Vanishing

The shed filled on the fifth day and the reeve paid him in the yard.

She counted it into his hand out of a leather bag, coin by coin, saying the number each time, which he understood later was for his benefit and which he was grateful for at the time without knowing why.

Then she said the work had been good, and that the guild would hear so, and went back inside with her arm in its sling.

He walked out of Ashfield in the early afternoon with more money than he had ever held, which was not a demanding standard, and a completed thing in his quest panel that had gone from gold to grey.

He liked the grey. It was evidence.

The road back to Grennet took a day and a half and he killed a handful of slimes on it, none of which gave him very much, and he noticed that too and filed it next to the woodpile.

* * * *

He was two streets into Grennet when he watched a man stop existing.

It happened in front of him, at a distance of perhaps fifteen feet, in good light, at the corner where the street opened onto the crossing.

The man was standing with a woman. They were talking about something. He was holding a folded paper in one hand and gesturing with it, and he was in the middle of a word.

Then he was not there.

There was no sound. There was no collapse, no falling, no stagger. He did not go anywhere. The space he had been occupying simply stopped containing him, and the light that had been behind him was now the light where he had been, and the folded paper went with him.

Alaric stopped walking.

He waited for something to happen.

* * * *

Nobody in the street reacted.

That was worse than the vanishing.

The woman he had been talking to did not scream, or step back, or reach for the place where he had been. She looked at the empty air for about a second, made a small expression of mild irritation, and turned and carried on with her day.

Nobody else looked up.

There was a stall at his elbow and the man behind it did not pause in wrapping something. Two children went past the exact spot at a run. A dog crossed it.

Alaric stood in the street with his mouth slightly open, in the middle of a town where a person had just ceased to be, surrounded by sixty people who had not noticed.

He had been in the world for six days.

He understood, standing there, that whatever had just happened was ordinary.

He tested that, because he was not going to accept a conclusion that large on one instance. He walked the length of the crossing and back with his attention wide, watching faces rather than the street, looking for anybody who had been disturbed.

Nobody had been disturbed.

The woman who had been talking to the man was three stalls down by then, buying something, entirely composed. She had lost a conversation partner mid-sentence and had gone shopping.

* * * *

He asked a bystander.

He picked a man leaning on a barrel who had been facing the right way and who had been, so far as Alaric could tell, awake.

He asked what had happened to the man with the paper.

The bystander looked at him with the expression of somebody being asked why water is wet, and said something short and helpful.

It contained three words Alaric did not have.

He did not ask what they meant, because he had made a rule about that at a well and the rule had held so far. He thanked the man, and repeated the three words to himself twice as he walked away so that he would not lose them, and put them in the collection.

They joined quest and contract and tier and party and split and the greyed word from the guild hall panel, all of them sitting in a pocket unsorted, waiting for something to attach to.

* * * *

An hour later he watched the reverse.

He was at the fountain, eating, and a woman assembled herself out of nothing about ten feet away.

That was the only description he could produce. She did not walk into the space. There was no space and then there was a woman in it, upright, mid-step, already moving.

And then she immediately complained about a queue.

That was the part he could not get past. She looked around, oriented herself, saw the line outside the smith's, said something extremely rude about it to nobody in particular, and joined the back of it.

She had come out of nothing and her first act had been irritation about a queue.

He sat on the fountain edge with bread in his hand and watched her stand in line, and could not make the two things belong to the same person.

* * * *

He tried to catch one in the act.

This was the plan he arrived at, and he was rather proud of it for the first few minutes.

If people came and went, and if it happened often enough that a whole town had stopped noticing, then it would happen again, and if he watched somebody long enough he would see the moment properly and be able to tell what it looked like from the inside of the second it took.

He picked a man mending a shutter across the street and watched him.

He watched him for ten minutes.

The man mended the shutter. He tried the shutter. He was dissatisfied with the shutter. He got a different tool and did something else to it. He tested it again and was satisfied and gathered his things and went indoors.

At no point did he stop existing.

Alaric sat on the fountain edge with the distinct sensation of having done something stupid in public, which was accurate, because the man had noticed him watching around the sixth minute and had given him a look about it.

He gave it up.

