Morning—if you could call this washed-out softness a morning—arrived shyly in the Grund. A thin, mossy light seeped from the seams of root and rock, turning every breath into a visible thing. The village stirred without drama: buckets lifted, cloth wrung, metal consulted and persuaded.
Breuk stood outside the hut and drew water from a basin with his right hand, the motion awkward until it wasn't. The empty sleeve was pinned neat. He had learned to lean his hip just so, to angle the wrist and pour without spilling. The work set a quiet pace inside him, a beat he could hold.
Jakk passed with two wicker baskets slung across his shoulders—fat with pale fungi, knotted roots, leaves that smelled like clean earth. He took Breuk in quickly, like a craftsman checking a joint.
"You're getting used to it," Jakk said.
Breuk nodded. The smallest smile, unpracticed, arrived and left. "You do what you have to."
Three kids rattled past, laughing, their bowls clinking with small, bright metal: washers, bolts, a spring that had become a toy simply by refusing its former job. A tired light—no sun, just the gray memory of one—skimmed their faces and made their eyes a brief gold.
He rarely thought of above anymore, the thought passed through him, not unkind. And when he did, it felt like a dream he couldn't parse, the kind that leaves the taste of a word you can't remember.
He set the basin down. The village exhaled. The day went on being itself.
It changed mid-gesture. Jakk had already dropped to a knee to cut a root when the air became directional. A hush didn't fall; it gathered. People unbent their backs and set tools down in the way you put a book away knowing you'll return to the same page. Heads turned toward a path that cut into darker ground.
Breuk watched the shift move through the village like a shadow learning to walk. "What's happening?"
Jakk rose, eyes narrowed, listening to a sound Breuk hadn't learned yet. He wiped his knife on his palm and tucked it away. "It's time," he said. "The Schlund is open today."
Breuk heard the capital letter. "The… what?"
Jakk gave a small tilt of chin toward a cleft where the roots burned into rock and rock gave up. "Come," he said. "You'll see."
They went without ceremony and made one anyway. A line formed at the path's mouth, unhurried, purposeful. People carried what they had and what they chose: a wrapped tool with its handle polished by years; a square of cloth embroidered with stubborn care; a figure carved from bone that hinted at a bird; a handful of screws bound with twine; a bowl of water carried by hands that didn't spill.
Breuk and Jakk joined the last third of the procession. The light thinned as if it had been decided for them. The floor sweated underfoot, slick with film where moss dreamed of becoming carpet. The air smelled like wet iron and sleeping stone.
"What is this place?" Breuk whispered, because it felt like a place that wanted whispering.
"The Schlund," Jakk said. He didn't slow, didn't speed. "Where everything goes that falls."
They walked along a wall that had once been the inside of a pipe and now was just a dark with a memory of smooth. The sound arrived before the sight: a deep, steady pulse that pretended to be breath the way a factory pretends to be a field. It was too regular to be animal, too warm to be only machine. Breuk felt it through the soles of his feet and then behind the breastbone, as if it knew where to knock.
The path widened. The village's voices fell behind as the sound took up more room.
Then the ground broke like a sentence that runs out of words.
The Schlund ate the world from the inside. It was not a pit; pits have bottoms and the sense of having been made. This was a rift that existence forgot to stitch, an opening that drank light and folded it inward. The far side, if there was one, had learned how to be beyond. The air leaned into it. The pulse came up in patient waves.
The village arranged itself along the rim with the practiced ease of people who had always known where to stand at a chasm. No one stepped foolishly close. No one kept foolish distance. They held their offerings the way you hold a child who is leaving and will not be stopped.
One by one, they gave. A wrench kissed once by thumb and gone. A little bone bird that knew a child's sleep, turned gently in a palm, then released. Cloth, folded with the dignity of a table that remembers Sundays. A bowl of water poured over the edge, the stream bright for a second, then erased. There were no prayers you could hear. The silence did the work words used to do before they grew lazy.
