Chapter 16: Wil’s Warning

WIL CAUGHT UP with me between the Fishery and the Mews, falling into step beside me with the quiet inevitability of a stone rolling downhill.

That was Wilem’s way. He didn’t announce himself. He didn’t call out or wave or make the small, unnecessary noises that most people make when they want your attention. He simply appeared at your shoulder, solid and present, and waited for you to notice. If you didn’t notice, he waited longer. Wil had the patience of bedrock. He could outwait anything.

“You missed class,” he said, by way of greeting. “Advanced Sympathy. Third time this span.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been in the Archives. Or under them.” He didn’t look at me as he said this—just kept walking, his eyes fixed on the gravel path ahead, his stride matched to mine. “Sim covered for you. Told Elxa Dal you were ill. He’s getting better at lying, which worries me.”

“I appreciate the concern.”

“It’s not concern. It’s accounting.” Wil’s voice was flat, practical, stripped of everything that wasn’t essential. This was his natural register—Cealdish efficiency applied to the language of friendship. “You’ve missed three classes. You’ve skipped two meals that I know of. You haven’t been to Anker’s in six days. And you have a look about you that I don’t like.”

“What kind of look?”

“The kind you get before you do something spectacularly stupid.” He stopped walking, and because Wil stopped walking, I stopped too. We stood on the path between the Fishery and the Mews, students flowing around us like water around two stubborn stones. “We need to talk.”

“We are talking.”

“No. We’re exchanging words while you plan your next reckless expedition into whatever ancient mystery has its hooks in you this time.” His dark eyes found mine, and they were steady—steady the way a foundation is steady, the way the ground under your feet is steady until the moment it isn’t. “I mean a real conversation. The kind where you actually listen.”

I wanted to brush him off. To deflect with a joke or a redirect or the kind of charming evasion I’d perfected over years of keeping people at arm’s length. But something in Wil’s expression stopped me. A gravity that went beyond his usual seriousness. This wasn’t Wil being practical. This was Wil being afraid.

“All right,” I said. “I’m listening.”

We walked to the park behind the Archives—a small green space that most students avoided because it was too close to Lorren’s domain and too far from anything useful. A few old trees stood guard over wooden benches that had been worn smooth by generations of scholars, and the grass was the deep, neglected green of a place that was maintained by rain rather than groundskeepers.

We sat on a bench beneath an elm tree whose branches spread above us like the ribs of an inverted hull. The afternoon light filtered through the leaves in patterns that shifted with the wind, and somewhere nearby a thrush was singing—a simple, repeated phrase, three notes ascending, one note held, as if the bird were asking a question and then waiting for an answer that never came.

Wil sat with his hands on his knees, his back straight, his jaw set. He had the posture of a man preparing to deliver unpleasant news—which, I suppose, was exactly what he was doing.

“How much do you know about mining?” he asked.

“Not much. Some basic principles from studying geology for Sympathy.”

“I don’t mean the theory. I mean the practice.” He interlaced his fingers, squeezed them until the knuckles whitened. “My father was a miner. Iron ore, in the hills north of Ralien. I grew up around mines—the sounds of them, the smells. The way the men talked. The way they moved.”

This was new. Wil rarely spoke about his family, about his life before the University. He was Cealdish to the core—private, contained, revealing personal history the way a miser reveals coin: reluctantly, and only when the exchange was worth the cost.

“My father taught me many things,” Wil continued. “How to read a ledger. How to spot a counterfeit coin by the sound it makes when dropped. How to keep my mouth shut when speaking would only make things worse.” He paused. “And how to listen to stone.”

“Listen to stone?”

“In the mines. Before a collapse. The stone talks.” He looked at me, and his expression was utterly serious. “Not in words. In sounds. Small sounds—creaks, pops, the shifting of weight from one support to another. Sounds that mean the earth is redistributing pressure, trying to find a new equilibrium. My father could hear those sounds and tell you, to the hour, when a shaft was going to come down.”

“That’s an impressive skill.”

“It’s not impressive. It’s survival. The men who didn’t learn it died.” He turned to face me fully, his body angled toward mine on the bench, and I felt the weight of what he was about to say pressing on the air between us. “The stone is talking, Kvothe. And you’re not listening.”

The thrush sang its three ascending notes. The wind moved through the elm’s branches. A cloud passed over the sun, and the dappled light on the grass went flat and grey.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re headed for a collapse. I can see it. Sim can see it. Even Fela, who hasn’t known you as long, can see it.” He held up a hand, ticking off points on his fingers. “You’re barely sleeping. You’re skipping classes in the only term where your tuition isn’t going to bankrupt you. You’re spending every free hour in the Archives or the Underthing or Devi’s rooms, chasing something you won’t name. You’re obsessed with Denna’s patron, with the Amyr, with the Doors of Stone, with things that no student at this University has any business investigating.”

