Chapter 94: Building the Chest

I BUILT THE chest the way you build a coffin for someone you love.

Slowly. With care. With the knowledge that every joint and every seam is a promise: this will hold. This will last. This will keep safe the thing you cannot bear to lose but cannot bear to keep.

The idea had been growing for months. Not as a plan — planning requires the kind of forward-looking energy that I no longer possessed. More like a pressure, building behind my eyes, in the hollow of my chest, in the trembling fingers of my left hand. A need that didn’t announce itself in words but in the particular ache of something unfinished, the way a wound aches when the air changes.

I needed to put things away.

Not metaphorically. Not in the gentle sense of letting go or moving on or any of the other comfortable euphemisms people use for the act of surrender. I mean literally. I needed a place — a physical, lockable, inviolable place — where I could put the last remaining pieces of who I used to be and close the lid and walk away.

The idea came to me one night while I was lying in bed, not sleeping, listening to the silence of the Waystone breathe around me. I was thinking about the Lackless box. About Roah wood and copper and the ancient art of building containers that were more than containers — vessels of containment, architectures of sealing, objects whose purpose was not to store but to hold, in the deepest sense of the word.

The Lackless box had held a piece of the moon. I remembered the weight of it in my hands — dense, impossible, vibrating with a frequency that was not quite sound. The wood had been Roah, black as deep water, hard as stone, worked with techniques that predated the University by millennia.

I knew those techniques now.

Not because anyone had taught me, but because the knowledge had seeped into me the way water seeps into limestone — slowly, through channels too small to see, over a period so long that the process was invisible until it was complete. My months with the Lackless box, my time in the Fae, my study of the Yllish knots and the naming of things that are not things — all of it had accumulated into a kind of understanding that was less like knowledge and more like instinct.

I could build a box.

No. Not a box. A chest. Something larger. Something worthy of what it would hold.

Something final.

The Roah wood was the hardest part.

Roah trees grow in only three places in the world: the deep forests of Modeg, the highland valleys of the Tahl, and a single grove on the western edge of the Eld that has been ancient since before the Creation War. The wood is black, dense, and nearly indestructible — it doesn’t burn, doesn’t rot, doesn’t warp with moisture or crack with age. It absorbs light the way a sponge absorbs water, and when polished, its surface has a depth that tricks the eye into believing it goes down forever, like looking into a well at midnight.

I couldn’t go to Modeg. I couldn’t go to the Tahl. I certainly couldn’t venture into the Eld, where every road was watched and every stranger was a potential Kingkiller.

But I knew a man who knew a man who had a brother in the timber trade. And I knew that Roah, while rare, was not impossible to obtain if you were willing to pay a price that would make a reasonable person weep.

I paid it.

The wood arrived on a cart, wrapped in oilcloth, carried by a teamster who handled the planks with the reverent caution of a man transporting relics. Four pieces, each one cut from the same tree — I’d insisted on that, and paid extra for the insistence. A chest made from a single tree has a unity that a chest of mixed stock can never achieve. The grain aligns. The density is consistent. The wood remembers being one thing, and that memory gives the finished piece a structural integrity that no amount of joinery can replicate.

I unwrapped the planks in the workshop behind the inn — a space I’d been converting, slowly, from a storage shed into something more useful. I ran my hands along the wood.

Black. Smooth. Heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weight and everything to do with presence. Roah wood doesn’t just sit in a room — it changes the room. Pulls the eye. Shifts the atmosphere. Makes everything around it seem slightly less real, slightly less substantial, as if the wood itself is the most genuine thing present and everything else is just a sketch.

“Beautiful,” Bast said, from the doorway. He’d been watching, keeping his distance. The iron tools in the workshop made the space uncomfortable for him. “What are you making?”

“A chest.”

“For what?”

I didn’t answer.

He watched a moment longer, then left. The Fae understand ritual objects. They understand the making of things that are more than things. He knew what I was doing even if I hadn’t explained it, the way you know a funeral when you see one even if no one has told you someone died.

I began with the bottom.

In woodworking, as in most things, the foundation determines everything that follows. A warped bottom will torque the sides, stress the joints, create tensions in the structure that will propagate upward until the entire piece is compromised. I have seen master carpenters spend more time on the bottom of a cabinet than on all the visible surfaces combined, because they understood that what you can’t see is more important than what you can.