Breuk stood among them, breath shallow without meaning to be. He looked down. The dark did not look back. The pulse measured him, and for a moment it seemed to shift—like a listener leaning closer, like a metronome that changes tempo because someone has entered the room.
It's… breathing?
The old man from the fire took his place beside Breuk as if he had been drawn there. He watched Breuk's face watch the dark. "The Schlund takes what it wants," he said, without reverence, without challenge. "We give what we have."
"Why?" Breuk asked, and his own voice sounded like a clumsy tool.
"So it forgets us," the old man said, and smiled a small, tired smile that didn't ask for understanding.
A woman stepped forward and emptied her bowl. A child set his little coil of wire at the lip with both hands and nudged it over like a ship christening itself. The pulse kept time. The air went on being a wall and a path and a law.
The line thinned. The rim breathed out people the way a tide returns a beach. Jakk stayed, eyes on the dark, the set of his mouth the kind you wear at funerals and weddings—important faces that refuse to decide which one they are.
"And if someone jumps in?" Breuk asked, because he had to.
Jakk looked at him then, not unkind. "Then you're the offering," he said. "And the Schlund remembers you. Always."
Breuk's chest tightened at the word remembers. He felt suddenly, sharply, the disc at his breast, cold as opinion, pressing its round into bone. He let his palm flatten over the pocket as if to keep a bird from flying.
The pulse thickened for a heartbeat. Or Breuk imagined it did. The ground seemed to move under him—no, not move: agree. He stared into the dark until his eyes invented shapes and then punished him for believing them.
Maybe that's the way up, he thought, and the thought was crazy enough to feel clean. A place that swallowed everything might spit something out. A law might permit the exception that knows how to ask. A wall made of air might have a seam if your lungs were stubborn enough.
The old man turned away, pipe already finding the exact pocket it wanted. Jakk did not move until the last of the water had disappeared and the last of the small bone birds had become a story the dark would keep.
They walked back slower because leaving is a different verb than going. People spoke softly, not to hush each other but because words still had to climb out of the pulse. Some touched the rock as they passed it, a gesture without superstition, like checking a door was shut.
In the village, the day resumed. A child laughed. A pot refused to boil and then did. A woman shook a cloth and turned it into wind.
Jakk set the baskets down and rubbed a thumb over a rusted edge until it remembered to be smooth. "You look like someone who learned a new word and hates it," he said.
"What happens if you don't give," Breuk said.
Jakk shrugged. "We always do."
"Because it works?"
"Because we're still here," Jakk said. "Maybe that's the same thing."
Breuk had no answer that didn't turn into a knife in his mouth. He found the basin again and lifted water he didn't need to lift, just to feel the weight deciding harder in his hand. The empty sleeve tugged at his side, a small gravity of its own.
That night the fire seemed lower. The stew held a different quiet. The old man did not tell a story. The children slept early, as if the pulse had tired them out. Breuk listened to the Grund hum and thought of the Schlund and the word remembersand the way the necklace had said Not yet during his fall.
If the Schlund forgets them when they give, he thought, what happens if it remembers me because I take?
The question found a chair in him and sat. It did not argue. It did not reassure. It waited.
Later, alone at the edge platform, he threw a screw up into the dark and watched it reach the seam where air becomes law. It hung. It thought. It came back.
He caught it, and the catch felt like a bargain.
He closed his fist around the screw and stared up until the far coin of light burned his eyes and then left its ghost there. The pulse of the Schlund answered in his feet. The necklace answered in his sternum. Two clocks. One war.
He did not decide. He didn't know how to live with a decision this big while his body still remembered how the pump-line wanted to sing under his palm. He only breathed and let both clocks keep their time inside him.
Behind him, the Grund slept like a place that trusts its own night. Before him, the Schlund waited like a god that had learned to be patient. Between them stood a man with one arm, a secret, and too much belief for his own peace.