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John rides into Yazad's "preserve" after sundown — a modest thatched hut perched at the edge of a vast forest, fronted by orderly rows of orchard trees too tidy to be natural. Yazad explains that the land is not theirs; it has been entrusted to them by the midfather of Wellbury, the much-larger nearby town. The midfather, Wealdsig, is the reeve John is here to confront over Wyrm; Ealstan claims to know the man, but Ulric has already named Wealdsig as someone amenable to his side, which makes the whole prospect uneasy.

Ealstan eyes the dense, unworked woods past the orchard and remarks that they sit too close to the forest. Yazad waves it off — the Black Bear has shown no inclination to push this way. Sefawynn leads her horse past in silence, slumped and hollow-eyed; she has barely spoken in an hour. John, who has never lived without nanites to manage sleep for him, can only guess at how badly a sleepless night and a kidnapped brother have hit her.

Yazad cracks the hut's door and startles an elderly watchman — Leof — who tears up at finding Yazad alive. Yazad cheerfully recounts having tried to preach to the Hordamen and credits John and Sefawynn with his rescue, all in a whisper so as not to wake the dozen or so people sleeping around the firepit. Leof gawks at the aelv. Yazad slaps John on the shoulder, declares him harmless ("unless you're a boat"), and announces that in the morning he will pretend to have been here all along and act offended that no one noticed.

Leof takes their horses and squints at Sefawynn — she looks familiar — but lets her brush it off as a passing skop. The household's resident wight, he warns the aelv, is friendly enough; rarely sours the milk, once mended his shoes (and tucked a dead mouse inside as a signature). The party slips inside. Sefawynn and Ealstan drop onto hay pallets and sleep almost at once. John, who does not plan to sleep, settles by the hearth and gets to work on the handbook.

He pages through the FAQ, hoping for something on how interdimensional travel actually *works* — and finally finds a stub of an explanation that points him at Chapter 4.17 for the real detail. Chapter 4.17 is, of course, gone in the burn-damage to his pages. The one fragment he can recover from that whole section turns out to be a joke about marmosets. He sits back furious. The book has reams on which packages he could have bought, and nothing on the basic mechanics of being here.

That is when he notices the rocks. Five thumb-sized pebbles beside his pallet, arranged into a neat little pyramid. Unsettled, he flicks his foot through them — and goes back to reading just in time for Leof to come in, wake a boy and dispatch him to watch the horses, then settle into a stool by the door to peer out into the dark, glancing sidelong at the aelv between turns.

John gives up on the dimensional-travel section and dabbles in the etiquette pages instead, also useless. He pulls a half-burned stick from the fire and chews the charcoal end — his nanites run on ingested carbon, and a taste-bud hack pretends the stick is buttered toast. Leof catches him at it and panics; John, smug, holds up the pages as if scripture, then catches himself taunting the old man and recognises why. He is using the handbook to avoid thinking about the burning grass.

Physics. The one thing the book swears should be the same across dimensions — same gravity, same arithmetic, same entropy. Rocks should not spontaneously form into piles. He glances over. The five stones are back in their pyramid. He knocks them flat, dials up his skin temperature against a chill that turns out not to be the room's, and shuts his eyes. When he opens them, the pyramid has become a column — pebbles balanced on their edges, one atop the other, the sort of impossible stack that gets photographed on retreat blogs. He mutters, *show-off*. He has crossed over to believing it now, or so he tells himself, because the alternative is hallucinations.

Distantly, he wonders, half in earnest, whether he should try writing his name in charcoal on the floor — *just to see* — and then talks himself out of trying anything that would burn the hut down or invite a comic-book deity to throw lightning at him. He runs through a memory of Jen absently. He instructs his nanites to put him to sleep, in one last desperate hope that the morning will reset whatever is happening to him. He drifts off with the pebbles once again stacked neatly into a pyramid, as if to mock him.