The bottom piece was eighteen inches by thirty, three inches thick. I planed it by hand — not with a machine, not with sympathy, not with any tool that didn’t require the direct, sustained application of my own effort. The plane moved across the Roah in long, slow strokes, each one removing a shaving so thin it was almost transparent, a curl of black that fell away like a whispered secret.

The wood resisted. Roah always resists. It’s the densest wood in the world, and working it is like working iron — you don’t shape it so much as negotiate with it, persuading each fiber to accept the form you’re offering, convincing the grain that this new configuration is not a violation but a fulfillment of what it was always meant to be.

I worked for hours. The sun moved across the workshop floor in a slow arc, marking time in a way I’d stopped marking it myself. My arms ached. My shoulders burned. Sweat collected at my temples and fell onto the wood, where it was absorbed instantly — Roah drinks moisture the way the Waystone’s walls drink sound.

By evening, the bottom was flat. Not merely level — flat in the way that only hand-planed surfaces can be, with a texture that catches the light in a thousand tiny variations, each one the signature of a single stroke, a single moment of attention.

I ran my fingers across it and felt the smoothness and felt, beneath the smoothness, the particular quality of Roah that makes it different from every other wood: a vibration. Not physical — you couldn’t measure it with instruments, couldn’t detect it with sympathy. But there, in the way that the color of a sound is there, or the shape of a smell. A resonance that spoke of depth, of permanence, of a patience so vast that human lifetimes were merely incidents within it.

I set the bottom aside and began on the sides.

The joinery took a week.

I used a technique I’d seen in the Lackless box — a compound miter that interlocked the pieces without nails or screws or any metal fastener. The angles were precise to tolerances that would have made Kilvin proud: sixteenths of a degree, measured not with instruments but with the naked eye and the particular spatial awareness that comes from years of training the mind to see what is rather than what seems to be.

Each joint required hours of fitting. Cut, test, adjust. Cut, test, adjust. The pieces mated slowly, reluctantly, each one resisting the union until the angle was so perfect that resistance became impossible and the two surfaces came together with a soft, decisive click — the sound of something finding its home.

I did not use glue. Glue is compromise. It fills gaps, masks imprecision, hides the places where the craftsman’s skill fell short of the wood’s demands. I wanted no gaps. No imprecision. No hiding. Each joint would hold by the perfection of its fit and nothing else.

The sides went up. The ends followed. The chest took shape on my workbench like an argument being assembled, each piece supporting the next, each angle reinforcing the one opposite, until the whole structure was held together by nothing but geometry and the stubborn unwillingness of Roah wood to be anywhere other than exactly where it had been put.

Bast watched from the doorway on the fourth day.

“You’re not using any binding,” he said. “No nails, no glue, no sympathetic links. Just wood against wood.”

“Just wood against wood.”

“It won’t hold. Not long-term. Wood moves with moisture, with temperature, with time. Without fasteners—”

“Roah doesn’t move.”

He was quiet. Then: “You’re right. I forgot. Roah is… different.”

“Roah is the only wood in the world that is more stable than stone. It doesn’t expand, doesn’t contract, doesn’t respond to the environment at all. It exists in a state of permanent equilibrium.” I fit the last side piece into place. The click was louder this time — the sound of something completing, something becoming whole. “That’s why I chose it.”

“Because it doesn’t change.”

“Because it can’t change. Whatever goes inside this chest will stay inside this chest, unaltered, unchanged, for as long as the wood endures. And Roah endures.”

“How long?”

I looked at the chest. At the black surfaces catching light and holding it, at the joints so tight they were invisible, at the object I was building to house everything I was surrendering.

“Longer than I will,” I said. “Longer than anyone will.”

The lid was a single piece.

I saved the best plank for it — the widest, the most consistent, the one with the grain running in lines so straight and so fine that they looked like they’d been drawn with a rule. I planed it to two inches thick and fitted it with hinges I’d forged myself from copper.

Copper, not iron.

Iron would have been stronger. Iron would have been more practical, more durable, more resistant to the wear that comes from opening and closing a lid over years and decades and centuries. But I chose copper for a reason that had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with what the chest was for.

Iron repels the Fae. It disrupts their glamour, weakens their power, burns their skin. An iron-bound chest is a fortress against the Fae — nothing of their world can pass through it, nothing of their nature can touch what’s inside.