“Those things are connected, Wil. There’s a pattern—”

“There’s always a pattern. You’re brilliant enough to find patterns in anything. That doesn’t make them real.” His voice was sharp now—sharper than I’d ever heard it. Wil was not a man who raised his voice or sharpened his tone, and the fact that he was doing both told me more about his state of mind than any words could have. “Let me ask you something. Directly. No games, no evasion. What exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

“I’m going to find out who Denna’s patron is. What he’s doing to her. And I’m going to stop it.”

“And the Chandrian?”

“If they’re connected, yes.”

“And the Amyr?”

“If they’re relevant.”

“And the Doors of Stone?”

I hesitated, and Wil pounced on the silence.

“You see? You can’t even state your goals without the scope expanding. Every answer leads to another question. Every thread you pull reveals three more. You’re not investigating, Kvothe. You’re spiraling.” He leaned forward. “In the mines, there’s a word for what happens when a man starts following a vein that gets thinner and thinner, branching and splitting until he’s crawled so deep into the rock that he can’t find his way back. You know what they call it?”

“What?”

“Talvest. It means ‘following the ghost.’ Because the vein is real, but the deeper you go, the less of it there is. You’re chasing a trace. A whisper. And by the time you realize there’s nothing left to find, you’re so deep in the dark that the light from the entrance is just a memory.”

His words landed with physical weight. Not because they were wrong—because they might have been right. I could feel it, the way I could feel the bone ring warm against my finger, the way I could feel the pull of the hidden library calling me back down into the deep places. The obsession was real. The spiral was real. And Wil, with his miner’s instinct for impending collapse, could hear in me what I couldn’t hear in myself.

“I can’t stop,” I said, and the words surprised me with their honesty. “Even if I wanted to. There are people in danger. Denna is in danger. And the things I’m finding—the knowledge that’s been hidden, the connections between the Chandrian and the University and the old magic—it all points to something real. Something that’s happening now. Something that’s going to get worse.”

“I’m not asking you to stop. I’m asking you to slow down.” Wil’s voice softened, and the softening was worse than the sharpness. Sharper words, I could deflect. Gentle ones found their way through. “You’re burning through your friends, Kvothe. Through your classes. Through your health. Through your standing at the University. Every favor you call in, every rule you break, every night you spend in the tunnels instead of sleeping—it costs something. And the costs are adding up.”

“Some things are worth the cost.”

“Some things seem worth the cost until the bill comes due.” He reached into his pocket and produced a coin—a Cealdish iron drab, worn smooth with handling. He turned it between his fingers with the absent-minded dexterity of someone who’d grown up in a counting house. “My father used to say: a man who bets everything on a single hand deserves what he loses. Not because he was wrong about the hand—maybe the cards were good—but because he was wrong about the game. The game goes on. If you lose everything on one bet, you can’t play the next round.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“No. It’s worse than a game. Games have rules. What you’re doing has none.” He put the coin away. “And the people you’re playing against—these patrons and Amyr and ancient powers—they’ve been playing longer than you’ve been alive. Longer than the University has existed. What makes you think you can outsmart them?”

“What makes you think I can’t?”

“I don’t think you can’t. I think you might. That’s what scares me.” His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word, and the sound of it hit me like a slap. Wilem didn’t crack. Wilem was the steady one, the reliable one, the one who held things together when everyone else was falling apart. If Wil was cracking, something was very wrong.

“You’re the most talented person I’ve ever met,” he said. “And I don’t say that lightly—I’ve met a lot of talented people. You’re brilliant and resourceful and brave beyond any reasonable measure. But Kvothe—” He said my name with a weight that made it sound like a prayer. “—you have a blind spot. A catastrophic one. You believe, down in the deepest part of yourself, that being brilliant and brave is enough. That if you’re just clever enough, just quick enough, just determined enough, you can handle anything. You can outthink any trap. Survive any danger. Win any fight.”

“And you think I’m wrong?”

“I think the world is full of clever, brave people who died because they didn’t know when to stop.” He looked at me, and his eyes were bright with something I’d never seen there before—not fear, exactly, but its close cousin. Anticipatory grief. The sorrow of someone watching a beloved friend walk toward an edge they can clearly see but cannot reach. “I think you’re heading for a cliff. And I think by the time you see it, it’ll be too late to stop.”

We sat in silence for a long time. The thrush had stopped singing. The wind had died. The afternoon light had taken on the golden quality of the hours before sunset, when everything looks beautiful and temporary.

I turned the bone ring on my finger—Auri’s gift—and felt its faint warmth against my skin. A key, she’d called it. Not for a lock, but for a conversation. How many conversations was I having now? How many doors was I trying to open at once?

