Chương 20: Chapter 19: Words Left Behind

Yato's ears were still flat. The growl in his throat had stopped — he'd moved from warning to watching, tail flicking slowly, the look of a creature who'd done his job and was now waiting to see whether I'd handle the rest or die about it. I opened the door. A golem stood on the threshold. It didn't look at me. Not waiting for permission, it walked past my legs and into the house.

I stood there with my hand still on the door, cold air pouring in around me, watching a stone construct cross the corridor like it had an appointment. The knife. That's what came to my mind instantly. The workshop knife. I'd taken it. It was on the counter, beside my own kitchen blade, two knives where there should have been one. The sweepers knew when a floor was wet. The polishers knew when a statue had dulled. If this golem could tell when something was missing the way they could tell when something was dirty...

Then it was here for the knife. I closed the door. Yato hadn't moved from the couch — his eyes tracked the golem with the flat intensity he reserved for birds outside the window and problems he'd decided were beneath his direct involvement. The golem walked through the corridor and into the office on the right. It stopped at the center of the room. Its eyes brightened. A slow pulse. Hold. Dim. Then it rotated — a full, slow turn — facing the couch, the desk, the shelves, the windows. It wasn't touching anything.

It was looking. Taking in the room. It walked back to the corridor. I followed. The kitchen came next. The golem entered the way it had entered the office — without hesitation, without curiosity. It stopped near the center of the floor and repeated the same slow rotation, eyes bright the whole time, marking every wall, every corner. The knives were right there. On the counter. Impossible to miss. The golem's eyes passed over the counter without pausing. The glow held steady. It didn't care.

My heart didn't slow down — it just found something new to beat against. If it wasn't here for the knife, what was it here for? What had I done that mattered enough to send one of these things to my door? The golem moved back to the hallway. Rotated. Moved upstairs to the bathroom. Rotated. Moved to the bedroom. Rotated. The garage. Rotated. Every room. Every doorway it even went into the pantry, waiting for me to opened closed doors like it was obvious.

The golem never touched a surface or a shelf or a piece of furniture. It didn't look at objects. It looked at walls. Corners. The distance from doorway to window. The shape of empty floor. When it finished the garage, it turned and walked back to the kitchen. It stopped near the counter. The spot where I'd gutted the fish — the floor just below the cutting board, the same stone tile I'd wiped down with a cloth and called it done.

A few scales had scattered, tiny silver flecks that had caught the light when I was cleaning. I'd been tired. I'd been distracted. I'd missed them. The golem on the other hand... It didn't. It extended its arm toward the floor. And with the tiny broom it held, started sweeping. Soon, the floor was clean. It didn't even look at me once. It had come here to clean the floor. That was it. That was the whole thing.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the frame and watched it walk to the back corner of the kitchen — the angle where the wall met the floor near the back door, tucked out of the way like a piece of furniture I'd never own. Its eyes dimmed. It went still. It wasn't going anywhere. It lived here now. A Roomba. I'd spent two minutes in cold dread over a Roomba.

I stood, watching a dormant stone construct that had just finished mapping my house and cleaning my floor, and somewhere between the adrenaline crash and the comedown, Yato finally jumped from his sit and trotted over to stare too. He leaned forward. Sniffed the stone. Looked up at me with the same flat expression. His tail flicked. You opened the door.

"I know," I said.

"I know." The sky outside the living room window was still clear The doubled light of two suns poured through the glass — brighter than I'd seen in days, winter sunlight without the weight of a storm behind it. The thermal road was visible through the window, just a couple meters away, a dark line cutting through the snow, and somewhere on that line, a hundred kilometers away, my car was out there with a battery that was slowly dying.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Less than a third. That was the number I'd landed on last afternoon when I parked it. For the third time today I had to snap back to reality. That wasn't an issue for today. I hadn't slept.

But the bath had loosened every muscle in my body, and the warmth had tricked it into thinking it could rest — then the knock came, and the golem, and the long slow drain of watching it circle every room without ever reaching for what I'd been afraid of. And now that same golem was dormant in my kitchen corner and my heart was still catching up. If I lay down now, I'd crash. But my brain wasn't going to let me rest just yet.

Not after what happened last night, if I were to lay down right now I had the impression that I would miss some crucial information and my house would take on a new journey while I slept. The study. I'd told myself this morning that I wouldn't work there. The house could move again. The books were safer here. But the house was in the village for now, and the study was only a five-minute walk away. furthermore, the books were there. All of them.

Not just the three I'd stolen before I'd even stopped to consider the implications. A library. I dressed again—coat, boots, the workshop knife still in my pocket. The sky was clear. The walk would keep me awake. Besides, all I'd said was that I wouldn't spend the night there, right?. Turns out I hadn't planned very well. It had always been my problem with libraries. One book became two. Two became a stack. Now I was pulling books off the shelves by the armful, stacking them on the table, and the sun was going down.

The scanning golem hadn't moved. Its amber eyes were still dark. Whatever had activated it when I first touched the terminal, it hadn't triggered again. The study was quiet. Sweepers crossed the main street outside the window. One paused to clear a drift of snow that had blown against a doorframe. Another passed in the opposite direction without stopping. Life. Maintenance. Whatever you called it. I looked around for a switch. Old habits. The room had no lamps, no obvious source of light.