Unworked copper conducts. But copper worked with inverse patterns — with silence-binding — becomes an absorber rather than conductor, the way a mirror can both reflect and trap light depending on its backing. Copper absorbs the resonance that naming requires — the sympathetic frequency that links a name to the thing it names. A copper box is a dead zone for naming, a place where words lose their power and names lose their meaning.

I needed both.

But not yet. Not for the hinges, which were merely functional, which needed only to allow the lid to rise and fall with a smoothness worthy of the rest of the construction. For the hinges, copper was sufficient.

I set them with care, drilling pilot holes by hand, threading the pins with a precision that left no play, no wobble, no looseness of any kind. When I was finished, the lid rose on its hinges with the fluid grace of a wing unfolding — silent, smooth, inevitable.

I opened and closed it seven times.

Each time, the motion was identical. Each time, the seal between lid and body was perfect — airtight, light-tight, sound-tight. You could put a candle inside this chest and close the lid and the flame would die, not from lack of air but from the absolute finality of the closure.

I opened it an eighth time.

Looked inside.

The interior was dark Roah, unfinished, the raw wood exposed in all its black, lightless depth. It looked like looking into night itself — not the comfortable night of a bedroom with curtains drawn, but the primordial night that existed before stars, before fire, before anything that illuminated.

A space for keeping things that should not see the light.

I closed the lid.

The locks took longer than everything else combined.

Three locks. Each one different. Each one impossible.

The first lock was iron.

I forged it myself, working the metal in the small forge I’d built behind the workshop. I am not a blacksmith — have never been, will never be. My metalwork is the metalwork of an arcanist: precise, functional, ugly. I shaped the iron with hammer and tongs and quenching water, working it through three heats, drawing out the impurities, folding the metal until it was dense and homogeneous and ready to receive the pattern I was pressing into it.

The pattern was a binding. Not a sympathetic binding — those require a link between two things, and this lock was linked to nothing except itself. This was a more fundamental kind of binding: a naming binding, where the pattern inscribed in the iron was itself a kind of name.

The name of closure.

I didn’t speak it. I couldn’t speak it — the silence inside me had long since consumed my ability to name things aloud. But I could still think in names, the way a man who has lost his voice can still think in words. The pattern existed in my mind, and I pressed it into the iron with each stroke of the hammer, each fold of the metal, each moment of shaping.

When it was done, the lock was crude but functional — a black iron mechanism that seated into the front face of the chest and clicked home with a sound like a small door closing. The keyhole accepted no key. The mechanism responded to no pick. It would open only when the binding was released, and the binding would release only when the iron recognized something its name permitted.

What did it keep out? The Fae. Anything of the Fae realm — glamour, magic, the particular vibrancy that made Fae creatures more real than the world they walked through. The iron binding was a wall against all of it.

I tested it. Set a butterfly inside the chest — a small, amber-winged thing I’d caught in the garden. Closed the lid, engaged the lock. Then I asked Bast to open it.

He tried. For twenty minutes, he tried — with his hands, with his glamour, with every trick of Fae craft he possessed. The lock didn’t budge. Not because it was physically strong — though it was — but because the iron binding rejected his touch the way water rejects oil. His fingers slid off it. His will couldn’t find purchase. The lock existed in a space where the Fae simply weren’t allowed.

“Reshi,” he said, his voice strained. “What is this?”

“The first lock.” I opened the chest, released the butterfly. It flew away without looking back. “One of three.”

His face was a complicated thing to look at. Hurt, bewildered, fascinated, afraid — all of it moving across his features with the mercurial speed of Fae emotion, each feeling arriving fully formed and departing without transition.

“A lock against the Fae,” he said quietly. “Against me.”

“Against everything Fae. Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because what goes inside this chest must be protected from everything. Even you.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“Even me,” he repeated, and the sadness in his voice was so vast and so genuine that I almost — almost — reconsidered.

Almost.

The second lock was copper.

I worked it differently than the iron. Copper is a gentler metal, more forgiving, more willing to accept the shapes you offer it without the brutal insistence that iron demands. You can coax copper. You can suggest to copper. You can have a conversation with copper, if you know how to listen.

I knew how to listen. I had lost my ability to speak names, but I had not lost my ability to hear them. And copper has a name — not the deep, true name that Elodin would have sought, but a working name, a functional name, the name by which copper knows itself when no one is watching.

I used that name.

Not aloud. Inside. In the silent space where naming and silence coexisted in a truce so fragile that even thinking about it too directly might break it. I shaped the copper with my hands and my will and the ghost of the power I used to have, pressing into the metal a pattern that was the inverse of naming itself.