Wil sat with his hands folded in his lap, waiting. Not impatiently—Wil didn’t do impatience. He waited the way stone waits: without expectation, without urgency, simply present and available for as long as presence was required.

A pair of students walked past on the path, their voices low and their heads bent over a shared text. They didn’t notice us. No one ever notices the conversations that matter. The ones that could change everything happen in plain sight, on ordinary benches, in ordinary light, and the world walks past without a second glance.

“You know what my father said about the men who ignored the stone?” Wil asked, quietly. “The ones who stayed in the shaft after he pulled his crew out?”

“What?”

“He said they weren’t stupid. They weren’t deaf. They could hear the same sounds he could—the creaks, the shifts, the subtle rearrangement of pressures that meant the earth was losing patience with the hole they’d dug. They heard it. They simply chose to interpret it differently.” He paused. “They told themselves the sounds were normal. Part of the process. The cost of doing business in the deep places.”

“And they died?”

“Not always. Sometimes the shaft held. Sometimes their interpretation was correct—the sounds were normal, the shifts were routine, and my father’s caution cost him time and money for nothing.” He looked at his hands. “But over a lifetime of mining, the men who ignored the stone had a way of running out of lifetimes. My father retired at sixty-two. Most of his contemporaries didn’t make it past forty.”

The mathematics of survival. Trust your instincts over your ambition, and you live long enough to grow old. Trust your ambition over your instincts, and eventually the earth collects what it’s owed.

“What would you have me do?” I asked finally. “Walk away? Pretend I don’t know what I know? Let Denna be rewritten by someone who’s using her as a tool?”

“I’d have you ask for help. From people who can actually give it.” Wil’s voice was steady again—the crack sealed, the foundation restored. “Go to Elxa Dal. Go to the Chancellor. Go to Elodin, for all his madness. Tell them what you’ve found. Let them carry some of the weight.”

“They won’t believe me. And even if they do, they’ll try to stop me. The University’s response to dangerous knowledge isn’t to confront it—it’s to bury it deeper.”

“Maybe that response is right.”

“It’s not right. It’s cowardly.”

“Cowardice and caution look the same from the outside. The difference is in the outcome.” He stood, brushing off his trousers with brisk, practical movements. “I’ve said my piece. I know you’re not going to listen—you never do, not about things like this. But I needed to say it. For my own sake, if not for yours.”

“Wil—”

“In the mines,” he said, turning back to face me, “when my father heard the stone talking, he would pull his men out. Every time. Even when the vein was rich, even when the company was pressuring them to keep digging, even when his own crew thought he was being overcautious. He pulled them out, and he waited, and nine times out of ten, the shaft collapsed within a day.”

“And the tenth time?”

“The tenth time, nothing happened. And his men grumbled and called him a coward and went back to work.” He held my gaze. “But they were alive to grumble. That was the point.”

He turned and walked away, his footsteps steady and measured on the gravel path, his shoulders square, his back straight. I watched him go—my friend, my solid, dependable, Cealdish friend who saw the world in terms of ledgers and debts and the simple arithmetic of survival.

He was right. I knew he was right, the way you know that fire is hot and water is wet and gravity pulls things down. He was right that I was spiraling, right that I was burning through everything I’d built, right that the obsession was consuming me from the inside out.

But knowing something is true and acting on it are two very different things. The knowledge in the hidden library called to me. The bone ring hummed on my finger. Denna’s braids grew more elaborate with each passing day, the inscriptions sinking deeper into her identity, and every hour I delayed was an hour closer to the moment when the woman I loved would be completely gone, overwritten by someone else’s design.

I couldn’t slow down. The stone might be talking, but the collapse wasn’t coming for me.

It was coming for everyone.

And if no one else was going to dig for the truth, I’d have to keep digging myself, no matter how dark the shaft became.

I sat on that bench for a long time after Wil left, watching the light change and the shadows lengthen and the stars begin to appear, one by one, in the darkening sky. The thrush started singing again—the same three ascending notes, the same held question, the same waiting silence.

I thought about Wil’s father, pulling his men out of a mine because he could hear the stone speaking. I thought about the bravery in that—the courage it took to choose caution when everyone around you was pressing forward, to trust your instincts over the consensus, to value lives more than gold.

And I thought about the tenth time. The time when nothing happened. When the shaft held and the stone went quiet and the men went back to work.

Was I the miner who heard the stone talking? Or was I the stone itself—cracking under pressure, redistributing weight, trying to hold something together that was determined to fall apart?

I didn’t know. And in the absence of knowing, I did what I always did.

I chose to keep digging.

Years later, standing in the wreckage of everything I’d built and everyone I’d loved, I would think about that bench, that conversation, that moment when Wilem offered me the chance to step back from the edge. I would think about the stone and the mine shaft and the father who knew when to pull his men to safety.

And I would understand, too late, that the stone had been talking to me all along.

I just hadn’t listened.