Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SANORA
Before I left the house, I’d documented everything I’d come across since reaching Nimorran, including my encounter with Thrax, down to the messenger. I didn’t know if I’d survive this place, and if I didn’t, I wanted the only person I cared about to know what happened to me.
Everything I’d written had been copied into an email, scheduled to send to my mother the day after I was meant to leave. Just in case I never got the chance. But I hoped I did. I didn’t want her to read those things I wrote.
It was creeping towards evening when I walked into a small café and pleaded for the owner's presence.
My notebook rested beside a melting bowl of ice cream the owner had given me out of hospitality while I waited for her to get free.
Inside the notebook were scribbles and notes from my afternoon spent knocking on doors, asking questions about the deaths near The Crater.
A few had let me in. Most had slammed the door in my face, yelling like I was some kind of curse they didn’t want near their threshold. If they hated hearing about The Crater so much, why the hell were they still living right next to it?
So far, five people had spoken to me. Two out of impatience, and three with genuine effort, but they had told me things I already knew. Ten had shut me out though.
But who’s counting?
I looked up as the café owner approached, wiping her palms down her red apron. She offered a tired smile and took the seat opposite me. Her hair was scraped into a bun, a pair of glasses framing her kind eyes. Something about that gaze eased the tension in my shoulders.
She leaned in, resting her hands on the table. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes,” I said brightly, snapping my notebook shut. “Only if you’re comfortable, though. It’s totally fine if you’re not. I’m going to pack my things and leave, you just need to say the word. I can—”
“This is about The Crater, isn’t it?” Her brows pinched slightly.
My mouth fell open. “How’d you guess?”
She sighed, eyes scanning over my sunglasses, my face, my clothes—a sky blue tank top, with my jacket hanging on the chair, and a low-waisted pair of jeans.
“You don’t exactly look local. People don’t come here for vacation.
Not unless it’s for research.” She glanced at the table.
“And you’re sitting here with a notebook. ”
I grinned. “That was...uh, impressive,” I stumbled on my words, not knowing if to compliment her for being quick witted, or maybe I was just stupid because a kid would have guessed that, too. “Would you mind answering a few questions?”
She glanced at my notes, then back at me. After a pause, she gave a small nod.
Relieved, I flipped open the page. “How long have you lived here?”
“Since I was born.”
She looked like she was in her late fifties, maybe older. That was promising. I adjusted in my seat. “How many researchers have visited here in recent years?”
She let out a long breath, tapping her fingers on the table in thought. “Could’ve been more, but I’ve only heard of five groups in the past couple decades. Most people don’t come here again, this place used to be flooded with them back in my great-grandmother’s time.”
“Do you know why that changed?”
She shrugged. “How would I know? But I heard they kept getting the same results. There was nothing new to record. They lost interest and quickly got bored. Also, the world is evolving. Only a few youngsters are interested in the past. No one really cares about the history of this place.”
I gave a tight smile. “And...have you ever heard of a researcher not making it out?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, thoughtfully. “They usually came in groups with their...equipment. And they usually left the same way. I wouldn’t know if someone went missing among them.”
“By equipment, you mean...”
“Cameras,” she clarified.
I nodded. “Right...”
I looked down at my notes to ask the next question, but she cut in, voice quieter.
“But...twenty years ago, there was a little chaos in this town. A girl went missing.”
I picked up my pen, flipping the note to a new page. “How did she go missing? Can you elaborate? Please?”
“Well.” She sighed. “She went missing overnight.”
That made me pause for a second or two. “And?”
“Her team went wild searching. They knocked on doors, turned the place inside out. It was a mess.”
“Did they find her?”
She shook her head. “No. They left without her when the next train came.”
“Could you, maybe, provide more details about the girl? And the speculations that were roaming everywhere during that period?”
“I heard she was young. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-six.
One of her team said she went back to The Crater to retrieve something she’d lost during their visit earlier that day.
According to the team member, the thing had been a valuable piece from a dead friend and she didn’t want to lose it.
The other one had gone to sleep after trying to persuade her, and she had stubbornly gone to the hills that night. ”
“She went alone? She walked?”