Just stone walls, shelves, and the same smooth construction I'd seen everywhere else. Then I noticed the small recess in the wall beside the table. Of course. The same kind of core I'd seen in the houses. I touched it. The stone brightened, and a sphere of light appeared above the recess, floating silently in the air. Not bright. Not enough to hurt the eyes. Just a soft glow that spread across the room and settled over the shelves. I touched the outer ring around the core. The light intensified.

Another adjustment, and it dimmed again. A dim reading light. A bright room light. The same simple control system as the water in the houses. Looking at the floating light above me, I had a dozen questions. Right now, I only knew one way to get answers. I opened the first book. Eleven books later, I had nothing. Actually, that wasn't fair. I had plenty.

I had drawings that meant something to someone else: A princess — or a queen, or a figure important enough to be drawn alone on a full page, her expression calm in a way that felt painted rather than real. The dragon. Not a generic dragon. The dragon. White scales, the same horns, the same wingspan — drawn from below, as though the artist had stood beneath it and looked up. The proportions were right. The curve of the neck. I'd seen it from so close.

Just looking at the dragon I could tell that the artist that had made this was incredibly skilled. Foods. Beasts. A creature with too many legs and a mouth that opened sideways — I closed that page faster than I'd opened it. A thing with feathers and scales in equal measure, wings spread, talons that could have wrapped around my torso. A herd of something small and six-legged, drawn mid-leap across a double-page spread, the landscape behind them empty and vast. Beautiful things. Terrifying things.

None of it I could read. The script was the same dense tangle of symbols I'd seen on the terminal and the books I'd taken home. Every page. Every label pointing to a wing joint, a cooking technique or a flower petal — all of it in the same language. I went through eleven books. Then twelve. Then fifteen. The stack of finished volumes grew on my left. And the stack of unopened ones shrank on my right. My eyes were dry. My back ached from leaning over the table. But I'd told myself I'd keep going.

And somewhere around book thirty, the script changed. I almost missed it. I'd been flipping pages on a rhythm — look at the script, fail to read it, look at the pictures, extract what I could, move on. My brain was filtering everything through the same gate: unknown, unknown, gibberish... Unknown. Then a page came up. The symbols were different. Smaller. More angular. Fewer curves. I knew those letters. Hadran. The language from my mother's book. My mother's book.

The language she'd written in — the one from the book I kept reading on quiet mornings, back when the house was still in the forest, back when morning coffee was still a thing — was sitting on a page in the village library. I pulled the book closer to me. Finally. Something I could read. I couldn't believe it. The text filled both pages. Column after column of the angular script. No pictures. No diagrams. Just dense, uninterrupted writing. Here it was. Here. In the village. On a shelf in a mysterious library.

My hands were steady. My mind wasn't. I turned more pages. The script continued. Columns. Numbers, quantities, values, dates. A log. A ledger. Financial records, if I had to guess. Why? My mother's friend had written the book, she'd said. A friend who'd given her a story in a language no one spoke. That was the story I knew. I stood up. The chair scraped the stone floor. The dormant golem didn't stir. This book wasn't useful.

Records of transactions made by people who were gone, in a language I recognized — it was a dead end wrapped in a mystery. But if this language was here... I turned to the shelves. I went through the rest of the books not by opening each one but by checking the first few pages. Script check. The angular letters of my mother's book versus the dense symbols of the local language. I sorted as I went — local script on the left, Hadran on the right, neither in a third pile I'd figure out later. Most were local.

The others were all similar to the previous one. Dense blocks of text. Numbers. Probably records of some kind. Useful eventually. Useless for now. Then I found it. It was thicker than the others. The spine was wider than my hand. The cover — pale smooth binding like every other book in the library — had the local script stamped across it in dark ink. A title, presumably. An author. I couldn't read either. I opened it. The first page was local script. A heading.

Some kind of introduction, maybe, a block of dense text I couldn't parse. I turned the page. Two columns. Left column: the angular script. My mother's language, Hadran. A single word, or phrase, followed by a mark — a divider, a separator. Right column: the local script. A word or phrase of similar length. The same mark. The next entry. I turned another page. Same format. Two columns. Hundreds of entries. Hadran on the left, local on the right, line after line, page after page. A dictionary.

The language of my mother's book and the language of this world. I closed it and checked the shelf. Two more volumes. Same thickness. Same binding. Same title text on the cover — I checked each one, identical across all three. A single dictionary split across three massive books. I pulled them both down. Three volumes. Thousands of pages. Every entry the same format: angular script on the left, local script on the right. Someone had built this.

Someone had sat down and catalogued every word from my mother's language — no, not my mother's language. A script that existed in two worlds, and someone here had documented, translated it, across three volumes. Why? I didn't know. And more likely than not, I wasn't going to know tonight. But I had them now. I had a dictionary. I couldn't read the local script. But I could compare. I could match symbols. I could build a map from the language I knew to the language I didn't, and from there...

From there, I could read the terminal. The books. The labels. It would take weeks. Months. The dictionary was massive and I was starting from zero. But I had a path now and winter was far from over. I left the financial records on the table and carried the three dictionary volumes to the chair by the window. The sky was darkening. The second sun was setting — or whatever the second sun did when the day ended. It didn't set like the first one. It dimmed. Faded.

The light shifted from doubled brightness to a single pale glow, then to something closer to twilight, and then it would be night. As expected, the night wouldn't be short. I would spend the rest of the day — the night, the morning, whatever came next — translating. Learning. Matching symbols. The sky was clear and the road was open. This time, I just had to follow it.