The pain was intense, but brief.

  A clean tearing away, without transition, as if something had seized him from the very core of his thought and hurled him out of all continuity. He had the precise sensation of splitting apart, then falling—not into space, but into an absence, a directionless void.

  Then came the impact.

  Brutal, unforgiving. The ground struck him before he even had time to understand that he was falling. His legs buckled and he collapsed to his knees on a hard, rocky surface strewn with sharp stones. The shock shot up his shins, dry and unmistakably real.

  It was daylight.

  The sun heated the pale stone beneath his hands. A blunt, almost aggressive warmth. Nothing dreamlike. Nothing softened.

  Noah remained motionless for a few seconds, short of breath, startled by the density of it all. Then he slowly straightened, still unsteady, and attempted something he had never truly dared before.

  He searched for himself.

  His breathing first—too fast, but undeniably there.

  The beating of his heart—irregular, alive.

  The heat on his skin, the faint prickle of sweat already forming under the sun.

  He was here.

  Or rather… somewhere.

  Whole, apparently. As whole as one could be when not entirely present: a condensed projection, barely stabilized, held in the minimal coherence allowed by the out-of-phase state.

  He closed his eyes.

  Deep in his mind, he sought a familiar sensation, a marker—something that would confirm his condition. He found it almost at once.

  A call.

  Fine, precise, insistent.

  Not a voice. Not an image.

  A gentle but constant pull.

  The tablet fragment. Very close. Not in this layer—but so near that it seemed to vibrate at the edge of his perception.

  Noah opened his eyes.

  Around him, the landscape asserted itself with almost excessive clarity: a jagged rocky coastline, limestone cliffs streaked with pale fissures, narrow coves where the water died in slow waves. The sea was a deep blue, scattered with blinding reflections. The wind carried a saline scent, mixed with something harsher, still distant.

  “And now…” he murmured to himself.

  A voice answered at once.

  Feminine. Distant. Decisive.

  “Follow me.”

  He did not have to look long. A little farther ahead, already moving with a confident stride, Lilitu’s silhouette stood out. She moved with that same feline, fluid grace—almost unreal—as if the terrain adapted to her rather than the reverse.

  Noah followed and caught up with her after a few minutes.

  She stopped and turned toward him.

  “You all right?” she asked, vaguely indicating his face.

  He immediately understood that she was not truly concerned with his physical state.

  He looked at her—especially her eyes.

  They had changed.

  The inhuman depth that usually inhabited them had vanished, replaced by two irises of dense, almost mineral green. Jade beads—opaque and calm.

  “Very beautiful,” he said simply, without irony.

  Lilitu seemed satisfied. Or something close to it. Hard to say.

  They were both wearing clothes meant to suit the fourteenth century—assuming they had correctly assessed the fragment’s harmonic period. Noah’s out-of-phase image bore the same garments he had assembled in the chalet. For Lilitu, it was obviously simpler.

  They resumed walking.

  Rounding a promontory, the city appeared.

  Still distant, but unmistakable. A compact mass of tiled roofs pressed tightly together, dominated by a few tower and steeple silhouettes. The harbor could be guessed at from the curve of the coast, bristling with motionless masts. Even from this distance, something felt wrong: an absence of movement, a heavy stillness.

  As they drew closer, the unease deepened.

  Wandering figures along the paths. Bodies seated against rocks, unmoving. Abandoned clothing. A man lying face down, far too still to be merely exhausted. Farther on, a silent group hauling a crude cart loaded with indistinct shapes.

  Noah understood before they even entered the city.

  An epidemic.

  Near the first streets, the sights became impossible to ignore. Barricaded houses, crude crosses scrawled on doors. Muffled cries behind shuttered windows. Corpses left where they lay for lack of arms to remove them. Bruised, blackened faces, swollen, distorted by buboes.

  The smell arrived at last.

  An odor of death, rot, abandoned flesh. It stagnated in the warm air, seeped into narrow alleys, clung to the throat.

  Noah inhaled despite himself, suppressing a wave of nausea.

  “The Black Death,” he said suddenly.

  Lilitu cast a perfectly neutral gaze over the scene. No disgust. No visible compassion.

