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 dog, half-starved and grey-muzzled, limped past him and disappeared into the brush. 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 livestock pens.
There, he slowed. The animals were penned too close to the homes. Shaggy creatures with bowed legs and dull eyes milled behind crude fences tied with fraying vine cord. Flies thickened the air. The stench of manure, piss, and old hay made his lip curl. He squatted near the fence, studied the structure. A single storm could bring the whole thing down. Disease wouldn't have far to travel.
He moved on.
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.
Beyond the stream, 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.
Further on, 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 thatch ceilings darkened with soot, 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.
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 traffic in that — but calculation. Illness untreated was a crack in the wall. One sick man could become ten. Ten could collapse a village.
He scanned nearby. No sign of medicinal herbs hanging to dry. No basin for mixing poultices. No old woman with hands stained green from plants. No healer. Or if there was one, they'd been too quiet.
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.
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. No simple alarms — not even windchimes or bells. 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 with torches, one at each side, one to kill the animals. No resistance. No preparation. Just smoke, screaming, and blood on the dirt.
And yet, no one seemed afraid.
That was its own kind of blindness.
He paused near the western corner, by a cluster of drying hides. There were no drying racks for meat. No pits for preserving grain or smoking fish. Nothing built to last. He didn't see stores of food, not enough for more than a few days. If a storm hit, if the animals died, if the crops failed — what then?
Even now, the villagers moved slowly, like people used to just barely surviving. Their shoulders stooped not with age but with endurance. They had no plans for sickness. No defenses. No margin.
He exhaled.
This was not a village, not really.
It was a wound scabbed over and called healing.
He returned to the tree by dusk, the same one he'd left at dawn. 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 by the fireless ground and whispered the names of the dead. His wife. His sons. The names did not echo. This world had no place for echoes yet. Only the long, waiting silence.
But he had seen.
And he remembered everything.