Chapter 55: Sim’s Stand

THERE ARE THINGS I have never told anyone.

Not Chronicler, with his patient pen and his careful questions. Not Bast, with his desperate hope and his ancient eyes. Not even myself, in the quiet hours when there’s nothing left to hide behind.

But I will tell this one now. Because Simmon deserves to have his story told. Because the world should know what he did, even if the world will never understand why it mattered.

Because he was my friend. And I owe him that much. I owe him everything.

It happened on our last night at the University.

We had planned to leave at moonrise. The texts were packed. The supplies were gathered. Devi had arranged transport---horses waiting at a stable in Imre, paid for with coin I didn’t ask the origin of. Everything was ready.

But the four-plate door had other plans.

The breach started with a sound.

Not the low pulsing I’d been feeling for days---the heartbeat rhythm of something pressing against weakened seals. This was different. A crack. A single, sharp report like a stone splitting, followed by a vibration that ran through the foundations of the University the way a tuning fork’s note runs through still water.

I felt it in my teeth. In my spine. In the sleeping part of my mind that had been half-awake since the fire.

We were in the lower corridors beneath Mains, using the tunnels to move unseen toward the Imre bridge, when the sound hit. All of us stopped. All of us knew what it meant, though none of us wanted to say it.

Sim said it anyway. Because Sim always said the things no one else would.

“The door,” he said. “Something’s happening with the door.”

“We should keep moving,” Devi said. Her voice was tight. “The horses are waiting. Whatever’s happening with the door, it’s not our problem anymore.”

“It’s everyone’s problem,” Fela said. She had gone pale---paler than the fear warranted, and I realized she was feeling it. Her naming ability, her sensitivity to the deep structure of things, was translating the door’s distress into physical sensation. Her hands were shaking. “The seal just cracked. Not all the way. But it cracked. I can feel the shape of what’s pushing through.”

“What shape?” I asked.

She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and dark in the tunnel’s lamplight.

“Wrong,” she said. “The shape is wrong.”

We should have left.

I need you to understand that. We should have walked through those tunnels, crossed the bridge to Imre, mounted those horses, and ridden south without looking back. The University had expelled me. The Masters had chosen their course. Whatever was happening with the four-plate door was, as Devi had correctly observed, no longer our responsibility.

But Simmon.

Simmon, who never could leave a problem unsolved. Simmon, who tutored struggling students for free and volunteered at the Medica on weekends and once spent three days creating an alchemical remedy for a stray cat’s infected paw. Simmon, who saw the world not as it was but as it should be, and who couldn’t walk past the gap between those two visions without trying to close it.

“There are students in the Archives,” he said. “The lower study rooms. People study there overnight during admissions season.”

“Sim---”

“If the door breaches, they’re right there. Twenty feet from whatever comes through.” His jaw set---that particular stubborn set that meant he’d already made up his mind and was simply informing the rest of us of his decision. “I’m going.”

“Then we’re all going,” I said.

“No.” And here his voice changed. Became something I’d never heard from him before---quiet, certain, carrying an authority that had nothing to do with volume and everything to do with conviction. “You need to get the texts out. The sealing protocols, the construction documents---if those are lost, there’s nothing to rebuild with. Nothing to fix this.”

“We’re not splitting up.”

“We have to.” He looked at me. At Fela. At Wil and Devi. “I’ll get the students out. Clear the lower levels. It’s just an evacuation. I can handle an evacuation.”

“You don’t know what’s coming through that door.”

“Neither do you. Which means neither of us knows if it’s dangerous.” He smiled---that gentle, self-deprecating Simmon smile that had disarmed every argument I’d ever tried to make. “I’ll be fine, Kvothe. I’m not the hero type. I’m just going to knock on some doors and tell people to leave.”

I should have stopped him. Should have grabbed him, held him, refused to let him go. Should have known---in my bones, in my blood, in the part of me that could feel the names of things---that this was the last time.

But I didn’t know. That’s the cruelest part. The universe doesn’t signal its turnings. It doesn’t darken the sky before it takes someone. It just takes them, mid-sentence, mid-smile, mid-breath, and leaves you standing in the space where they used to be, wondering how you didn’t see it coming.