  “Many deaths,” she observed, as if describing a landscape.

  Then she closed her eyes slightly, attentive to something else.

  “The fragment is here,” she continued. “But its dissonance is diffuse. I can’t localize it.”

  She opened her eyes again, a faint crease of irritation at the corner.

  “As if it extended across the entire city.”

  Noah looked around: streets saturated with fear, the living avoiding the dead, the dead abandoned to the living.

  “Then it isn’t the plague that accompanies it,” he said slowly.“It’s the other way around.”

  Lilitu looked at him differently this time.

  And for the first time since their arrival, she seemed genuinely interested.

  Night had fallen without the city truly changing.

  The same streets, the same houses—stripped now of the illusion of movement. Sparse torches cast shadows that were too long, too thick. The air remained warm, saturated with that smell of death that never quite dissipated.

  They had taken shelter in a gutted house near the port. Part of the roof was missing, exposing a veiled sky with no visible stars. Below, a narrow alley formed a perfect corridor for fear.

  Noah watched.

  He had stopped trying not to see. Instead, he watched how things happened.

  A man ran past, stumbled, spun around abruptly—convinced he was being followed. No one was there. And yet the shadow behind him seemed to stretch a fraction of a second too long. The man screamed and vanished around a corner.

  “Did you see that?” Noah whispered.

  Lilitu was motionless, leaning against the wall, eyes half closed. She was not watching the street, but something else.

  “Yes,” she replied. “A local distortion. Brief. Non-materialized.”

  Noah frowned.

  “It doesn’t come directly from the fragment, does it?”

  Lilitu opened her eyes.

  “No. The fragment doesn’t project. It amplifies.”

  They remained silent for a moment. A cart passed slowly, pulled by two haggard figures. A shape slipped from the load and struck the paving stones with a dull sound. No one stopped.

  “Look at the people,” Noah said. “Not the dead. The living.”

  Lilitu followed his gaze.

  A woman advanced hesitantly, clutching a feverish child. She murmured disjointed words, repeated a name. As she moved, the air around her seemed to vibrate, like heat haze.

  “Her fear is concentrated,” Lilitu observed.

  “Yes,” Noah said. “But it doesn’t stay in her.”

  He gestured toward the walls, the sealed doors, the barricaded windows.

  “It spills out. Like smoke. It clings where fear already exists. And the more there is, the thicker it gets.”

  Lilitu inclined her head slightly.

  “A collective resonance.”

  “Not exactly,” Noah corrected. “A loop.”

  He crouched near the edge of the alley, laid a hand on the warm stone.

  “The fragment doesn’t create fear. It uses it as a carrier medium. Each individual fear feeds a shared layer, and that layer comes back to amplify the next ones.”

  He looked up.

  “That’s why you can’t locate it. It isn’t somewhere. It’s everywhere fear circulates.”

  Lilitu studied the street differently now—more closely.

  “That would imply it’s mobile,” she said.

  “No. That it’s… diluted.”

  A scream rang out farther away. Brief. Cut short too quickly.

  Lilitu closed her eyes again.

  “I sense increased density near gathering places. Makeshift hospitals. Churches. Pits.”

  Noah nodded.

  “Where fear is no longer individual. Where it becomes contagious.”

  He rose slowly.

  “This fragment doesn’t feed on death. It feeds on anticipation of death. On waiting. On imagination spinning in a void.”

  Lilitu looked at him for a long time.

  “You’re describing a human mechanism,” she said.

  “Yes. And that’s why you can’t defeat it alone.”

  A heavy silence settled between them.

  “So what do we do?” she asked at last.

  Noah cast one last look down the street. The shadows seemed thicker now. More numerous.

  “We break the loop,” he said.

  “By eliminating fear?”

  He shook his head.

  “Impossible. We have to stop it from circulating. Contain it. Make it… useless.”

  Lilitu reflected.

  “By isolating individuals.”

  “No,” Noah said. “By connecting them differently.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  He drew a deep breath, despite the smell.

  “As long as people are afraid together, the fragment feeds. But if they’re afraid for someone, the loop breaks.”

  Lilitu narrowed her eyes slightly.

  “Explain.”

