Chapter 9
Chapter 9 — Blooming in My Own Time
The narrator returns to school the morning after the prokurorai's visit and finds the pedagogas changed but still teaching, his lesson carrying veiled references to things that grow in darkness and break through surfaces. Sarzaa appears at the cemetery fence singing a melody with a new quality that the narrator recognizes as connected to the earth's pulse. Beptotystes is encountered near the wolf grounds, where the crack has widened further and the soil rising from below has increased. The narrator senses the pulse strengthening and catches sight of a third red cap in the distance, suggesting escalation.
I did not sleep well.
Not because of the pulse — I had grown accustomed to its rhythm, the way one grows accustomed to a clock ticking in an empty room, aware of it only when it stops. The pulse had not stopped. It continued beneath my floorboards with the same lengthened beat it had carried for days, patient and deep, and I had learned to rest inside it the way a body rests inside its own heartbeat. What kept me awake was something else: the boot prints frozen into the path outside my door, leading toward the school and never leading back.
They were still there when I stepped out into the gray morning. The frost had preserved them perfectly — each tread mark sharp, each stride measured, the official weight of them pressed into the dirt like a sentence written in a language I could read but did not want to translate. I stepped around them the way one steps around a wound in a sidewalk, carefully, without looking directly, though looking was all I had been doing for weeks now. Looking and listening and feeling the ground for changes that no one else seemed to notice except Beptotystes and Sarzaa and the pedagogas, who noticed everything and said nothing that could be repeated.
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