“Be careful,” I said.

“Always am.” He kissed Fela. Quick, easy, the casual intimacy of two people who assumed they had all the time in the world. “Meet you at the horses. Save me the good one.”

He turned and jogged back up the corridor toward the Archives.

I let him go.

I let him go.

The breach widened while we moved.

We felt it in stages. First, the vibration intensified---a deep, bone-thrumming frequency that made the tunnel walls shed dust and the lamplight flicker. Then the air changed. The temperature dropped, not by degrees but by kind---the cold of deep winter has a different quality than the cold of underground spaces, and what we felt was neither. It was the cold of absence. Of warmth being drawn away, not by nature but by intention.

Something was pulling heat through the crack in the seal. Feeding on it. Using it to make the crack wider.

“Faster,” Devi said. She was carrying two satchels of texts, her small frame bent under their weight, her footsteps quick and precise. “Whatever’s happening, it’s accelerating.”

We emerged from the tunnels into the night air on the Imre side of the river. The sky above the University was wrong again---not with fire this time, but with a light that came from below. A cold, pale luminescence that seeped up through the ground itself, turning the buildings into silhouettes against an inverted dawn.

The four-plate door was opening.

Not all the way. Not yet. But enough.

“Kvothe.” Wil’s voice, sharp with the particular urgency of a man who calculates odds and doesn’t like the numbers. “Look.”

He was pointing at the Archives. At the ruined, smoke-stained building where the four-plate door sat in its chamber beneath the stacks.

Figures were emerging from the lower entrances. Students, stumbling, confused, some in nightclothes, some carrying books they’d been too dazed to set down. They moved in a disorganized stream away from the building, their faces white in the uncanny light.

And behind them, herding them, guiding them, his voice carrying across the open ground with surprising strength---

Simmon.

I could see him in the doorway of the lower study entrance, waving people through, counting heads, making sure no one was left behind. He was doing exactly what he’d said he would do. Evacuating. Guiding. Being the gentle, steadfast presence that got people moving when panic wanted them to freeze.

“He’s doing it,” Fela whispered. She was standing at the bridge, the texts at her feet, her hands gripping the stone rail. “He’s getting them out.”

For a moment---one brief, shining moment---I thought it would be fine. Sim would clear the building. He’d come jogging across the courtyard with that sheepish grin, apologize for worrying us, and we’d ride south together. I could see it so clearly. The future where nothing went wrong. The future where we all survived.

Then the door opened wider.

I don’t know how to describe what came through.

Not because the memories have faded. They haven’t. Every detail is carved into me with the precision of a master engraver, each line sharp enough to cut. I can’t describe it because language---even the rich, layered language I’ve spent my life shaping---isn’t built for this. There are things that exist outside the architecture of human expression, and what came through the four-plate door that night is one of them.

It wasn’t a creature. It wasn’t a force. It was more like a wrongness---a place where reality had been torn and something from the other side was pressing through the gap. The air around the breach shimmered and buckled, and the light changed, and the sounds of the night---crickets, wind, distant voices---were swallowed one by one, replaced by a silence that was the opposite of silence. A silence that was full. Dense with something that wanted in.

The students nearest the Archives screamed and ran. Some fell. Some simply stopped, their bodies going rigid as the wrongness touched them.

And Simmon was still in the doorway.

He had been guiding the last students out when the breach widened. Now he stood at the threshold of the lower entrance, directly between the wrongness and the dozen students who hadn’t yet cleared the building. They were behind him, in the corridor, moving toward the exit but not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.

I saw him look at the wrongness. Saw his face change.

Not to fear. That was what destroyed me, later, when I had time to think about it. Not to fear.

To understanding.

Simmon was not a Namer. He didn’t have my talent for hearing the names of things, for reaching into the deep structure of reality and pulling out the essential truth. But he was brilliant in his own way---methodical, precise, with an alchemist’s understanding of how things combined and reacted and transformed.

He understood what was coming through the door.

And he understood what it would do to the students behind him if it reached them.

He closed the door.

Not the four-plate door---that was beyond any mortal’s ability to shut. He closed the entrance to the lower studies. The heavy oak door that separated the study rooms from the exterior courtyard. He grabbed it with both hands and he pulled it shut and he braced his body against it.