  “Abstract fear is fertile. Directed fear isn’t. When you care for someone, you stop feeding the rumor. You exhaust yourself. You anchor.”

  Lilitu remained silent for a long time.

  Another scream rang out—closer this time.

  She straightened.

  “Then we must create islands of presence,” she said.

  “Yes,” Noah replied. “And while the fragment starves…”

  He looked at her.

  “You’ll finally be able to take it.”

  Lilitu gazed again at the city, this sea of overlapping fears.

  “So humans have a way to defend themselves,” she said slowly.

  “No,” Noah corrected. “They have a way not to feed what devours them.”

  She looked at him differently now—without analytical distance.

  Noah and Lilitu decided to walk the city before doing anything else.

  Not to act, but to measure.

  Lilitu had given up leaving her human form. The decision was never spoken aloud, but it was clear. Any overly visible change, any rupture of local coherence, risked adding yet another disturbance to an environment already saturated with fear. Here, the slightest deviation became an amplifier.

  They first crossed nearly deserted streets. Closed doors marked with crude signs, cloth nailed to panels, windows blocked with uneven planks. In some alleys, fear seemed to have settled like thick dust—weighting steps, warping perception.

  Noah saw things he knew at once were not entirely real: immobile silhouettes watching from impossible angles, movements too fast to be human, reflections lingering in puddles after passersby had gone. Sometimes, crying—its source impossible to find.

  Lilitu walked without hesitation, attentive to something other than the scenery. Several times she stopped, briefly closed her eyes, then resumed, as if the city formed an invisible map whose relief interested only her.

  The farther they went, the more distressing the scenes became. In an inner courtyard, a woman screamed alone, unable to leave a body lying at her feet. Farther on, an old man stood frozen on a threshold, staring into emptiness, murmuring incoherently. Each time, fear seemed to extend beyond individuals, infecting walls, stones, the very air.

  “Here,” Lilitu murmured, “the dissonance is everywhere.”

  Noah didn’t answer. He was watching the living—their gestures, their eyes. He saw how fear preceded every movement, how it occupied space even before bodies entered it.

  At last they reached a building from which a trembling light escaped.

  Torches. Candles. Continuous human presence.

  The moment they crossed the threshold, Noah felt the difference. The air was still heavy, acrid with smells, but something had shifted. Fear was no longer diffuse. It had given way to another tension—denser, contained.

  Inside, men and women tended to many sick laid on makeshift pallets. Some raved, others moaned softly. Many lay motionless, eyes open, waiting without speaking. Dirty linens were piled in a corner, basins of dark water set directly on the floor.

  A priest moved from one patient to another, murmuring prayers, sometimes laying a hand on a burning forehead, sometimes merely closing eyes already dead.

  Lilitu watched for a long time.

  “Many deaths to come,” she whispered, as a simple observation.

  Noah turned to her. His gaze was as cold as hers.

  “You’re watching people die,” he said.

  Then, after a brief silence:

  “But you’re not watching those who remain.”

  Lilitu stiffened—barely. A minute shift in her shoulders, a new tension in her posture. She didn’t reply. But her gaze moved, leaving the bodies to settle on those still working, stubbornly.

  That was when Noah noticed a man who neither prayed nor lamented. He spoke little, but when he did, others listened. He assigned tasks, moved beds, decided who should be washed, fed, isolated.

  They approached.

  The man regarded them warily, but without hostility.

  “My name is Mattéo,” he said.

  “Noah. And this is Lilitu.”

  They explained they came from the East, had already seen the sickness strike elsewhere, farther away, earlier. Mattéo believed them—or pretended to. In those times, the difference mattered little.

  “You want to help?” he asked simply.

  “Yes,” Noah answered without hesitation.

  He went to work at once, with what he knew. Cleaning wounds where possible. Isolating those who coughed too violently. Giving water, moistening lips, keeping bodies clean as far as means allowed. Simple gestures, repeated, almost mechanical.

  Lilitu watched him for a long time.

  Then, without a word, she began to reproduce the same gestures. The same precision. The same attention. They worked side by side, silent, attuned without having agreed.

  It was very late when Mattéo suggested they rest. He pointed out a small nearby house, still intact, where a few places were available.