“That’s what they said. But no one believed it. A young girl walking to those hills alone at night? They thought it was impossible. The team had rented three cars on getting here, and she had not taken any.”
“So they searched everywhere else but the hills.”
She nodded. “They eventually did when they didn’t find her here. But they didn’t go far since it gets chilly up there. They came back empty.”
I scribbled quickly, my thoughts turning cold. If she didn’t walk and didn’t drive, how did she get there? What was the thing she lost? What could have gone wrong that night?
Is it similar to mine?
“Was there anything strange that night? Anything out of usual? Like a sound or something?”
She drew in a long breath. “Not that I can remember. It’s been too long.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to push.”
“It’s alright.” She gave a small smile. “She wasn’t the first to go near that thing and not come back. The Crater’s swallowed plenty of people since its existence.”
“Do you think she died there?”
Another shrug. “There’s no crime in Nimorran. You want to be safe, stay away from the hills.”
Even though I knew the answer, I still asked, “Do you know any way I could reach the person who saw her leave? Oh, or the missing girl’s team?”
She shook her head.
I closed the book. “Thank you. For your time.”
She stood and smiled faintly. “It’s alright.” But before I could move, she turned back. “Friendly warning—don’t go near it. Some people come back alive, sure...but not all. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
If only she knew.
I flashed a polite smile and walked out of the café.
Around six p.m., I sat in a library in Nimorran with five others, three books opened before me, my attention drifting between them as I scribbled down overlapping stories of strange accidents around the hills.
Even as I read, I scrolled through the internet that I felt was mostly fabricated and exaggerated just to make The Crater look more dangerous than it already was.
But I still read them. I needed to look for a version of the truth that made sense to me.
One that felt like it could explain what I’d seen.
But as much as I searched, I found nothing about a messenger and who it served.
Who was the she it spoke of? It had come from The Crater, but surely, it didn’t belong to...it, right? Selvanyra hated humans because of what was done to her, yes, but she wouldn’t have created monsters just to kill them off even if they meant no harm.
Would she?
The ache in my head sharpened, a dull pressure behind my eyes. I rubbed at my temples and stood, breathing out slowly as I made my way to the back of the library where the older shelves were.
I needed the old stories. The ones that had not been edited for sanity. I needed the raw truth, the one about when Selvanyra, the moon, still walked in a mortal body, before the Soulless Man ruined everything.
I used to read that story as a kid, obsessively so. The last time I touched it, I was seventeen. Somewhere along the line, that fascination had faded.
But The Crater never left me. It stayed tucked into the corners of my mind like an almost due assignment.
Maybe I’d missed a detail back then. Probably a piece of the story I was too young to understand.
I’d stopped reading it when the story started to feel too heavy to carry in my chest, when something inside me shattered every time I reached the part where she cursed him.
How my chest clenched like the wrong person had been punished.
He’d killed someone, yes. But something about it made my inside feel like they were shedding tears on his behalf.
He’d been made to live on, soulless and alone. More than a thousand years had passed. Surely by now, if he wasn’t dead, he should have been forgiven, right? Yes. Yes. He should have.
I shook the thought off and focused on the shelf in front of me. I was searching for the thick volume that held the entire tales about Selvanyra, the Soulless Man and The Crater in one. My fingers trailed across the spines, dust clinging to my skin.
Then stopped.
A chill kissed my nape, crawling down the ridges of my spine like a fingertip I couldn’t see. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as the air behind me shifted and thickened.
And then the scent bled into me. I froze, my body recognising him before my mind could catch up.
Cedarwood. Myrrh.
My chest stuttered as my stomach turned to silk and fire, longing and relief exploding inside me. Every inch of my body tightened, and a sound clawed its way up my throat—a gasp, half-born, as if relief had hands and it was wringing my lungs with them.
I turned—
But I didn’t make it.
Because he was already there.
Behind me.
His body closed in, pressing me into the bookshelf until there was nowhere to go, his presence wrapping around me like a snare. One hand pressed to the shelf beside my head, the other I didn’t see—I felt—hovering near my hip