Waynes stepped forward, laying his left hand over Eli’s head like a broad leaf shading a sprout.

He frowned, lines like dry bark. “Nothing seems damaged.”

The feeling stayed wrong, a fishbone stuck in the throat, so he kept searching like sifting river silt.

He found no wound, no crack, only still water under ice.

As Waynes gave up, a veiled force rippled in Eli’s mind like a shadowed tide, then sank away without a trace.

Waynes paused, eyes downcast like dusk over stone, watching Eli’s blank face.

Silence pooled between them like stagnant rain.

“Waynes, how is it?” Sherman asked, voice like a pebble skipping water.

Waynes sighed, wind through old boughs. He looked at Eli. “This… friend.”

“Hah? You old geezers done poking me?” Eli rolled his eyes like a wind-flipped page. “Can I go? You’re making me look bad.”

“I’ll ask one question,” Waynes said, voice steady as a staff. “Answer, and you can leave.”

“…Fine, fine, ask.” The weight was against him like a mountain; he ate humble pie and bowed his head.

Whatever they asked, he planned to toss chaff and keep the grain, smooth as smoke.

Waynes remembered the girl who’d mooched meals while tending Eli, a lamp by a window in rain. “Do you remember a girl named Edlyn?”

“Edlyn? Why, she your granddaughter?” Eli’s grin was a paper mask in wind. “Hey, old man, not my problem. If she’s hurt, it’s not on me. Can I go?”

Waynes sighed, a tired tide. “As I thought.”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?” Eli caught the shift like a chill draft. “Seriously, not my problem.”

“…Nothing. Let’s go.” Waynes waved his old friends back like shepherding cranes, retreating to the World Tree’s domain.

They left Eli standing there, fog in his eyes and mud at his feet.

“Hey! You can’t just leave!” he shouted, voice echoing like a stone in a well. “At least tell me how to get out!”

Waynes sighed again, summoning a door at the edge like a moonlit gate. “Go.”

“Ran into a nest of lunatics,” Eli muttered, rolling his eyes like storm-tossed beads.

“Waynes, out with it,” Sherman pressed, breath quick as sparrow wings. “How’d he forget his little girlfriend?”

Waynes studied them, thought gathering like clouds. “He’s likely lost the last ten years.”

“Hm?”

“You noticed his Transcender energy is odd, a broken ring,” Waynes said, voice low as soil. “It’s not complete.”

“When the world’s origin tried to enter his head, he was asleep, soft mud for a heavy foot. It slammed his brain.”

“He didn’t absorb it, so that power claimed a patch of his mind like frost on glass,” Waynes said.

“I missed it at first. When I withdrew, a kindred Transcender current pushed back, a thorn in flesh. It stopped hiding and threw me out.”

“And the kid?”

“Leave it to fate,” Waynes sighed, a candle in wind. “He’ll need another blow to the head to wake that force.”

Eli had just stepped through the door like stepping off a ledge into fog.

He wasn’t watching his step, eyes on clouds instead of stone.

The door opened straight downward like a shaft. The Tree of Life’s roots ran long, with hollow spaces like caverns.

Not looking, Eli tripped the instant he crossed, a snared foot in underbrush.

He pitched forward headfirst, a felled sapling in a storm.

His head speared the soil, his body outside shaking like a loosened drum.

“Old man—damn you—I’m not done!” Eli yanked his head free, dirt clinging like wet moss.

Then the force Waynes spoke of surged, blanketing his mind like night tide over sand.

“Aah!” Eli screamed, a torn banner in gale.

A tearing pain ripped his skull, and his curses guttered like sparks in rain.

When he couldn’t bear it, he slammed his head against the World Tree’s root, a woodpecker in panic.

In an instant, his memories and Birand’s crashed in like twin rivers in flood.

With them came a cool current, a mountain spring through fever.

Eli squinted through the pain like staring into glare. When the coolness faded, he shut his eyes, unwilling as dusk.

Something still hid in the reeds of his mind, a fish that wouldn’t surface.