Work Text:
One day, in a village hidden away behind two mountain ranges, a stranger comes into town.
The dark-haired stranger causes quite a stir. The village doesn’t get very many visitors, so children abandon their games to follow him, their parents greet him with open curiosity, and everyone else comes out of their houses to see what’s going on.
He’s tall and polite. Handsome and gentle. He is more than happy to stop and chat, and as time goes on, more and more villagers open up to him.
He’s a mystery, and this particular village loves mysteries.
This particular village is sleepy and safe, hidden away behind its two mountain ranges. The slow-moving river brings most things in - food, goods, people. But several hills past the horizon, it picks up speed and plunges straight down into a waterfall that would smash any river boat to pieces. As a result, this village has a nickname: the village at the end of the world.
People come, and sometimes they never leave.
And why should they? After all, the air is fresh and the scenery is breathtaking. The villagers are kind and lively, the food is amazing, and best of all, this village is blessed with a real live guardian deity.
They tell the stranger all about it. His golden eyes widen, captivated, as they tell him about the sleeping beauty living in the mountains, beneath a lake of ice.
That high up, the temperatures are so cold that the lake is frozen all year round. But the villagers insist that their deity is real and alive. Fragments of memory remain, passed down from generation to generation, of a great power resting in that lake.
Evil beings avoid that area as if their lives depend on it. Wolves and bandits alike slink away from those woods, scared stiff by the sensation of something, or someone watching them with a stern, cold gaze.
And every few years, the water in that lake will reform and freeze into an impossible shape. Vortices fanning out in an inverted hurricane. Exploded craters, strangely artistic in their frozen beauty. Like this, it is easy to imagine some creature under the surface bursting out and climbing its way to the surface. But the frozen display is always hauntingly beautiful.
There’s no way something like that can be made by nature or monsters or human hands. It must be some higher power instead.
After all, how else can the village be blessed with perfect weather all year round? The seemingly endless supply of fish from the river. The unexpected recoveries of children too sick for medicine to heal. Aging elderly people that live long, healthy lives. It’s a miracle, and who else but a guardian deity could produce such miracles?
The stranger hears all of this and smiles. It makes his face look kind. But, for some reason, it also makes him look a bit sad.
A boy claws his way out of a pitch back nightmare and wakes up underneath a frozen sky.
The moment he opens his eyes, the world seems to invert. Water becomes ice, and ice sublimates into air. Waking is always a sudden process, for this one. The lake around him instantly reforms, as if a huge stone had been dropped from the sky, and the resulting splash is frozen.
The lake cracks open. No smoke rises from the crater that forms. No dust billows out into the air. But the world still resonates, and the effect is very much the same.
The boy pulls himself up, his joints stiff, his muscles aching.
That had been a long dream. He was sure of it. How much time had passed? How many lifetimes?
The moment that he climbs out of the frozen pit in the middle of the lake, the cold air stings his eyes, even though there’s no wind.
Stupid lake. Stupid sky.
When he looks around, the trees are frozen in a perfect tableau of windswept nonchalance. He must have woken up in the middle of a storm. The sky is cloudy and dark - the clouds painted with thick, oily grey against a white canvas sky. Nothing moves, as far as the eye can see.
Because you see, when Khun wakes up, time goes to sleep. And when he sleeps, time starts moving again.
He has lived in this state of half-life half-death for as long as he can remember.
On lucky days, he wakes when the sun is shining, the village is peaceful, and not much time has passed since the last time he fell asleep.
On unlucky days, like today, Khun wakes with the lake heavy and choppy - bits of it crunching beneath his feet. The sky isn’t dark enough to see the stars, but the air tastes different. There is a light wintry bite to it. The seasons have changed - but how many seasons?
He makes his way down to the village the way he always does - his bare feet slipping in the snow, questing for a path that has changed since the last time he used it. It seems so unfair, sometimes - he has lived here for as long as he can remember, but the place never stays static long enough for him to get around properly.
As the village comes into sight, people frozen in the middle of their daily lives, campfires cooking and smoke making solid columns in the air, the knot of tension in Khun’s chest eases.
The village is still here.
He reassures himself: The village will always be here, in some form or other.
The roofs are new. The streets are paved with this strange new material - smooth instead of pitted. Khun steps onto it and immediately approves. He must have woken up around dinner time. The sun is high enough in the sky that it must be summer.
In the middle of the village is a river, now frozen into a glassy surface. Khun steps onto it and carefully doesn’t look west, where it flows down into a waterfall.
Children are trickling in from their games, called home by women wearing light shawls around their arms, hanging out of doorways. Khun passes through the doorway of one house and peeks into the kitchen. The stew in the cooking pot looks absolutely delicious.
He steals a bowl and scoops some for himself - he rarely needs to eat anymore, but he likes to know what his village has been up to. The flavors of carrot, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and leek explode in his mouth. Khun draws a squiggly line and then a star in the soup pot. The liquid remains frozen in the shape he made it. When he falls asleep, it will splash back into its original shape - a secret message intended for the bright-eyed kid staring hungrily at the pot.
