I walk down the gallery, lit by panels of thready sunlight from the windy apertures in the walls. The apse is dark, and it does not extend far. What grows at the far end is not exactly a tree; a shapeless tree, with roots and branches intermingled and a trunk like a bulging wall, like many trunks grafted together. There’s a charred cavity in the middle of the trunk, a natural crêche, and something I can’t make out rests in it.

The floor intervening is flat and clean, with puddles here and there standing upright inside silver wire frames. That stifling feeling comes back again, like troubled sleep with the heavy covers piled on top of me. The area above the cavity is glowing with luminous moss, a pale sulfur color. As I come near, an all but invisible halo appears in the crêche, a head conforming to it and causing me to recognize other objects there as the outspread arms and legs, the crumpled torso.

Over the breathing, the eyes, living, gaze steadily at me. Their color is obscured by a golden lustre that seems to be an effect of the halo, for beneath it I can see blackness. The face appears through a kind of glare, as though I saw it through a membrane. A pale, spear-shaped nose points down toward black whiskers as straight as straw on a thatched roof. Hollow breath crosses his hidden mouth. His cap and his tunic are black, the light paints two glistening streaks on his black boots.

I imagine he will impassively raise a gun and cut me down where I stand. Just an idle thought, because, though he lives, I see too where the light twinkles on his abdomen, on the blood that soaks the cloth of his uniform, and the ragged spot where the bullet entered. Arms and legs lie on the ground without the slightest visible tension—they are paralyzed, alive but inert. There is an armband on his right arm, with insignia identifying him as a Narrator.

His thought is the same, his eyes, which quiver with life although they barely move, seem to have fixed on my armband, which feels almost to burn or tingle with the intensity of his attention.

His halo shimmers from time to time, like a guttering candle. There is an air of seniority about him, which convinces me the Narrator I met in the clearing must have not been a fully qualified Narrator, but a subordinate officer to this one, an assistant. At the same time, I notice his Narrator’s bars are struck through with a black line, possibly only a loose thread, and I am not about to move it to find out, but perhaps he isn’t yet a full Narrator either. We had no ranks ourselves.