A silence-lock. A name-trap. A mechanism that absorbed the resonance of naming the way a sponge absorbs water, leaving the air around it dead and flat and empty of the invisible vibrations that make speaking names possible.

When it was done, the lock was beautiful. Not deliberately — I hadn’t been trying for beauty. But copper, when worked with attention and care, has a natural grace that reveals itself in the finished piece the way a melody reveals itself in the final bars of a song. The lock was warm-colored and intricate, its surface etched with patterns so fine they were barely visible, each one a sentence in the language of names-that-deny-naming.

I set it below the iron lock, where the two mechanisms overlapped without interfering. The chest now bore two faces: iron above, copper below. Strength and subtlety. Force and finesse. A lock against the Fae, and a lock against the namers.

Against me.

I tested it the way I’d tested the first — not with a butterfly, this time, but with a candle. I lit the candle, placed it inside the chest, closed the lid, engaged both locks. Then I tried to speak its name.

Nothing.

Not the silence of failure, where the name doesn’t come and you feel the absence like a missed step on a staircase. This was the silence of impossibility, where the place in your mind where names live is simply not there, where reaching for a word is like reaching for a glass that has been quietly removed from the shelf.

The copper lock had eaten the name.

I sat in my workshop and looked at the chest and felt something that might have been pride or might have been grief. It was difficult to tell the difference. Both are responses to the recognition that something is finished.

The third lock was neither iron nor copper.

The third lock was silence.

I know this sounds like mysticism. Like the kind of thing a storyteller says when they want to sound profound without actually meaning anything. But I am telling you the truth, as plainly as I can:

the third lock was made of silence.

Not the absence of sound. Not the metaphorical silence of a man who has chosen not to speak. The actual substance of silence itself — the Name I had spoken in Renere, the force that had killed Denna and the King and two hundred others, the power that was eating me from the edges inward.

I used it.

For the first time since Renere, I deliberately reached for the silence inside me and shaped it with intent. Not to destroy — destruction was what silence did when you let it run wild, when you failed to direct it, when you simply opened the door and let it pour through you like a river through a broken dam. This was different. This was controlled. This was silence used the way a sculptor uses a chisel — not to shatter but to carve.

I carved a lock.

Into the Roah wood, into the space between the iron and the copper, I pressed a pattern that was not a pattern. A shape that was not a shape. An absence that was more present than any presence, a void that was more solid than any substance.

The lock had no keyhole because silence has no key.

The lock had no mechanism because silence has no moving parts.

The lock existed — exists — in a dimension that is neither physical nor magical but something third, something that occupies the space where physics and magic overlap and cancel each other out, leaving only the raw, undifferentiated is of a thing that simply is what it is and cannot be anything else.

It would open only for Kvothe.

Not for Kote. Not for the innkeeper. Not for the red-haired man behind the bar with the trembling hand and the dead eyes and the polishing cloth that never stopped moving. It would open only for the full, complete, undeniable truth of who I was — the name that contained everything, the word that held the wind and the fire and the music and the silence and the love and the loss and every other ingredient in the complex, impossible, self-contradictory recipe that constituted Kvothe.

And Kvothe was leaving.

Day by day, piece by piece, like a sandcastle losing itself to the tide. The silence was taking him. The forgetting was taking him. The deliberate, sustained act of being ordinary was taking him. And someday soon — not today, not tomorrow, but soon — there would be nothing of Kvothe left. Just Kote. Just the innkeeper. Just the mask without a face beneath it.

When that day came, the third lock would be impassable.

Not because it was strong. Not because it was clever. But because the key it required would no longer exist.

I had built a trap for myself. A prison disguised as protection. A surrender disguised as prudence.

I knew this.

I did it anyway.

The night I finished the locks, I sat in my room and looked at the chest.

It was beautiful. I say this without vanity, because the beauty was not mine — it belonged to the Roah wood, to the copper, to the iron, to the silence that had shaped the final lock. I was merely the instrument, the hands through which the materials expressed what they had always been.

Black wood, polished to a depth that swallowed lamplight. Iron bands, dark and uncompromising, their binding patterns invisible but present. Copper inlays, warm against the black, their name-denying etchings catching the light in ways that made them seem to move. And between them, occupying no visible space, the third lock — a presence made of absence, a solidity made of nothing.

Three locks. Three doors. Three walls between me and everything I was.