Going on, still taking small bites of the absolutely delicious soup, Khun wanders through the village and looks for familiar faces. It takes him a long time to find one.
The old man is sitting on a rocking chair in front of his house, mouth wide open in a gaping yawn. Khun recognizes him from the birthmark on his right cheek - a small dark mole right underneath his eye, barely visible among the wrinkles of old age.
“That long, huh,” Khun mutters, staring at a face that had been middle-aged last he’d seen.
He pats the old man on the arm as he walks past him and into the village head’s residence.
Normally the village head had great security - two warriors guarding the entrance at all times, sometimes ceremonial, sometimes functional. Khun notes the decorative tassels on their spears with amusement. The spear tips are sharp - well-maintained and obviously well cared for. But clearly, the village has been peaceful for some time.
And, well, these two youngsters can hardly be blamed for failing to defend against a being that literally stops time.
Inside the building, Khun searches through several drawers in the well-furnished study before he finds what he’s looking for - a huge, thick book with a metallic blue binding, with a stylized blue pattern, vaguely geometric and reminiscent of a snowflake. It’s heavy and ceremonial, and old. Very, very old.
He opens it to find a record of all the births, deaths, and everything in between. Shuffling out the creaky wooden chair behind the desk - why do the village heads always insist on using such uncomfortable chairs? They could afford to splurge every now and then - Khun sits down to catch up on what he had missed.
47 years.
He’s been asleep for 47 years.
The village head this time clearly had a sense of humor. In the margins, scrawled in between thick, official lettering, Khun finds small doodles of people, their faces captured in a variety of expressions: smiling, angry, thoughtful, and sad.
With these as clues, he pores over the records and slowly, painstakingly, begins matching the faces he knew back then to the faces he sees now.
The kid by the soup pot is Arlechinno’s grandkid. Then his mother must be - he flips through the pages, his heart caught in between a strange mixture of amusement and grief - there. A somber-faced woman stares out at him from the margins. Arlechinno’s daughter had passed away two years ago, aged 37. An entire life, there and gone while he had been asleep.
He reads through the book and goes wandering around the village again. This time, with names put to faces, he no longer walks among strangers.
There’s often very little he can do, trapped between moments as he is. But he can help a little - a written note here, a gentle nudge there. He finds butterflies to put in children’s hair, and does a few chores around some houses. He’s bored, and he has all the time in the world, so why not? He collects little trinkets as payment - a loose nail, a young girl’s hair tie, a lost ball, a rusty spoon. They won’t be missed, but he likes having things in his pockets.
After a few hours, Khun leans back against the village gate and watches the frozen sun.
This is exhausting work, sometimes. If anybody had been around to see him do it, he has no doubt that they would make fun of him. The so-called village deity, mucking around because he’s bored.
But the work is done. Here is the new village, 47 years in the future, made up of the people he loves and the children of people he once loved. Even if they never see him, he sees them, and that’s enough for him.
There is a tall, dark-haired man standing at the edge of the lake. His hair is worn unusually long, and as Khun gets closer, he realizes that his skin is an an unfamiliar tan, and his eyes are burnished amber. He is definitely not from here, and most definitely not a child from the village.
Then, to his greater surprise, the man moves.
His weight shifts. His head turns. His hair spills gently from his shoulder to his back. Their eyes meet.
Khun feels a frisson of wonder and terror and being seen. It is the first time he can remember - being observed by a living being.
For a long moment, they just stare at each other. If time hadn’t already stopped, Khun suspects it must have. Galaxies whirl far away, and distant suns wink in and out of existence in the space between one breath and the next.
The stranger by the shore feels heartbreakingly familiar.
“Who are you?” Khun asks finally.
“I’ve been looking for you,” the man says, his words spilling out in a rush. “I’ve heard stories about you. I’ve been wondering if you’d been cursed too, same as me.”
Suddenly, Khun can hardly breathe.
The man smiles at him, his smile wobbly, and all of time seems to coalesce down to this single moment.
“I think I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”
The stranger’s name is Bam, and he is not a god.
Khun is inclined to believe him. After all, the villagers think he is a god, but really he’s just a human with an ancient curse on him. One that makes him seem like a god.
What’s more is - Bam seems to have some kind of curse on him as well. He doesn’t change. He doesn’t age. He doesn’t seem to be touched by time at all.
For as long as he can remember, he has been alone. All he has is a vague feeling, a driving desire to wander. He’s traveled nearly the entire world, but he can barely remember any of it. Khun thinks it’s a shame, and when he says so, Bam laughs like he’s just said the funniest thing.
“But still,” Bam says. “When I saw you, that feeling disappeared. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I think you’re it. I’ve been looking for you all this time.”
Khun thinks it's strange, how something so absurd can sound so genuine when Bam says it.
“Do you remember what made you this way?” Khun asks, curious. He has so many questions. “Do you know who or what cursed you? Do you know how it began?”