“Run!” His voice carried across the courtyard, reaching us on the bridge, reaching the students who were still staggering away from the building. “Everyone run!”

The wrongness hit the door.

I saw it---even from the bridge, even in the uncanny light, I saw the moment when the thing from beyond the seal reached the barrier Sim had placed between it and its prey. The oak door shuddered. Frost raced across its surface in patterns that hurt the eye. The iron hinges groaned with a sound like an animal in pain.

And Simmon held.

He wasn’t strong. Not physically, not in the way that Wil was strong or Kilvin was strong. He was a slight young man with an alchemist’s hands and a poet’s heart, and the force pressing against that door was something that had been imprisoned for three thousand years.

But he held.

He held because he was using everything he had. I could see it---see the bindings he was weaving with desperate speed, sympathy and alchemy combined in ways I’d never seen. He was using his own body heat as a source, channeling it through the door, creating a thermal barrier that resisted the cold. He was using the iron in the hinges, the carbon in the oak, the trace elements in the stone threshold, binding them together into a lattice of resistance that was part science and part will and part something that had no name.

His skin went white. Then blue. The heat was leaving him, pouring through his bindings into the door, and the cold was pouring back, and his body was the exchange point, the fulcrum, the place where warmth became wall.

“SIM!” Fela’s scream cut the night like a blade. She was moving---toward the bridge, toward the courtyard, toward him---and Wil caught her, held her, his face terrible with the effort of restraining someone who was fighting him with every ounce of her strength.

I was running.

Across the bridge. Across the courtyard. My legs burned and my lungs burned and the wrongness pressed against me like wind from an open grave, but I ran. Because Sim was dying. I could see it in the way his body was changing, the way the cold was eating him from the edges inward, the way his skin had gone from blue to white to a translucent grey that showed the shadows of bones beneath.

He was giving himself to the door. Pouring his heat, his energy, his life into the binding that held it closed. And the binding was working. Behind that door, the students he’d been evacuating were still moving through the corridor, still heading for the far exit, still alive because one man had decided to stand between them and the dark.

“Sim! Let go! You have to let go!”

He looked at me.

Through the frost on his eyelashes, through the rime of ice that was forming on his lips, his eyes found mine. And in them I saw no fear, no regret, no anger at the unfairness of a universe that asked this price of gentle people.

I saw peace.

The peace of a man who has found the one thing he can do and is doing it.

“Almost,” he said. His voice was a whisper, barely audible over the groaning of the door and the hungry silence pressing from beyond. “Almost… through. The students. They’re almost… through.”

“Then let someone else hold the door. Sim, please---”

“Can’t.” He smiled. It was a terrible smile---blue-lipped, frost-covered, the smile of a man whose body was dying around him. “The binding… it’s tied to me. If I let go… it collapses. And they’re still… twenty feet…”

I reached for his hand. The one nearest me, the right one, pressed flat against the door. His skin was ice. Not cold like ice. Ice. The moisture in his flesh had crystallized, and when my fingers touched his, the contact sent a shock of cold through me that reached all the way to my heart.

“I can take the binding,” I said. “Transfer it to me. I can---”

“No.” His eyes were clear. Clearer than they should have been, given what was happening to his body. “You need… the texts. The seals. You’re the one who… can fix this. All of this.” A breath. A shuddering, thin, terrible breath. “I’m just… holding a door.”

“You’re dying!”

“Everybody dies.” Another breath. Thinner. “This way… it counts.”

The door shuddered. The wrongness behind it surged, and Sim’s body arched against the oak, every muscle rigid, every tendon visible through skin that had become translucent as glass. I heard something crack---not the door, not the stone, something inside him. Something fundamental breaking under a strain it was never designed to bear.

And then, distantly, from the far side of the building---a shout. Voices. The sound of the far exit opening and students pouring out into the night, free and alive and running.

Sim heard it.

Something shifted in his face. The pain didn’t leave---it couldn’t leave, not with what was happening to him---but it settled. Became bearable. The way a weight becomes bearable when you understand why you’re carrying it.

His lips moved. No sound came. But I could read the shape of the word on his frost-covered mouth.