“It’s time,” I said, to the empty room.

I went to the corner where the lute case sat.

I had not opened it since the night I’d looked at the lute and closed the case and fastened the clasps and walked away. That had been almost two years ago. The case was dusty now — a fine grey layer that testified to the passage of time and the failure of my cleaning habits in this one specific regard. I cleaned everything in the Waystone. Everything except this. As if by leaving the dust undisturbed, I could pretend the case and its contents occupied a different category of existence, one where the rules of maintenance and attention didn’t apply.

I opened the clasps.

The lute was unchanged. Of course it was — instruments don’t age the way people do. They don’t lose their beauty, their precision, their capacity for wonder. They simply wait, with the infinite patience of objects, for hands to return them to purpose.

My father’s lute. The instrument I’d carried through Tarbean, through the University, through the Fae, through everything. The physical expression of the longest love affair of my life — longer than Denna, longer than naming, longer than any other connection I’d forged in my short, violent, music-saturated existence.

I picked it up.

The weight was familiar. The shape was familiar. The way it settled against my body — my chest, my left arm, my right hand curling naturally toward the strings — was as familiar as breathing. More familiar. There had been times in my life when I’d forgotten how to breathe, but I had never forgotten how to hold a lute.

I didn’t play.

I held it, and I remembered.

My father’s voice, singing in the firelight. My mother’s laugh when he hit a wrong note, which was almost never. The way the Edema Ruh moved with music, the way every wagon and every campfire and every mile of road was accompanied by a song, because the Ruh understood what most people forget: that music is not something you do. It is something you are.

I had been music.

Now I was silence.

I placed the lute inside the chest.

It fit perfectly. Not because I’d built the chest to its dimensions — I hadn’t. But because the chest was Roah, and Roah accommodates. The wood seemed to adjust itself around the instrument, cradling it the way a hand cradles a bird, with just enough pressure to hold and not enough to harm.

The lute lay in the dark interior and gleamed faintly — the pale wood warm against the black, the strings catching light from the room above and throwing it back in thin, silver lines.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I placed the shaed on top of it.

The shaed was Felurian’s gift.

A cloak of shadow, woven from the stuff of twilight itself, imbued with Fae magic so deep and so old that even the most powerful namers in the mortal world would struggle to understand its construction. When I wore it, I was part of the darkness — not invisible, but indistinguishable, the way a shadow is indistinguishable from the darkness that surrounds it.

I had not worn it since Renere. Had not even unfolded it since arriving at the Waystone. It had been packed in my bag, wadded carelessly — an object of immense power treated with the disregard of a man who no longer valued power, who had come to see his own capabilities as liabilities, as dangers, as the very things that had led him to destroy everything he loved.

I unfolded it now.

The fabric — if fabric is the right word for something that has no weight, no weave, no discernible structure — rippled between my fingers like dark water. It was cold. Not the cold of temperature but the cold of distance, of depth, of the vast spaces between stars where light travels for millennia and arrives exhausted.

I laid it over the lute. Shadow over music. Fae power over mortal art. Two surrenders, nesting inside each other, inside the dark Roah vessel I’d built to hold them.

The last thing I placed inside the chest was not an object.

It was a piece of myself.

I need you to understand what I mean by this, because the language fails me in ways I am not accustomed to. Language has always been my tool, my weapon, my most reliable ally. But what I did that night exists at the edge of language, in the territory where words become metaphors and metaphors become lies and only silence tells the truth.

The silence had been eating my name.

Not my common name — not Kvothe, not Kote, not the sounds that people used to get my attention. My true name. The deep name. The name that exists below language, below consciousness, below the threshold of what can be spoken or even thought. The name that is you, the irreducible essence of your selfhood, the pattern that makes you you and not someone else.

The silence was consuming it. Bit by bit, letter by letter — if letters can describe something that has no letters — it was dissolving the edges of who I was and replacing them with nothing. Each day, I was a little less Kvothe and a little more Kote, and the distance between the two names was the distance between a living man and his shadow.

But the process was not complete.

Fragments remained. Pieces of the deep name that the silence had not yet reached, that still flickered inside me like embers in ash. I could feel them sometimes, in moments of quiet, in the space between sleep and waking — bright, sharp, undeniably me in a way that Kote never was and never could be.

I gathered them.

Not with my hands. With my will, with the last remnant of the naming power that had once made me extraordinary. I reached inside myself and found the pieces — two of them, distinct and glowing, each one a fragment of the word that was my truest name.

