Chương 18: Chapter 17: Those Who Remain

The road was still there. I opened the front door and saw it through the falling snow. There was a dark line through the white, exactly where I'd left it. Steam rose faintly from the stones. Whatever kept the road clear hadn't stopped overnight. But the path I'd dug wasn't the road. The waist-deep trench I'd carved from the garage to the stones was still there. Barely. A thin layer of fresh snow had settled into it overnight. Not enough to stop the car, but enough to tell me that it wouldn't last.

Another night like this and the path would be gone. Another two and I'd be shoveling all over again. I couldn't do that every time. I walked the path one last time, boots breaking through the fresh crust, and reached the road. just like yesterday, the stones were barely warm under my palm. From now on, the car would stay here. Not in the garage. Not behind a drift that could bury it again. On the road, where the snow couldn't hold. I went back inside.

Yato was on the couch, watching me with the flat expression of a creature who knew something had changed and wasn't sure it was good.

"I'll be back tonight." His tail flicked.

"If I'm not, there's extra food." Another flick. He'd heard that one before. I grabbed the keys from the counter, walked back out through the garage, and drove the car onto the road. The world without the forest was strange. Not empty. Not dead. Just... exposed. For the first time since arriving here, I could see beyond the walls of trees that had surrounded me. The forest hadn't disappeared. It had withdrawn.

The trees had buried themselves beneath the earth for winter, leaving behind a landscape they had hidden for centuries. Rock formations rose where the canopy had once blocked the sky. Dry stream beds carved paths through the valley. Ancient stone pillars stood at forgotten crossroads, too deliberate to be natural, too weathered for me to understand their purpose. The road branched three times.

Each junction was marked by nothing but the stones themselves, no signs, no carvings, no indication of who had built them or where they led. I navigated by my hand-drawn map and the summit photos on my phone, taking the branch that I felt, angled toward the river. The car handled the pavement smoothly. I wasn't rushed. I kept my speed low, the tires rolling over grass and stones that had waited centuries for someone to use them once more. The battery indicator moved slowly, and I had plenty left.

The village was closer than the mountain had been, and I had already made the same trip with less than half a charge. After over an hour, the road widened into a larger junction. One branch continued straight. Another crossed what had once been a bridge. Collapsed. Stone blocks tumbled into the dry riverbed below. The gap was too wide to cross, too broken to repair. The stones weren't shattered. They were separated, as though the bridge had been designed to come apart and simply never reassembled.

I stood at the edge for a moment, looking down at blocks that had been precisely cut and then abandoned. The third branch turned downstream, following the river. I took it. The river was faster than I remembered. From this elevation, I could see the current cutting through the valley, white turbulence in the narrow sections, deep green in the wider bends. The same river I'd discovered weeks ago, but seen from higher ground. Seen without the trees. The road ran close to the bank for a stretch.

I stopped where a fallen stone had created a sheltered eddy, a piece of the collapsed bridge, carried downstream centuries ago. The water here was slower, almost still behind the stone's protection. I got out. The cold hit immediately, colder than at the house, colder than the road. My breath clouded harder. My fingers numbed faster. The trap was ugly. A plastic container with a funnel-shaped entrance, duct tape at the seams, string tied to the handle.

The monster fat inside had frozen solid during the night, in theory it would thaw in the water, release its scent, do whatever bait was supposed to do. I tied the cord around a twisted piece of dead wood caught between the stones. Lowered the trap into the eddy. It settled beneath the surface and disappeared. I waited. The river kept moving. It didn't care about my trap, my plans, or the fact that I was the only person for miles trying to survive. My little plastic box was the smallest thing in the valley.

I got back in the car. The road curved around a low ridge. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The village appeared. There you are! Stone roofs. Sloped. Triangular. Exactly what my photographs had captured, but the photographs hadn't captured the scale. Fifteen buildings. Maybe twenty. Clustered around a central hall, arranged along a main street that was itself a branch of the thermal road.

The stones here were the same as the road ancient but intact, No snow on the streets. No ice on the steps. I parked at the edge and stepped out. Silence. Not the winter silence I'd grown used to. That silence had wind in it, the house creaking, snow shifting somewhere distant. This silence was heavier. Older. It had been accumulating for centuries. I walked the main street. The buildings were all intact. Stone walls, wooden doors that hadn't rotted, windows made of glass. No weeds between the paving stones.

No debris in the corners. No dust on the windowsills. The village wasn't ruined. It was maintained. It's incredible! Someone has to live here. I stopped at the first doorway. Peered inside. A home. A table set with plates. Two of them. A cup beside a chair, still sitting where someone had placed it, waiting for a hand to grab it. A blanket folded on a bed, the corners tucked. Someone had made that bed thinking they'd sleep in it again. Dustless. Perfect. No skeletons. No blood. No sign of violence.

But it was empty. I moved to the next building. The same. A loaf-shaped stone beside an oven, the kind you'd use to bake bread. A pair of small shoes by the door, smaller than the ones in the first house, small enough to make me stop. A book open on a windowsill, pages held down by a smooth river stone. The shoes bothered me more than the book. Whoever wore them had expected to come back. Everyone had vanished on the same day. And someone — something — had been cleaning ever since.