  “You’ll need it,” he said.

  Noah accepted. Lilitu did not object.

  On the way, Noah spoke in a low voice. He explained to Mattéo that where they came from, it had been learned that fear often worsened illness—that it fed it, hastened it. That simple things—staying, acting, naming, accompanying—could limit and divert that fear.

  Mattéo listened without interrupting.

  “It isn’t a cure,” Noah concluded.

  “No,” Mattéo replied.

  But it wasn’t an objection.

  In the house, a family had taken refuge with them. A father, drawn and silent. A young boy, too calm for his age. And the mother, lying on a straw mattress, already ill—short of breath, eyes feverish.

  Lilitu observed the scene.

  Worry and sorrow had replaced fear. There were no more screams, no frantic gestures. Only an obstinate vigil, painful and steady.

  For a very brief instant, Lilitu felt the fragment’s presence. A direction—clear, almost reachable. She extended her attention… then the contact broke. The sensation vanished, repelled by something even denser.

  She stayed awake all night.

  She watched the father smooth the woman’s hair. The boy hold her hand in silence. The repeated gestures—perhaps useless, but constant. She observed how fear no longer circulated, how it transformed into fatigue, grief, attachment.

  She was learning.

  And without yet putting it into words, she understood that this was precisely where the fragment stopped feeding.

  The woman died at dawn.

  The night before, Lilitu had watched her without attachment—one body among others.

  But when the father entered the room and collapsed beside the pallet, something cracked.

  Lilitu looked away.

  “It isn’t rational,” she said softly.

  Noah looked at her.

  “No. It’s human.”

  The father’s cry pierced her chest.

  Not as data.

  As a wound.

  She felt a strange heat behind her eyes.

  Pressure.

  “I did nothing for her,” she said.

  “You stayed,” Noah replied. “Sometimes that’s all there is.”

  She understood, with a kind of stunned clarity, that she could no longer pass through suffering without being passed through in return.

  They found Mattéo again at dawn.

  He had aged several years in a single night. His face was hollow, his eyes reddened by exhaustion and lack of sleep. When he saw them enter, he didn’t stand. He let himself sink onto a still-soiled pallet, as if his legs now refused to carry him.

  “Tell me what we can do,” he murmured.

  “Not to heal… but so that fear doesn’t devour everything.”

  He introduced them to a thin man, drawn but with eyes still alert—Father Rivoire. He tended the dying when asked, and the living when he still could.

  Noah spoke calmly. Without emphasis. As one transmits something already tested.

  He explained what, in his view, had been attempted farther south, in Italy: marking not only affected houses, but certain streets, certain overly stricken districts, so fear would stop circulating without limits. He spoke of visible rounds, distributions of herbs, fumigations, amulets—it mattered little whether they truly worked, so long as a gesture existed.

  Then he turned to the priest.

  “Prayers, yes. Songs too. But not by gathering people. Walk the streets. Ask them to stay home. Let the voice circulate, not the crowd.”

  He added that the carts collecting bodies should pass at fixed hours, so death would stop appearing at random, like a constant surprise.

  Mattéo and Rivoire exchanged a look.

  “It will be hard to find volunteers,” Mattéo said.

  “We’ll try,” the priest replied simply.

  They had nothing better to propose.

  Lilitu watched.

  Implementation was slow, chaotic, often incomplete. Volunteers dropped out. Others came, then left. Door markings were sometimes erased, sometimes clumsily redrawn. Processions were misunderstood, poorly relayed.

  And yet, something changed.

  Fear did not vanish.

  But it began to weigh instead of run.

  The streets grew quieter. Cries became rarer. The visions that once sprang from blind angles lost their sharpness. Shadows ceased to stretch unnaturally.

  Lilitu perceived it distinctly. The dissonance was contracting. No longer uniform, it formed pockets—zones of resistance.

  She understood then—without joy, without regret—that alone, she would never have achieved this effect.

  The human was indispensable.

  Not as force.

  As brake.

  Mattéo realized it one evening, walking alone down a street he had avoided until then.

  He stopped short, surprised by his own gesture.

