The Place Between Worlds

The second morning in the world that was not his began before the sun rose. A smear of violet bruised the horizon while the rest of the sky held its breath, dark and endless. Vince sat beneath the same crooked tree at the village's edge, eyes open but unseeing. Sleep had come in brief, shallow waves, and never took him fully. He was too aware of himself, of the quiet around him, of the strangeness that curled like mist beneath his skin.

When light finally broke through the trees, he stood and began to walk.

Not with purpose, but not aimlessly either. He walked the length of the village like he was tracing the perimeter of a prison yard, mapping the edges of a new cage. Each step pressed into damp soil, and with each step, he took in what surrounded him — not with curiosity, but with calculation.

The village was quiet still. Smoke coiled lazily from the low, circular huts. A few birds called from the treetops, but even that felt thin, half-hearted. Vince walked the same circuit twice before veering off toward the slope near the stream.

There, he slowed. The stream ran near the eastern edge, its water clear on the surface. But clarity meant nothing. He stood there a long while, watching. Two children splashed and washed a cloth in it, laughing, unaware. A few paces upstream, the same water carried away a pile of greyish muck — waste, most likely. He scanned the bank. No sign of filtration. No effort to protect the source. They were drinking from it. Washing, yes — but also fouling it.

He said nothing. Just noted it. A sharp mark in the ledgers of his mind.

The smell of decay drifted faintly from the left. Behind a row of overgrown shrubs, he found what passed for a refuse pit. A shallow depression in the dirt, barely dug. Scraps of bone, cracked pots, the remains of cloth and ash, all moldered in a wet, stinking heap. It was too close to everything else. The flies here were heavier. They lifted and settled in waves. Rats, bold and bloated, scattered when he approached.

He straightened, jaw tight, and turned away.

Each hut he passed was a breath away from collapse. The thatched roofs drooped unevenly, sagging where the supports had given way. The mud walls were cracked, weather-scabbed. The wood used to brace them was thin and brittle, already rotting at the joints.

Further in, the smoke from the central hearth stung his nose before he reached it. The villagers cooked on open fires inside the huts, without chimneys or windows. He saw the soot-blackened ceilings, the sharp smell of damp smoke clinging to everything like a second skin. Infants coughed in the arms of women squatting in doorways. The air inside these homes couldn't be safe. Not for children. Not for anyone.

And still—no one did anything about it. No one questioned it.

Vince kept walking.

Toward the outer huts, a man lay outside on a mat, coughing into a stained rag. Deep, guttural, the sound of something long-ignored. No one stood over him. No one offered aid. Vince lingered for a moment, not out of pity — he didn't believe in pity — but out of memory. He'd heard that cough before. In Naples, in the alleyways where mold grew in the cracks of stone, where winter clung to ribs like a second skeleton. He'd buried friends with lungs drowned in rot.

No medicine. No healer. 

Still farther along, he passed a girl seated near a doorway, idly scratching at her arm. The skin there was raw, red, patterned with small bites or welts. Parasites. Mites. Something that could spread. She looked up and saw him but said nothing. Just kept scratching. He moved on.

He noted the absence of storage. No pits dug deep to keep things cool. No racks to dry root or herb. No clay vessels sealed against moisture. They lived close to the edge. Closer than they realized.

No walls guarded the village. No trenches. No stakes or sharp rocks laid along the treeline. Nothing. The huts sat open to the woods as if daring the world to come and take them. He circled the edge again, this time slower. No perimeter guards. No warning signs. Not even a tied line of bells or shells. A nighttime raid would be easy. Fire could swallow this place before anyone woke.

He thought about how he would have taken it, in the old days. Three men. One with fire. Two with blades. No resistance. No strategy. Just screams and ash.

And yet, no one seemed afraid.

He stopped at a patch of bare earth, where the footprints of a child overlapped his own from the day before. It struck him, then, how fragile they all were. How trusting.

It was not ignorance. It was surrender. A life too long stripped of choice.

He sat for a while in the grass, listening to the forest. Leaves rustled. A crow cawed once, then fell silent.

He remembered the broken tenement near the harbor. The first time Elena had fallen ill. She'd cried through the night with heat in her skin and tremble in her hands. Lucia had rocked her gently, whispering prayers she no longer believed in.

Vince had carried her through the streets at dawn, knocking on doors, offering money, favors, threats — anything for medicine.

No one had opened their door. Not that day.

She had survived. Barely.

But the helplessness… he still wore it, like a scar beneath the ribs.

He rose. Walked again.

He stopped at the same crooked tree by dusk, the one where he'd begun that morning. The path had taken him in a full circle, but he hadn't walked for the sake of distance. He had walked to know. To see. And now he had.

The woman with the child passed by again. She glanced at him. He looked back.

Still, he said nothing.

This wasn't the day to act. Not yet.

That night, he sat alone near the edge, by the fireless ground. A cold wind stirred the ash. He whispered the names of the dead. Lucia. Elena.

This world had no place for echoes yet. Only the long, waiting silence.

But he had seen.

And he remembered everything.