I was standing in the third doorway when I noticed movement. Small. Knee-high. Stone. At the far end of the corridor, a shape was sweeping. I froze. It reached the end of the corridor. Turned. Swept back. The motion was smooth, mechanical, unhurried. It covered the same six meters. Again. I stepped closer. There I was, dumbfouded, facing a golem. Rough-hewn stone, shaped vaguely like a person — not carved beautifully, but functionally. Two arms. Two legs. A rounded head.

No face, only two crystal flecks where eyes should be. One hand held a broom. It swept. The floor was spotless. There was no dust. There hadn't been dust for long time. The golem had won long ago. It simply didn't know. I spoke.

"Hey." Nothing. I touched its shoulder. The golem paused — a mechanical recalibration, like a machine registering an obstacle. It adjusted its path by the width of my hand. Resumed sweeping. It didn't know I existed. It only knew its task. In the next building, I found another one. A golem polishing a statue in the central courtyard. The statue's face had weathered away, wind and time had erased whatever it once depicted. The golem's cloth moved in the same circular pattern it had followed for centuries.

Polishing blank stone. Polishing nothing. I watched it for longer than I meant to. It had been doing this for centuries. Tiny. Patient. Hopelessly faithful. I stepped back onto the main street and really looked. Every doorway. Every window. Every staircase. Movement in the shadows — small shapes, methodical, endless. Sweeping empty bedrooms. Oiling hinges that no one opens. The village wasn't surviving because time spared it. Or at least it didn't look that way. The largest building sat at the village center.

A hall, or a meeting place, or whatever had passed for government here. The doors were open. Inside: a stone desk. Behind it, set into the wall, a smooth dark panel that pulsed with faint light. Symbols moved across its surface in the same script as the book on the windowsill A list. Small portraits — faces, dozens of them — each beside a line of text and a green symbol. I didn't know what it was. But I knew what it looked like. A computer. Or something close enough. I stood in front of it.

The panel was alive still running after however long this place had been empty. I touched the surface. Cold. The symbols reacted to my fingers. Not like a machine receiving input. Like something recognizing permission. For a few seconds, a rectangle of new symbols appeared over the list. A popup. Bright against the dim background. It pulsed twice. Then vanished. The original display returned. I stared. I couldn't read any of it. The popup could have been anything, an error, a greeting, a warning.

I had no way to know. I took photos with my phone. The portraits. The symbols. The green indicators. Evidence to study later. A soft click behind me. I turned. A golem had entered the hall. Different from the sweepers, slightly larger, its stone smoother, its crystal eyes bigger. It walked toward me with a purpose the others lacked. It stopped. Two meters away. Its eyes brightened. A pale amber glow that hadn't been there before. And it looked at me. Not through me. Not past me. At me. The golem's head tilted.

The crystals traveled down my body — boots, legs, coat, hands, face — then back up. A scan. Deliberate. Complete. When the light reached my eyes, it held there for one long moment. Then the crystals dimmed. The glow faded. It turned and walked toward a side corridor. I stood frozen. That was different. That wasn't mindless task execution. Something had just processed me. Hurrying, I followed. The golem walked to a small room off the main hall. Shelves lined the walls, bound volumes, more books than I could count.

A smaller panel on the wall. A single chair. An office, or a study, or something close. The golem stepped onto a low stone platform in the corner, settled into a recess that fit its shape perfectly, and went still. Its eyes remained dark. I waited. Nothing. It was done. Meanwhile in the empty hall, the terminal pulsed once more. The list of residents had grown by one line. At the bottom, beneath dozens of names, a new portrait had appeared. Not a drawing. Not a symbol. A photograph. A man in his twenties.

Blond hair. Tired eyes. The expression of someone who hadn't expected to be photographed. Beside the portrait, a green symbol. The terminal held the image for a moment, as though confirming something. Then the display returned to its quiet scroll, the new entry integrated into the list like it had always belonged there. The hall was empty. No one saw it happen. No one would. I looked at the shelves. The books were bound in something that wasn't leather. smooth, pale, faintly textured like the underside of a leaf.

Pages that weren't paper, thinner, stronger, untouched by centuries. I pulled one volume. Opened it. The script was the same as the terminal symbols. I photographed several pages. Took three of the thinner volumes — they fit in my coat pockets. Left the rest. It was time to go home.

"I'll come back." The drive home was quiet. Yato met me at the door with the flat stare of a cat who had been fed but abandoned. I gave him extra beast meat as penance. He accepted it without gratitude, which was fair. That evening, I spread the books across the table and transferred the photographs to my computer. The result was frustrating. The pages were filled with the same symbols as the terminal, and I couldn't read a single word.

I zoomed in on the portraits, the popup, the strange markings, looking for a pattern. Anything. Nothing except the memory of those amber eyes. The way they had moved over me. The way they had stopped at my face. Outside, snow was falling again. I thought about the golems. Every building had one. Still sweeping. Still polishing. Still maintaining a village whose people had vanished centuries ago. They didn't know. They couldn't know. They were simply following the last orders they had been given.

But one of them had looked at me. Not because of a task. Not because I was in the way. Because it had recognized something. I didn't know what. But I knew it mattered. Once again, I went to bed with more questions than answers. The night wasn't going to be short.