The Greatest Sound Is Barely Heard

In this backward world, not yet ravaged by headphones and stereos, most people could still manage the first half of "keen ears and sharp eyes." Kraft was no exception.

He thought he heard something. Though it was so faint that it was hard to notice, so faint that one might suspect it was an auditory hallucination brought on by being in silence for too long.

It sounded like someone dragging a heavy sack across snow, cheap fibers or something else grinding against tiny crystals. The soft layer of snow shattered under immense force, then the space compressed, countless delicate snowflakes breaking and collapsing into dull clumps of snow—this was the sound he heard.

If his senses were not deceiving him, the sound was passing less than five meters outside Kraft's window. In darkness so complete that even a well-nourished young man like Kraft could see nothing, it advanced with decisive force.

It was hard to come up with any reasonable explanation for it, such as a person returning home late at night, or a petty thief carrying a heavy haul.

No, that was impossible. Kraft's hand was already on his sword hilt. Though the exercise-starved otherworlder now occupied half this soul, the other half, which had controlled this body for more than a decade, could still perform the difficult maneuver of moving a sword from its sheath to someone else's throat in an instant.

Perhaps he would not react quite so violently for now, but even the sheath alone could knock out an untrained adult head-on.

That sound—that sound so faint it was nearly a hallucination—did not change. It seemed to linger in place rather than move away. Continuous and low, it inexplicably brought to mind a train roaring past in front of you. Before the entire string of carriages had gone by, you would hear the same unbroken rumble.

Kraft pictured the owner of that sound in his mind. It had to be as long and enormous as a train, yet capable of moving softly through the snow. Those who had not seen its body could only imagine its shape from that drawn-out rustling.

What he constructed from hearing and baseless imagination was too bizarre and disjointed, closer to an absurd Dream than objective reality. He almost suspected he was caught between waking and sleep, his low-power brain indiscriminately blending vague information with subjective impressions and arriving at the conclusion that a train was quietly strolling past him.

But he knew he was fully awake—awake enough to feel the cold wind slip in through his nose and mouth, pass the barrier of his lips and teeth, swirl between his palatal arches, and then be swallowed into his throat.

The frigid airflow, too cold to be warmed by his nasal cavity, scraped away the thin moisture on his mucous membranes. Sensitive nerves faithfully transmitted the signals to his brain. In such cold, the body's emergency mechanisms began to function. Catecholamine hormones secreted by the activated adrenal medulla would stimulate his circulatory system, blood pumping through the arteries into the Circle of Willis before circulating through the entire brain, ensuring that this fragile organ continued to function normally.

So was it possible that some long, silent behemoth really was passing before him, yet, against all intuition, making only a sound that was difficult to detect?

It had even avoided every obstacle. In the disorderly village, it had not crushed so much as half a plank or a dead branch. It simply wandered freely through the snowy night, the boundless darkness its sea of unrestricted movement.

Within that sea, the low walls of rock and clay were no different from empty void. What it rubbed against was not falling snow, but something finer and more abstract—lightweight, yet capable of supporting its enormous body as it moved according to its will.

Kraft did not understand how he had grasped all this from such a faint sound. Or perhaps there was no need to think at all; the complex, bizarre content had always been contained within that sound.

He felt that his thoughts had never been so active. Neither swinging an iron sword nor writing answers he had long memorized could compare to this. It was like a hammer forging red-hot metal, thoughts scattering like sparks, his boiling soul too much for the skull shaped by millions of years of human evolution to contain.

As time passed, his already crowded mind filled with even more information. Things he would never normally think of were dredged up from beneath the surface, countless fragments rolling past like a lantern reel—the thin gray matter tried to find something within its limited store of information to describe what it had learned from this sound, creating the illusion that his thoughts moved like lightning.

The process was completely beyond the control of his conscious mind. His consciousness was like someone standing before a dam whose gates had been opened, watching everything known by both souls surge forth.

Among countless words, the interlinked neural network chose "scales" to describe the skin rubbing against minute substances. They were segmented shells formed from inexplicable content, capable of touching the faintest concepts and allowing the elongated main body to move meaningfully through space.

And the body to which those "scales" clung extended far beyond the reach of consciousness, stretching from the known into the unknown depths of darkness.

The "sound" of its movement was the flakes shed as its "scales" rubbed against minute substances. The instant they left the main body, they began an uncontrollable decay, falling from another conceptual space it inhabited into the overlapping space humans could perceive, and finally disintegrating into information fit to exist in this world.

This information spread continuously, spreading like vibrating sound waves, releasing one final shriek before annihilation. Yet only souls beyond the ordinary could, under special circumstances, come into contact with it and passively comprehend the existence at its source before the pitiful water-rich organic tissue protected by a hard dome of calcium salts began to boil.

And now, this tiny, fortunate individual, accidentally blended from two souls, had reached some subtle passing threshold of density because he had received a double portion without any increase in capacity. Thus, he was able to "hear" something unimaginable in the two impoverished, tedious, brief lives he had lived. He could not describe it in human language. He could only define it as an indescribable existence beyond the reality he knew.

At the edge of madness, he understood the meaning of the patterns on the stone pillar he had seen during the day—those things had fallen from a higher plane, changing and twisting as they descended before arriving in this world.

But those who received them could not understand their true meaning, and used elements that existed in this world to depict them, describing them as a giant serpent in the night. It coiled onward without end, its body submerged in endless darkness.

Kraft drifted through his wild imaginings, everything around him receding into the distance. He did not even know whether he was still standing by the window. Until a hand landed on his shoulder.

"Kraft, you didn't stand here all night, did you? Kraft?"

His vision returned in an instant. In the rare sunlight, his pupillary sphincters contracted violently. Amid a sensation of weightlessness, Kraft discovered that his rigid body was rapidly pitching forward under the push from his left shoulder, the white windowsill swelling before his eyes at a terrifying speed.