Good.

One last breath. A shudder that moved through him like a wave through ice. And then the terrible rigidity left his body all at once, the way tension leaves a bowstring when it breaks.

His eyes began to dim.

And then---voices. Footsteps, heavy and urgent, echoing through the corridors. A light, not the cold luminescence of the breach but warm and orange, the light of a sympathy lamp turned to full strength.

“Cyphus take it! Hold on, Re’lar!”

Kilvin. His enormous frame filled the corridor behind us, Elxa Dal at his shoulder, both of them running with the desperate speed of men who have just felt the foundations of their world crack beneath them. Kilvin had something in his hands---a device from the Fishery, something I’d never seen, all copper coils and spinning glass that hummed with contained energy.

“Get him away from the door,” Elxa Dal shouted. “The seal is reasserting---the breach is closing. If he’s still linked when it snaps shut---”

I didn’t need to hear the rest. I grabbed Sim’s shoulders and pulled.

The binding fought me. It had wound itself through him, threaded into his blood and his bones and the fundamental architecture of his body, and pulling him away was like trying to separate a flame from its fuel. Sim screamed---a thin, cracked sound that barely made it past his frozen lips---and for a terrible moment I thought I would tear him apart trying to save him.

Then Kilvin was there, pressing the copper device against the door, and the humming became a roar, and I felt the binding shift---transferring, not to me, not to Sim, but to the device itself, which drank the energy like a parched man drinks water. The copper coils glowed white. The glass spheres shattered one by one, and Kilvin held on with his bare hands, absorbing through his artificing what his student had been absorbing through his body.

Sim’s hands slid from the door.

He fell. Not the gentle slumping of a man who has given up, but the sudden, total collapse of a body that has been held upright by nothing but will and is now, finally, allowed to stop.

I caught him.

He weighed nothing. He weighed everything.

Sim was not dead.

But he was so close to dead that the difference was academic. His skin was grey-blue, the color of lake ice in winter. Frost still clung to his eyelashes and the corners of his mouth. His breathing was so shallow that I had to press my ear to his chest to hear it---a thin, reedy whisper of air, the sound a bellows makes when it’s nearly flat.

His hands were the worst. Both of them, pressed flat against that door for however long it had been---minutes that felt like hours---had gone past cold into something else. The skin was white, waxy, rigid. Frostbite so deep that the tissue beneath had crystallized.

Elxa Dal knelt beside us. His face was grim. He put two fingers to Sim’s neck and held them there for a long time.

“Alive,” he said. “Barely. We need Arwyl. Now.”

“Already sent for,” Kilvin said. His hands were burned from the copper device, red and blistered, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at the door. At the thin line of dark that still showed around its edges, the last trace of what had tried to come through. “The boy held it. By himself.” His voice carried something I had never heard from Kilvin before. Awe. “No artificing. No schema. He used his own body as a thermocouple and held it.”

“He used himself as a source,” Elxa Dal said quietly. “Channeled his own heat into the binding. That’s not sympathy, Kilvin. That’s---”

“I know what it is.” Kilvin’s eyes were bright. “That is what it is.”

Fela arrived at a run.

She must have broken free from Wil. Must have crossed the bridge, driven by something stronger than fear or reason or the gentle restraint of a friend trying to protect her from what she already sensed.

She fell to her knees beside me. Beside him.

She touched his face. His grey-blue, impossibly still face. She touched his hair, his hands---and flinched at the cold of them, at the waxy rigidity of the frostbitten skin.

“Is he---”

“Alive,” I said. “He’s alive, Fela.”

The sound she made was not a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of someone who has been holding their breath for so long that the exhale contains everything---fear, love, rage, relief, and beneath it all a grief-in-advance, the knowledge that she had come within a heartbeat of losing him and that the world would never feel entirely safe again.

She pulled his head into her lap. Cradled him. Whispered things I couldn’t hear and didn’t try to.

Master Arwyl came with two medica students and a stretcher.

They worked with quiet efficiency---checking Sim’s pulse, his breathing, the extent of the frostbite. Arwyl’s face was professionally composed, but I saw his eyes widen when he examined Sim’s hands, and I saw the look he exchanged with Elxa Dal. The look that said: he may keep his life, but the hands are another matter.

