The bench was the longest one in the nave, positioned along the left wall where the morning light came through the stone window and fell across it at an angle that made it the warmest seat in the church for about two hours every day. Aris had spent a significant portion of his life on this bench. He knew exactly which section had the loose plank, where the wood had worn smooth, and the precise angle at which to sit to avoid the knot in the backrest that had been bothering him since he was twelve.

  He sat at one end. Elysse sat at the other.

  The distance between them was the distance of two people who had been through something together and were now, in the ordinary light of a morning church, working out what that meant.

  Edric had disappeared into the back — giving them space, or attending to the clinic, or both. He had a talent for being exactly present enough and exactly absent enough at the right moments, which Aris had long since stopped noticing and had started appreciating again recently.

  The morning sounds came through the walls. The street outside assembling itself. A cart. Someone's dog. The rhythmic call of the vegetable vendor on Cours Edren who had been opening at the same hour with the same volume for as long as Aris could remember.

  He looked at his hands. At the cloth wrapping. At the loose thread at the bandage's edge he'd been meaning to trim since he sat down.

  "So," he said.

  Elysse looked at him.

  "Why were you down there?"

  The obvious question. The first question. The one that had been sitting in the room since she'd opened the bedroom door, that neither of them had addressed because the other things had been more immediate.

  He watched her face as it landed.

  Something happened to it — not a flinch, more like a door finding its frame. Her expression went briefly blank. Not empty. Blank in the specific way of a wall where a window used to be — the shape of something without the thing itself.

  She was quiet long enough that he started to think she wasn't going to answer.

  Then:

  "I don't know."

  Flat. Not evasive — genuinely flat. The tone of someone reporting a fact they find as frustrating as the person receiving it.

  "You don't remember," he said.

  "No." She said it carefully, like she was testing the word. "When I try to reach for it, it's — it hurts. Like pressing on something that goes deeper than it should." She stopped. Put two fingers briefly to her temple, then lowered her hand. "Thinking about it makes my head spin."

  "Then don't," he said.

  She looked at him sideways.

  "I mean it. Don't push it." He said it without particular gentleness — just as a practical observation. "Whatever's in there, forcing it won't get it back. It'll just hurt."

  She held his gaze for a moment. Then looked away. Not conceding exactly. Acknowledging.

  "There is one thing," she said.

  "Okay."

  "Someone told me to run." She said it to the middle distance, to the nave and the statue at the far end. "I don't remember who. I don't remember where. But I remember a voice — telling me to run — and I ran." A pause. "That's all I have."

  Aris considered this.

  "A Hollow Guard chased you," he said. "You saw it. Those things start appearing around Floor 13. If you were running from one—"

  "I went further than Floor 13," she said.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I ran for—" She stopped. Her jaw tightened slightly. "It felt like forever. Always up, always fighting, floor after floor." The words came out measured, like she was reading them off something just barely visible. "I think I was very deep when I started."

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  "How deep?"

  She looked at him directly.

  "Below Floor 40," she said. "Maybe further."

  The bench was quiet for a moment.

  Outside a child shouted something at another child. The vegetable vendor called his morning price. The cart that had been creaking somewhere down the street finally stopped.

  Aris looked at her.

  "Below Floor 40," he repeated.

  "Yes."

  "You came up from below Floor 40." He said it again because the first time hadn't fully settled. "Alone. In the condition I found you in. On Floor Six."

  "In that armor," she said quietly. "Which was in better condition when I started."

  Aris opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Found nothing that seemed adequate and closed it a final time.

  He looked at the ceiling.

  The deepest confirmed descent on record was Floor 51 — a solo Wanderer from forty years ago whose account guild historians had been arguing about ever since. The deepest current active expedition range sat at Floor 47, which the major guilds had been pushing toward for two years and treating as a serious undertaking requiring months of preparation and full elite parties.

  She'd come up from below forty. Alone. Injured. Through floors where the dungeon's character changed in ways that guild reports described with increasing creative desperation the deeper they went.

  "That's not possible," he said.

  "I know," she said.

  "I believe you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying what you're describing is—" He searched. "The record is fifty-one floors. One person. Forty years ago. Half the city thinks he was lying."

  "Half the city is probably wrong," she said.

  "Maybe. But you—" He gestured vaguely at her, at the general evidence of what the descent had cost her. "In that state. Forty floors of ascent."

  She said nothing. Which was its own kind of answer.

  "The voice that told you to run," he said.

  "Yes."

  "What do you remember about it?"

  She was quiet for a moment. Looking at the statue again — the Architect's extended hand, reaching downward.

  "It was calm," she said finally. "When it told me to run. Not panicked. Like the person saying it had already — decided something. And telling me to run was the last part of that decision."

  The words sat between them.

  Aris looked at the statue too, for a moment.

  "And the others," he said.

  She looked at him.

  "You said you weren't entirely alone when you started running."

  "I said I think I wasn't." She corrected it precisely, the way someone does when the difference between think and know matters to them. "I have — impressions. Not memories. I think others were running the same direction. I think we were separated somewhere on the way up." A pause. "I don't know what happened to them."

  "They might have made it out," Aris said.

  "Or they might not have." She said it without inflection. The way someone talks about probability because the alternative doesn't help anyone. "I can't know. Not yet."

  Aris nodded slowly.

  He leaned back against the bench. Looked at the ceiling, at the cracked plaster, at the place near the corner where the roof repair from twenty years ago was starting to express an opinion about its own longevity.

  "Floor 40," he said, mostly to himself.

  "At least," she said.

  He shook his head. A slow, genuine, slightly helpless movement.

  "I've been going to Floor Six for six years," he said. "And complaining about it."

  Something shifted in her expression. Very small. Very controlled. But there.

  "Floor Six has the Deepbloom," she said.

  "It does. And now my satchel is somewhere in it, so."

  "I'm sorry about the satchel."

  "It had three weeks of harvests in it."

  "I'll replace them."

  "You're wearing a borrowed robe and sleeping in my room."

  "Eventually," she said. "I'll replace them eventually."

  "Don't worry about it," he said.

  The morning moved through the church at its own pace. The light on the nave floor shifted slightly as the sun continued its work outside. In the back, Edric's movements had settled into the steady rhythm of the clinic opening — the sounds Aris had been hearing his whole life, so familiar they were closer to silence than sound.

  They sat on opposite ends of the bench and said nothing for a while.

  It wasn't uncomfortable.

  That was the thing Aris noticed, in a distant, filing-it-away sort of way. The silence between them didn't have the quality of silence that needed filling. It just existed, the way the church's silence always existed — holding whatever was brought into it without asking for anything in return.

  "You should probably eat something," he said eventually.

  "Probably," she agreed.

  "Edric will have made something. He always makes something."

  "You say that like it's inevitable."

  "It is. I've never once come downstairs to an empty kitchen. In sixteen years." He stood, carefully, with the accommodation of damaged ribs that had formed strong opinions about sudden movement. "It's the most reliable thing in Valerne."

  He started toward the back of the church. Stopped after a few steps.

  "Can you walk?"

  She stood — slowly, with the careful economy of someone who had mapped exactly what their body would and wouldn't permit this morning. She made it upright without touching the pew.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Good." He started walking again. "Because I'm not carrying you through five more floors."

  Behind him, quiet enough that it might not have been meant for him:

  "I know."

  And something in it — not the word, just the quality of it, the specific weight of two words from someone who understood exactly what those five floors had cost — made him keep walking without answering.

  Some things didn't need a response.