Five days after the ritual room.
He woke with the waterfall and lay still for a moment the way he had every morning since the collapse, running his inventory. The inventory had been improving.
Side: present, scarred, not speaking above a murmur. Arm: stiff in the morning, loosening within the hour, the scar tissue doing what scar tissue did. Back: faded to a dull background complaint that he had stopped registering as distinct from the general condition of existing. Everything else: functional in the way of something that had been tested comprehensively and had not broken.
He was not healed.
He was ready.
The five days had passed with the particular quality of time that had purpose without urgency — each one different from the last in small ways that accumulated into something he could feel in his body and in how he moved through the world. The first two had been recovery, mostly horizontal, the vine fruit and the lake water and the sleep doing their patient work. The third had been exploration — he had finally mapped the temple's exterior completely, found two additional structural alcoves in the rear section that had been sealed with stone at some point and contained nothing beyond the sealed stone, and had spent an afternoon in the dry overhang simply sitting in the cleaner air and watching the lake.
The fourth day he had gone back to the ritual room.
He had stood in front of each section of the wall story with the fire held close and had looked at each image until he had something from it, not forcing comprehension but collecting impressions the way you collected pieces before you had enough to see the pattern. He had spent the longest time in front of the final section — the large raven figure and the standing human, the mark on the raven's chest, the space between them that told him nothing and everything simultaneously. He had left with more questions than he arrived with, which felt correct.
The fifth day he had spent preparing.
The knife, resharpened. The fire kit, its tallow nearly exhausted but enough remaining for the journey if he was careful. The robes — he was keeping the one he'd been wearing, washed as well as cold lake water allowed, dried in the overhang. The marked stone in one pocket, the talisman in the other. The book from the small room, which he had wrapped in the cleanest piece of remaining cloth and secured inside the robe at his chest — it was the paladin's and it had been held onto through his death and Ard was taking it, and that felt less like theft and more like continuation of something that had run out of the person to continue it.
The pendant around his neck, the raven and the blade.
He had left the feather on the altar. The chain too. Some things felt like they belonged to the room rather than to him, and those were two of them.
He stood at the gate on the morning of the fifth day and looked out at the lake and the statues and the waterfall, and felt something he took a moment to identify precisely because he wasn't accustomed to feeling it.
Something close to strength.
Not the strength of being fully recovered — he wasn't. His muscles had lost condition he would need to rebuild, and the side wound would limit certain movements for weeks yet. But the specific quality of someone who had been through something and had come out of it changed in directions they hadn't anticipated. He had arrived here broken and hunted and completely without resources. He was leaving with less than he would have liked and more than he'd had any right to expect.
He thought about Chubs.
The thought arrived with a sharpness that surprised him — not painful exactly, more the particular ache of something you had been not-thinking-about successfully and had now allowed to surface. Five days of no news, which was obviously not news, he was in a temple at the bottom of a waterfall with no way to receive news, but the absence of it had a weight now that it hadn't had while he'd been focused on surviving.
Chubs would have marked his absence. Would have noted the morning he didn't appear at the farm bell and would have constructed an explanation — several explanations, in the way Chubs constructed things, each one slightly more catastrophic than the last, the overthinking quality of him working through every possibility in sequence. Would have gone looking, probably. Would have found nothing, because there was nothing to find between the village and wherever Jack's people had left him.
He wanted to see Chubs.
The specific simplicity of that want was cleaner than anything else he was carrying — not the cold weight of Jack, not the layered complexity of the Hollow Sage and Dawn and the walls and the second layer and everything he didn't yet understand. Just the ordinary desire to sit next to someone he trusted and tell them what had happened and hear the specific quality of Chubs' laugh at the parts that were, in retrospect, almost funny.
He would be there in two days. Maybe less.
He stepped through the gate.
Looked back once — at the temple, the statues, the waterfall, the lake. At the place that had been a destination he hadn't chosen and was now a location he would carry.
Then he turned and began to climb.