They lifted him onto the stretcher. Fela walked beside it, one hand on Sim’s shoulder, her face set with the particular determination of someone who has decided that if the world wants to take this person from her, the world will have to come through her first.

I watched them carry him toward the Medica. In the moonlight---the moonlight Sim always insisted had special properties---his face looked peaceful. Like he was sleeping.

He was alive. He was alive, and the students were alive, and the door was sealed again, and everything that mattered had been saved.

I told myself that was enough. That the sick, hollow feeling in my chest was just fear draining away. That the shaking in my hands was just the cold.

I almost believed it.

Wilem stood at the edge of the courtyard.

His face was stone. His hands were shaking.

“He’s alive, Wil.”

“I know.” His voice was flat. Controlled. The voice of a man who calculates odds and knows that alive and whole are not the same thing. “We should go. The horses are still waiting.”

He was right. We had the texts. We had Devi’s plan. And the breach, though contained, had shown us what was coming. The seals were failing. The four-plate door would open again, and next time there might be no gentle young man brave enough to hold it shut.

Devi appeared at the bridge, satchels on her shoulders.

“The boy?” she asked.

“Alive,” I said. “In the Medica.”

She nodded. Something shifted in her face---not relief, exactly, but a loosening. As if she’d been holding a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

“Then we go,” she said. “Now. Before Ambrose’s people realize the breach didn’t kill us all.”

I looked back toward the Medica one last time. Somewhere inside, Sim was breathing. Shallow, thin, barely-there breaths that could stop at any moment. His hands might never hold a flask again. He might never play cards again, or argue about moonlight, or hold Fela the way he used to---casually, easily, as if the world would always allow them this.

But he was breathing.

That was the first time I almost lost Simmon. It would not be the last.

The horses were where Devi had arranged them. We mounted in silence---me, Wil, Devi. Fela had refused to leave. She was staying at the Medica until Sim woke, and nothing any of us said could change her mind. I didn’t try hard.

We rode south in silence. The road unspooled before us in the moonlight, and the world was quiet in the particular way it’s quiet after something enormous has happened---not peaceful, not calm, but exhausted.

I rode and I thought about Simmon.

About what it had cost him. About the binding he’d woven from his own body heat, his own life. About the look in his eyes when he’d told me he couldn’t let go of the door.

About how close it had been. How the space between alive and dead had been measured in seconds---the seconds it took Kilvin to reach the door, the seconds it took for the copper device to absorb the binding. A minute later and Sim’s heart would have stopped. Thirty seconds and there would have been nothing for Arwyl to save.

I had almost lost the best person I knew because I hadn’t been there. Because I’d been on the other side of the courtyard, carrying texts, doing the important work, while Sim stood alone between the darkness and the innocent.

I swore, riding through the moonlight, that I would not let that happen again. That the next time something terrible came for the people I loved, I would be strong enough to stop it.

It was the kind of oath a young man makes when he is afraid and grieving and doesn’t understand that strength is not the same thing as control.

I would learn the difference. Eventually. At a cost that makes Sim’s frostbitten hands look like a mercy.

PRESENT DAY — WAYSTONE INN

Kvothe paused.

Not the dramatic pause of a storyteller. The real kind. The kind where a man’s voice simply runs out of whatever fuel keeps it burning.

Chronicler waited. Bast was very still.

“He survived,” Kvothe said. “Sim survived the University. The hands healed---mostly. Arwyl was brilliant. There was nerve damage, scarring. He couldn’t do fine alchemy work anymore. But he could hold things. He could hold Fela’s hand.”

Another pause.

“He came south with us when he was well enough to travel. Fela brought him. He was thinner, quieter. The cold had taken something from him that Arwyl couldn’t name and couldn’t treat. But he came. Because that’s who Sim was. Because his friends were riding toward something terrible and he couldn’t bear to let them go alone.”

Bast leaned forward. “Reshi. What happened to him? After that?”

Kvothe picked up his cloth. Began wiping the bar in slow, mechanical circles.

“That,” he said quietly, “comes later.”

The silence settled.

And the story waited to continue.