Chapter 89: Auri’s Path

AURI KNEW THE way.

Not the way a guide knows a path — memorized, mapped, reduced to landmarks. She knew it the way a river knows its course. Instinctively. In her blood.

She stood at the edge of a clearing and tilted her head, listening to something neither Wil nor I could hear.

“Here,” she said. And stepped between a birch tree and an oak.

And vanished.

“Auri!” I lunged forward. My fingers met resistance — not solid, not liquid, but something between. Like pressing against the surface tension of the world.

Her head reappeared, hair drifting around her face as if she were underwater.

“Come on. Hold hands, so you don’t get separated. The between-places don’t like to keep groups together.”

I took Wil’s hand. He looked at me.

“If this kills me,” he said, “I want you to know that I’m going to be very angry.”

She pulled us through.

The between-places were not a place.

They were the gaps between places. The margins. The spaces that exist in the moment between turning a page and seeing what’s written on the next one. Auri had found a way to stretch those fractions into hours. Into something you could walk through.

We stepped into a forest of silver trees. Silver in their nature — the trunks the color of polished coin, singing when the wind touched them, a high, clear sound like crystal bells. The leaves were translucent, and through them I could see the shadows of things moving on the other side.

“Don’t look at the shadows,” Auri said. “They’re not shadows. They’re the other sides of things — possibilities, futures that didn’t happen, pasts that were forgotten.”

I failed to look away. A version of myself that had never left Tarbean — older, thinner, with dead eyes. A version of Denna who had never met me, smiling a practiced smile in a silk dress.

“Kvothe,” Auri said gently. “Don’t. They’re echoes. Reflections in a mirror that was never made.”

The forest gave way to a bridge arching over nothing — a void that was not dark, not light, not any color or absence of color. Simply empty. The bridge hummed with a frequency too low to hear but right to feel in the soles of your feet.

“Don’t step off the bridge,” Auri said. “There’s nothing underneath to catch you. You become a possibility. Something that might have been but wasn’t.”

I looked down, despite her warning.

The void looked back. Not hostile. Not welcoming. Just not-there — and the not-thereness created a kind of gravity. Not physical. Existential.

What if you stopped existing? the nothing asked.

I tore my eyes away. Behind me, Wil muttered something in Cealdish. A prayer, I think. Or a curse. With Cealdish, it’s sometimes the same thing.

After the bridge, a room. Walls made of frozen moments — a sunrise, a spoken word, a first kiss, a last breath. The floor was made of names — not written, not spoken, but the essence of names, raw material from which all naming draws. The ceiling was every sky that had ever existed, layered like sheets of painted glass.

“The underpinning,” Auri said, walking through with the familiarity of someone in their own kitchen. “This is what’s underneath everything. Names and moments and the spaces between them.”

She turned to face me, and in the light of a million simultaneous suns, she was luminous. The hesitant girl from the University rooftops was gone, replaced by something that moved through these impossible spaces with the authority of a queen.

“Broken things can be mended, Kvothe,” she said, taking my left hand. The broken one. “Not fixed. Mended. There’s a difference.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Fixing means making something the way it was. But some things were changed by the breaking, and the breaking is part of them now. Trying to force them back into old shapes just breaks them again.” She squeezed my hand. The trembling calmed, just slightly, as if the names in the floor recognized the names in her. “Mending means making something the way it needs to be. Accepting the breaks. Finding the shape the broken thing wants to become.”

I stood in the room of names and felt something shift inside me. Not a healing. A settling. Like the last grain of sand finding its place in the hourglass.

The breaking wasn’t punishment. It was transformation.

I didn’t believe that. Not fully. Not yet. But I held the possibility, the way you hold a seed.

We stepped through a doorway of nothing and into a meadow that was green and gold and smelled of grass and distance. Real grass. Real distance. A normal sun in a blue sky.

Auri stumbled. I caught her — lighter than she should have been, face pale and drawn.

“The real world is very loud,” she said, pressing her hands to her temples. “After the between-places.”

I held her while the world settled. Wil stood nearby, wearing the particular expression of a man who has walked through impossible places and is dealing with it the Cealdish way: filing it for later analysis.

“Where are we?” he asked.

The meadow sloped toward a valley — farmland, scattered homesteads, and at the center, where two dirt roads crossed, a cluster of buildings that might generously be called a village.

“South of the Eld,” I said. “Far south.”

“We’ve traveled hundreds of miles in a day.”

“The between-places don’t have distance,” Auri said, recovering. “They have connections. This place corresponds to where we started because both places are thin.”

I reached for my naming sense. What remained was barely enough. But enough.

The crossroads was a place of convergence. Where the fabric of reality had been worn thin by centuries of travelers and bargains.

“A waystone,” I said.

“Yes.” Auri closed her eyes. Listened. Smiled. “The village is called Newarre. Its name means ‘nowhere’ in a language no one remembers. A place that isn’t a place. A name for no-name.” She opened her eyes. “It’s been waiting for you, Kvothe. For a very long time.”

I looked down at the valley. At the tiny buildings. At the crossroads where two paths met in the middle of nothing important, going nowhere in particular.

Newarre. Nowhere. The perfect hiding place for a man becoming no one.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked down the hill toward the inn. Toward the end of everything I had been, and the beginning of everything I was about to become.