Bam shakes his head ruefully. “It’s been so long. Even if I knew in the beginning, I must have forgotten it by now. Except, there’s one thing -”
He hesitates, as if embarrassed. But Khun shifts closer, encouraging, and there is no space for secrets, not here in a world that only contains the two of them.
“I have dreams,” Bam says. “It’s about a tower, a huge one, tall enough to reach the sky. For as long as I can remember, I’ve either been trying to get away from it or find it.”
“What kind of tower?” Khun asks.
“Black, solid black, and big enough to block out the sun.”
Khun’s breath catches in his throat.
“I have the same dream,” Khun says. “Over and over and over again. In my dreams, I’m always trapped inside, and I’m trying to get out.”
Bam stares at him. “So it must be a real place, then.”
“Maybe.”
But Bam grows more insistent, saying: “Then I’m right. You are just like me!”
“Or we’re from the same place,” Khun says, staring hard at him. “Or we were cursed by the same thing.” It’s hard not to get caught up in Bam’s excitement. The thrill of being with someone, being heard, being spoken to, is a small and constant buzz underneath his skin.
Here they are, two beings that are more creature than man, and all Khun wants to spin around and laugh with joy.
“I wonder if there are more like us,” Bam says, his smile widening.
“I wonder what it all means,” Khun returns. “In stories, people are always cursed because they did something wrong. Offended the wrong person, or asked for too much. They’re cursed so that they can learn their lesson, and become better people. Only, I’ve been like this for so long that I don’t know if I remember how to be human again.”
Bam is giving him an odd look. “You are human,” he says. “Or at least, you look human to me.”
“And you don’t look like an evil villain to me.”
“Really?” Bam’s smile is wide and pleased.
“Do I?”
Bam laughs. “Not at all. You look like the princess from one of those fairytales, not the villain. Maybe you were trapped in that tower, and I wished to set you free.”
Khun laughs at being compared to a princess. But he sobers. Something is bothering him. Something Bam had said.
“There’s a waterfall at the edge of the village,” Khun says slowly. “This lake feeds into a river, you see. The river goes down the mountain, and then it goes over the edge. No one’s ever been further than that, but sometimes…sometimes I see this massive structure in the distance. Past all the fog, somewhere in the sky. I’ve always thought that it was a mirage.”
Bam is silent for a long moment.
“Do you think that’s it? The Tower?” He leaves the rest unspoken. Maybe this was why his wandering had felt like it ended it. Where else would it end, if not where it all began?
“I don’t know. I’ve tried not to think about it, all these years.”
They’re sitting together by the shore, and soon Khun knows he will have to go under again. He always gets this feeling around the end of the day - an unexplained pull. They have been talking late into the night, and it’s been steadily growing stronger.
The longer he forces himself to stay awake, the longer he ends up sleeping later. And no matter how hard he tries to fight it, he always has to go to sleep again.
“Will you go?” he asks.
Bam meets his eyes, and somehow understands his silent request.
“Not without you.”
Khun smiles slightly.
“Promise you’ll be here when I wake,” he says. “I know it won’t be fair to you, to ask you to stay in one place for however many years, but -”
Bam smiles at him reassuringly.
“I promise,” he says. “I’ll wait for you however long it takes.”
The village acquires a new mystery guardian deity.
They don’t remember him moving in, but it feels like he has always been there. Golden-eyed and gentle-mannered. He will fix things for you if they’re broken, and will readily help out with any big projects that need to be done. He’s great with kids - they always clamber over him, fearless, even though he is a stranger to them.
Days pass like this. Then months, then years.
Khun wakes up to a village that is more prosperous than ever. Red-glazed tiles cover rooftops, and bright lanterns hang from doorways. He must have woken up during one of the village’s many festivals.
He wanders through tiled entryways, the lavishly decorated main square, and the frozen villagers stopped in the midst of their daily tasks.
But this time, standing in the middle of the square, Bam is waiting for him.
His weight shifts. His head turns. His hair spills gently from his shoulder to his back. Their eyes meet.
Khun rushes over to hug him. “Bam!”
Stunned surprise flickers over Bam’s face.
“You remembered me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Bam lets out a sigh of relief.
“How were your dreams?”
“They were the same.”
Bam smiles sadly. It isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.
“Have you thought about it?” Khun asks. “About the waterfall, and whether we should go past it.”
Together, they turn their heads toward the slow, winding river. Past the horizon, it dips and crashes down for miles and miles into an endless abyss.
“Not today,” Bam says.
Khun breathes out a sigh of relief.
Bam takes his hands in his. He doesn’t need to say anything. Khun understands it all anyway.
The waterfall will always be there, waiting for them. And one day, they will both go over that edge. In search of who they were, where they came from, and how things came to be.
But for now, there’s no need to rush. They’ve only just found each other. If time allows it, they’ll steal as many days as they can from it.
In this decision, there is grief, and longing, and heartbreaking joy and heartrending despair.
“Well,” Khun says, forcing himself to sound lighthearted. He looks around at the festival going on, and thanks his lucky stars for this moment. “What would you like to do today?”