He noted, walking away, that this had been the first test he had run that had produced nothing at all, and that the failure was his own fault rather than the world's. He had assumed the thing happened on a schedule. There was no reason to think it happened on a schedule.

He would need better questions.

He worked at it on the way to the inn and got one, eventually, which was not what happened but where did he go.

That was better because it assumed less. He did not know that the man had ceased to be. He knew only that the man had stopped being here, which is a different claim and a smaller one, and which left room for a there.

He did not have anybody to ask it of yet. He kept it anyway.

* * * *

That night he took a room at the Third Bell, because he had coin now and had been told that was what coin was for.

The room was small and cost most of what the reeve had counted into his hand, and had a bed and a basin and a window over the yard, and he sat on the bed for a while simply being in a room, which was a new category of experience.

Then he opened his own panel and went looking for the mechanism.

It was, he thought, the obvious place. Everything else in the world had turned out to be in there somewhere. The map. The quest. The bar. The four names and their numbers. He had found the empty quest room by having something to put in it.

If people could go away and come back, and if it was ordinary, then it was probably a thing you did.

And if it was a thing you did, it would be on a pane.

* * * *

He found it in the fourth section.

He had been through them in order, reading everything, and most of it he could not use. His card. The map. The quest panel, now with one grey completed entry in it. A section with nothing in it at all that he could not make do anything.

And then a short list of words, and at the bottom of the list, one that was grey.

LOGOUT.

He looked at it for a moment before he understood he had seen it before.

The guild hall. Standing at the counter, going through the interface for the first time since the forest, and passing straight over a word he did not know because it was grey and did nothing and he had a village to walk to.

Here it was again.

He read it several times. It did not resolve into anything. It was two ordinary sounds stuck together and neither half of it helped.

But it was in the section where the things you did were, and it was grey, and everything else in the section was not.

* * * *

He pressed it.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again, more deliberately, in case the first press had been badly aimed.

Nothing happened again, in exactly the same way.

He pressed it eleven times in total. He counted them, because he counted things. Eleven presses at various speeds and pressures, including three in rapid succession and one long slow one where he held it and waited.

The word sat there being grey.

* * * *

Then he stopped pressing and examined the greyness itself, which turned out to be the more interesting question.

He had seen things refuse him before. That morning he had tried to open the empty section and it had pushed back, faintly, in a way that told him there was something behind it that was shut.

This did not push back.

There was nothing behind it to push. The word was not barred, or locked, or held closed against him. It had no opinion about him at all.

He looked for a comparison and found one from the quest board, of all places. When a posting had already been taken, the paper stayed on the board and went pale, and the pale meant this was available and is not now, and nobody had removed it because removing it would have been more work than leaving it.

That was the grey.

It was not the grey of a door. It was the grey of a thing that had been considered by somebody, at some point, and declined, and left where it was.

* * * *

He put it away.

That was the whole of it, and it took him a few minutes.

He had no framework in which this was alarming.

He did not know what LOGOUT was. He did not know that it was the thing that had taken the man with the folded paper, or brought the woman who complained about the queue. Nobody had told him, and the three words the bystander had used were still sitting unsorted in his pocket with the rest, and none of them had attached to anything yet.

What he had was a word he could not use, in a list of words he mostly could, in a world where he had already found several other things he could not do anything with.

He was a man six days old with an enormous inventory of the incomprehensible.

One more entry did not distinguish itself.

There is a particular protection in knowing nothing, and he had it in full that evening, sitting on a bed in a rented room. To be frightened by a locked door you must first understand what is behind it, or at least that the door is a door.

He had a grey word and a growing list of grey words, and a shed he had filled, and a bar a third of the way along, and none of it arranged itself into a shape that should have worried anybody.

* * * *

He closed the panel and lay down.

The room was warm. There was noise from the yard and more noise from downstairs, and the noise was the noise of people being nearby, which he had not slept inside before.

He thought about the shed filling, and about the reeve counting coins into his hand and saying the numbers.

He thought about the woman at the well who had promised to find him later, and about the fact that later had now been six days, and about whether that was a long time, which he had no way to judge.

He would ask, if he saw her.

He fell asleep quickly and slept well.

He did not think about the grey word again for two months.