  Nothing visible had changed. The houses were the same. The smells still there. But the air seemed less oppressive—as if something had stopped vibrating above his head.

  He stood motionless for a moment.

  “It’s calmer,” he murmured to himself.

  It wasn’t hope.

  It was worse—and better: a lull.

  The next day, he noticed some inhabitants venturing out again to speak to neighbors, at a distance. Timid gestures of solidarity reappeared. The city, without improving, stopped sinking.

  He didn’t know why.

  But he knew something had changed.

  Lilitu, for her part, felt what still resisted.

  A knot.

  Persistent. Dense.

  A narrow, sunken street where the dead had been left for days—too many, too close. Fear stagnated there, saturated, unable to transform.

  She showed it to Noah.

  Mattéo agreed to go, despite exhaustion. He gathered a few men—few, resigned. They organized a grueling, slow, nearly unbearable removal. Bodies were moved one by one, under the closed gazes of inhabitants hiding behind their doors.

  During this time, Lilitu stood apart.

  She did not act on the city.

  Only on that street.

  She neutralized the crystal’s influence very locally—not by canceling it, but by making it mute. The dissonance dissipated just enough for fear to stop feeding itself.

  Noah felt it at once.

  And so did Lilitu.

  Fear dropped, perceptibly—not only here, but as if something had broken in the global circulation.

  Lilitu closed her eyes.

  This time, the fragment did not evade her.

  It was there.

  Clear.

  Localized.

  For the first time since their arrival, she knew where to look.

  She opened her eyes and met Noah’s gaze.

  “We can go,” she said.

  And in her voice, for the first time, there was neither coldness nor distance.

  Only a certainty acquired together.

  They chose to wait until night.

  They stayed in the small house that had sheltered them since their first night in the city. Father Rivoire came to see the rest of the family before compline.

  When night was fully settled, they left the house.

  They headed toward the port.

  At that hour, the city was little more than a dark mass pierced by rare lights. The harbor appeared as a black gash in the coast, still water reflecting wavering lanterns. Several ships lay at anchor, abandoned, their sails hanging like soiled linens. Others had been turned into makeshift refuges: silhouettes lay stretched on decks, bodies too still, moans carried by the lapping water.

  The smell was different here—damper, mixed with salt, rotting wood, and disease.

  Lilitu stopped abruptly.

  “It’s there,” she said.

  She indicated a point in the middle of the basin.

  Not a precise place, but a suspended volume, slightly above the dark water.

  Noah followed her gesture, seeing nothing.

  “I can look for a boat,” he offered.

  Lilitu shook her head.

  “The fragment is anchored in a fold of the temporal layer.”

  She paused.

  “I’ll get it.”

  Noah hesitated.

  “Will it let you?”

  Lilitu turned toward him with a look he scarcely recognized—and she smiled. A brief, rare smile.

  “I marked it.”

  That would probably be enough, Noah thought.

  Her form lost sharpness, as if it stopped obeying the same density as the surrounding world. Her contours blurred, then thinned. She did not vanish abruptly. She slid out of coherence, leaving behind an immediate impression of emptiness.

  Noah felt his stomach knot.

  A worry rose—not fear of finding himself, out of phase, alone in a city ravaged by the Black Death. Something simpler. Barer.

  The fear that she would not return.

  He didn’t have time to go further.

  Lilitu recondensed scarcely seconds later. Her form snapped back into place with disconcerting ease. In her hand, she held an irregular crystalline object, with imperfect facets, crossed by internal reflections that seemed to hesitate between several colors.

  She smiled a second time, then whispered:

  “Why worry?”

  “Me?” Noah replied, with obvious bad faith.

  She offered him a third smile.

  “Let’s go back to the chalet,” she said simply.

  Mattéo had watched the scene from a distance.

  He had seen nothing precise—only two silhouettes standing motionless near the water.

  Then a brief disturbance, like an unsteady mirage over the port. The silhouettes gone in a breath.

  He stood still for a long time.

  He did not understand what he had seen.

  But he understood what had changed.

  The next day, the city felt heavier—but more stable. Like a feverish body after a crisis. Fear was still there, but it no longer overflowed.

  Mattéo never spoke of what he had observed.

  He did not have the words.