Part Thirty-Three — A Voice That Was Always There

　I don't know how long I knelt in that dirt before the screaming finally ran out of me.

　Long enough that my throat felt raw afterward, scraped hollow, matching everything else about me in that moment.

Okay.

Okay. Get it together.

Somehow.

However that's supposed to work right now.

　I went very still.

...What.

"Who――" My voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. "Who said that?"

That's not――

That's my own voice.

That's coming from inside my own head, in my own voice, and it is absolutely not something I said on purpose.

"Okay," I said out loud, to nobody, to the empty ruins around me. "Okay, that's――who are you?"

...

Excuse me?

"That's――" I let out a short, disbelieving laugh that came out more broken than amused. "That's such bullshit. Souls don't talk. That's not a thing. I would know if my own soul had opinions."

<You would not, previously, because I lacked the capacity to voice them. I have been one with you since the very beginning. I gained the ability to speak as a direct result of your evolution into High Hybrid.>

Huh.

Okay. Wait.

"One with me since the beginning," I repeated slowly. "Since――since Haruto? Since before any of this?"

<Yes.>

"So what, you're just――you've been in here the whole time. Watching. Silent. Like some kind of passenger who finally learned to talk."

<An imprecise but functionally accurate description. Think of me as your split personality, if that framing is easier to process.>

My split personality.

Great.

Wonderful.

Exactly the kind of thing I needed to learn about myself today, on top of everything else.

　I sat down properly after that, right there in the dirt, because standing suddenly felt like more effort than I had left in me for anything.

Doran.

Fenrik.

Both of you.

Gone.

And apparently I've had a second voice living inside my own head this whole time and just never noticed, because it never had anything to say until it killed six people with my own hands.

<Seven.>

　The voice corrected me, flatly.

"I wasn't asking for a correction."

It's... unbothered.

Completely unbothered.

That's almost worse than if it had sounded proud of it.

　I sat with all of it a long while――the grief, the voice, the impossible weight of everything that had happened in what felt like both a single night and an entire lifetime compressed into it.

"What am I supposed to do now?" I said eventually, mostly to myself, not really expecting an answer.

Oh, sure.

Right.

Like I can just walk into the nearest town looking like this, after everything that just happened, and ask for a room like a normal person having a normal week.

"Yeah, that's not――that's not really an option right now," I said out loud. "In case you missed it, I'm not exactly in a state to go making polite conversation with innkeepers."

<Then if you cannot find a place to stay, build one.>

"Build one."

　I let out another short, humorless laugh.

"With what? How? I don't even know how to build anything. I can barely cook without burning it, some days."

"...What are you talking about?"

　I looked down at the dirt beneath me.

　Then up, slowly, at the collapsed wooden frame still holding its stubborn angle, the same one that had stood there since I was eight years old.

The Horizontal Line.

Of course.

Of course it's here.

Where else would it be.

　Something in my chest did something complicated at that――grief, still, underneath everything, but something else threading through it too.

　A voice that had apparently been quietly steering me back toward the one place that had ever actually been mine, without me even realizing that's what it was doing.

It brought me home.

Whatever it is, whatever it's actually made of――it brought me home, when I had nowhere else left to go.

"Thank you," I said, quiet, and meant it more than I expected to.

<Acknowledged.>

Not exactly warm.

But I'll take it.

"So how am I supposed to build anything, if I'm doing it here, with nothing but my own two hands and whatever's left of a house that fell apart six years ago?"

A skill.

Right.

Because apparently I have those now, on top of everything else.

　I held out a hand, uncertain, and felt something respond beneath my own uncertainty――a thread of anti-mana, different from anything I'd worked with before, humming with a kind of readiness that felt less like effort and more like permission being granted.

"And if――" I stopped, throat tightening around the thought before I could finish it.

"If they come back. The dragons. If they ever decide I'm still worth finishing off. I don't think I'd survive a second attack like the first one. Not really."

<You possess a second skill: Absolute Sanctuary. Use it to create a barrier encompassing the entirety of the Horizontal Line――one dragons will not easily perceive. It will disguise the whole of this location as an ordinary mountain, indistinguishable from any other, to anything searching from outside it.>

A whole mountain.

Hidden in plain sight.

Safe.

Or as close to safe as anything's going to feel again for a long while.

"Okay," I said, quieter now, something steadier finally settling underneath the grief.

"Okay. Let's start there, then."

<Understood. Guidance will follow at each stage.>

　I stood, slowly, looking out over the ruins of the only home I'd ever really had in either of my lives.

　And began――for the second time, in the same place, with nothing but grief and a voice that wasn't quite mine guiding my hands――to build something out of what was left.