lighter, somehow, as if a weight she'd carried her whole life had finally been set down.
"Thank you," she said. Just that. Just those two words, carrying everything.
Doran nodded. He understood now, a little more, what it meant to be a Witness.
Not just to carry the dead.
But to give them to the living who needed them.
Yenna left at sunset. She didn't say where she was going, and Doran didn't ask. Some journeys were private.
He stayed by the grave through the night, thinking about what had happened. About the thread he'd followed. About the moment he'd found. About the way Yenna had looked at her mother—really looked, really seen, really witnessed—for the first time in her life.
He was still learning what his name meant.
But he was starting to understand.
In the morning, he would go find Orin. Yenna had told him about the old man before she left—where to find him, what to say, how to ask for help. The Nameless, she'd called his kind. People who studied true names without claiming them for themselves.
Doran had many questions.
And something told him Orin had many answers.