These were fragments of the true name beneath Kvothe, the name that made me me. If that deep name could be written in letters, these would have been the core phonemes — the essential sounds that held my identity together. Not letters from my common name, but the fundamental resonances that made me Kvothe rather than anyone else.

I pulled them free.

It hurt.

Not the sharp hurt of a cut or the deep hurt of a blow, but the existential hurt of diminishment — the pain of becoming less. Of giving up a piece of yourself and knowing that the giving is permanent, that the piece will not grow back, that you will carry the absence of it for the rest of your life the way an amputee carries the absence of a limb.

The fragments glowed in my hands. Not visibly — there was no light, no heat, no physical manifestation of any kind. But I could feel them, warm and vibrant and alive, pulsing with the essence of the man I was choosing not to be.

I placed them inside the chest.

They settled into the darkness alongside the lute and the shaed, three surrenders nested together, three final acts of a man who was dismantling himself piece by piece and storing the pieces in a box he would never be able to open.

I closed the lid.

The click was quiet. The kind of quiet that is louder than any noise, because it is the sound of something ending, and endings are always louder than they have any right to be.

I engaged the first lock. The iron mechanism closed with a heavy, decisive thunk — the sound of a door slamming, of a gate falling, of a wall going up between two things that used to be one.

I engaged the second lock. The copper mechanism closed with a softer sound, a whisper, a sigh — the sound of a name being spoken for the last time, of a word losing its meaning, of a connection being severed so cleanly that you can’t even feel the cut.

I engaged the third lock.

Silence.

Not the absence of sound. The presence of it. The thick, heavy, suffocating presence of silence as a force, as a substance, as a thing with weight and texture and intention. It settled over the chest like a shroud, sealing the lid, sealing the locks, sealing everything inside in a darkness so complete that even the memory of light couldn’t penetrate it.

The chest was closed.

The locks were engaged.

And I was standing in my room in the Waystone Inn, and I was smaller than I had been a moment ago. Diminished. Reduced. A man with pieces missing, like a puzzle that someone has started to take apart and abandoned halfway through.

I looked at my hands.

My left hand was trembling worse than ever. The last two fingers were nearly numb, the sensation fading like sound fading into distance. The silence had been eating them for months, and now, with the fragments of my name removed and locked away, the eating would accelerate. The extremities would go first. Then the skills. Then the memories, maybe. Then the will.

Then everything.

I looked at the chest.

It sat in the corner of my room, black and solid and impenetrable, and it looked like nothing. A piece of furniture. A trunk. The sort of thing you’d find in any bedroom, holding blankets or clothes or the accumulated detritus of an unremarkable life.

But it held my music. My shadow. My name.

It held everything I’d been and everything I could have been, locked behind three barriers — one against the Fae, one against naming, one against myself.

The last great thing Kvothe ever made.

I went downstairs.

The common room was empty. It was late — long past closing, long past the hour when even the most dedicated drinkers surrendered to the demands of sleep. The fire had burned low, casting the room in the amber half-light that makes everything look old, and tired, and finished.

Bast was asleep in his room. I could hear him breathing in threes — in, hold, out — the rhythm of the Fae, the rhythm of someone who exists more completely than the world around him and breathes accordingly.

I walked to the bar.

Picked up the cloth.

And began to polish.

The motion was the same as always: clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise. The pressure was the same. The rhythm was the same. But the man making the motion was different, because the man making the motion was now, truly and completely, just a man. An innkeeper. A keeper of an empty building in an empty town, polishing a bar that no one would see, for reasons that no one would understand, in a silence that no one would break.

Kote.

The name settled over me like the third lock settling over the chest. Complete. Final. A sealing.

I polished the bar.

The silence of the Waystone breathed around me.

And somewhere upstairs, in a chest of Roah wood with three impossible locks, the lute sang in its sleep, and the shadow stirred in its darkness, and the fragments of my name glowed faintly in their prison, waiting for a key that would never come.

Or so I believed.

But belief, as I have learned, is a poor predictor of truth. And the universe has a particular fondness for proving believers wrong.

The chest would wait.

The locks would hold.

And I would stand behind my bar and polish the wood and serve the cider and be no one, be nothing, be the emptiness at the center of a building that was itself the center of nothing.

For now.

For a very long time.

But not forever.

Nothing, in the end, lasts forever.

Not even silence.