Outside

He watched The Detective closely. The man had been on the trail far too fast, and the fact that he was on it at all suggested that someone was behind him. Someone was backing him. All he needed to find out was whom. How could he have missed it? Of course he would have missed it. The Detective had not been one of the key players. But now that he was here, maybe his position on the board had changed. It was as if a pawn had been promoted. He made a mental note to keep a screen on for The Detective at all times. To keep an updated file. Find out more.

He had let the man go. Maybe he was an idiot. Maybe he had stumbled onto this by accident. He could not be sure. But the trail was so hard and so long that it was not possible to accidentally enter a site. Hūr did. Hūr was meant to. So of course Hūr did. It had been written. The problem as he saw it was that no one knew everything, and everyone was playing on different sides. If only he could sit down and pick the minds of the three. He often yearned for that. They would know. But they were not friends any longer. And a lot had changed since they had first found the legend.

Water dripped slowly onto the natural crevice below, the one that seemed endless, just as the water did. The cavern smelled of home now. The ground was as natural to him as any carpet he had had in any home he had lived in, if anything, even more so now. The rock formations, he knew them all. He knew each nook and cranny. He sighed, he had been here a while. How much longer would it be? He caught himself as he thought the thought. This was necessary. He did not need to know. He would be here forever, until he died, as long as was necessary, He needed to be here.

He wondered what the outside felt like. Was it like the sunny cloudy days of his youth. He knew what it looked like. To look at it through a screen was one thing, to live through it was another. The thought of the feeling of grass under his feet made the ground here feel like dust, like ash. The smell of flowers, and of winds carrying all scents from everywhere. The feeling of wind, fresh wind, no, outside wind. He had drafts here, they flew in from tunnels that opened out to the outside, but instead of winds being carried through open maws on the surface of the earth, what about winds as felt directly on the land. He sighed. It was heavy, deep, full of melancholy. The sounds. Birds chattering, the murmur of people. Again, through a screen, he could experience those, but it was not the same. It never was. It had been almost three decades, would be three decades in three days, since he had been outside.