It was an undeniably interesting story that Fen told Daisy in frustrating installments, each time they stopped to rest on their seemingly-interminable journey through the underground of The Mainland. He promised that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end as stories tend to do, only he wasn’t so good at sticking to the order. One moment he had just started working in The Archives, the next he was a solidified member of The Rebellion. It was very difficult for Daisy to straighten it all out. His second promise was that when he was finished, Daisy would understand why she could never go home, and where they were going. This last bit he added with a rueful smile, as he could see, game as she was, that Daisy was beginning to falter, to feel the strain of extended time underground. It was never easy for overlanders, though she was making a good show of it.

-So where were we? He asked when they next sat to rest.

-The Archives, Daisy replied. The Archives.

-Ah yes, that’s right.

Fen leaned back and began again.

The young Wran archivist was out of his mind with worry for a few days, but as time drifted on, as it has the tendency to do, and nothing terrible happened, and the small voice did not return in the night, things began to settle into their old rhythm once again. He spent his days sleeping in his warm burrow, and his nights alone in The Archives, absorbed in his work, eventually forgetting the incident altogether, until much later, years in fact, when he was a somewhat less young Wran archivist...and it all came rushing back.

Just as before, it was deep in the night, and The Archives were deathly quiet, the only sound Fen gently turning the pages of a tome regarding the formation of The Islands and their initial separation from The Mainland. It was a thick, difficult volume, rife with engineering difficulties and struggles to reconcile ancient iron-working abilities with such a massive undertaking. Fen used a quill to make markings in the margin for a future Archivist to return to. It was one of their jobs as archivists to maintain the integrity of the texts by writing in them a modern understanding of the text so that context was never entirely lost and the ancient words did not fade into obscurity and no longer serve any purpose to future generations. Fen’s notations were hardly the first, as each age of archivists was tasked with the same, and in fact, rather soon this particular tome would have to be recopied.

-Hello.

The voice spoke as before into the echoing silence of The Archives, stirring up motes of dust from texts unread for centuries, and stirring up a rising panic in the Wran who sat with his quill hovering above parchment. Fen swallowed hard and waited for his mind to cease playing tricks on him, for the windless night to cease howling into his ears the obscenities of his past. But there were no tricks, and the voice came again, stubborn, persistent, real.

-Hello.

-Hello, Fen replied.

-Do you remember me?

The young Wran would have loved to pretend he did not recognize the voice after the passage of time, it’s maturation and change of key...but he did. He had never forgotten the meter or the soul of the voice that spoke to him those years before. He set down his quill as he was spattering ink all over the book in front of him on the oak table. His hands shook.

-I remember you.

-I thought maybe you forgot.

-No.

-Can I come down?

Fen’s voice shook and he set down his mug on the table between him and Daisy in the rest area where they sat. Even moving the mug from hand to table had spilled a considerable amount on himself. He rubbed at his empty eye socket as if to wipe away tears and held his hands in his lap like a child being scolded. Daisy had never seen the Wran act this way before. To her, he had always assumed a confident and powerful role of her protector and guide through the underworld.

-Are you okay? She asked.

-I think we ought to get going.

-So we don’t miss our next crossing.

-Right, he said, grateful for the out his traveling companion so kindly gave him. So we don’t miss our next crossing.

Daisy saw now why he had been hesitant to explain the entirety of their situation to her. It wasn’t because he didn’t want her to know, but because in the telling, he made himself vulnerable. She wondered too, how the voice of a girl coming down to him as if from a benevolent spirit could cause him such anxiety, such fear that he, even all these many years later, could not hold a mug without shaking half its contents out. Daisy would learn all this and more before her trip was done.

As they approached the next crossing, and Daisy gripped Fen’s hand tightly, she allowed herself, for the first time in many days, to think of Torv, and his own struggle. Fen had hinted only vaguely that Torv’s journey and their own were intertwined, but it wasn’t hints or hope that Daisy wanted. It was a physical touch, even if for only a moment; the graze of his fingertips on hers, the play of his pipe smoke about her ears that always tickled her, or even just the feel of the rowboat seat beneath her as she sat across from him...looking into his eyes as he rowed.

Even this reverie was taken from her, as her memory reached the point where Island Guards appeared on the shore behind her beloved, she was whooshed away down the tunnel.