OH told stories to fill the places silence gnawed, stories that sounded like half-remembered vengeance songs.
"There was a cabinet once," OH said, almost casually. "No bigger than a pantry. Plain wood, plain hinges, the sort of thing you'd walk past without seeing."
Khalen kept working a strip of crystal scale free from a spar. "A cabinet."
"A cabinet," OH repeated, delighted by the simplicity of it. "You put anything inside and shut the doors. When you opened it again, the thing had become gold."
Khalen's hands paused.
"Gold?" he echoed, like the word had been pulled from someone else's mouth.
OH went still for half a beat, and in that silence something old surfaced in his tone, wonder with a sharp edge. "Right. Of course. You wouldn't…" He let out a soft laugh, not mocking, just startled. "Look at you. Look at this age."
Khalen narrowed his eyes. "What is gold."
OH's glow brightened a fraction, like the question fed him. "A metal. Yellow. Soft. Pretty enough that humans decided it should mean power."
Khalen stared at him. "They made power out of… pretty."
"It gets worse," OH said, warming up, and then he was off, words tumbling like stones downhill. "They dug it out of mountains, dragged it across continents, murdered for it, married for it, crowned themselves with it. They made little circles and stamped faces on them, and agreed those circles were worth bread."
Khalen blinked. "Bread?"
"Food," OH said, impatient. "Shelter. Safety. All traded for metal."
Khalen's expression tightened. "Why would anyone do that."
"Because it was rare," OH said, as if that explained everything, then caught himself and chuckled. "Which is a nonsense reason, when you say it out loud."
He went on anyway, voice turning sharp with memory. "Most of human history, the greedy had to dress it up. They called it divine. They said the hoard was proof of blessing, proof the universe loved them more than it loved the starving."
Khalen's jaw flexed. "So people were starving."
"Yes," OH said, too easy. "Constantly. While others sat in palaces filled with food they didn't eat, and gold they couldn't spend twice."
Khalen just stared, like the idea had broken something in him. "That makes no sense."
"It made perfect sense to them," OH said. "That's the trick. You convince a hungry man his hunger is holy, and he'll thank you for the lesson."
Khalen's voice dropped. "And nobody stopped them."
OH paused, then his tone went almost thoughtful, almost reverent in the wrong way. "Sometimes they tried. Sometimes they burned the palaces. Sometimes they built new ones the moment the smoke cleared."
Khalen shook his head once, slow. "So this cabinet… it turned things to gold."
"Yes," OH said, and his humour returned, quick and bright. Khalen dragged his thumb over the grease on his fingers, then huffed a quiet breath through his nose, the closest thing to a laugh he'd allowed himself all week. "And the moment it existed, it began destroying everyone who touched it."
Khalen frowned. "Because they fought over it."
"Oh, they fought," OH said. "But that was just the loud part. The real harm was quieter."
He let the words settle, then continued, voice sharpening into something almost clinical.
"Imagine you have it. A cabinet that can turn a rock into enough gold to buy a wardline, or an army."
Khalen's eyes narrowed. "You'd hide it."
"That's what they all said," OH replied. "And then the cabinet asked its first question."
Khalen waited.
OH smiled in that maddening way he had, as if the punchline was human nature itself. "Who do you tell."
Khalen's jaw flexed. "No one."
"That's the first lie," OH said. "Because if you don't tell anyone, you can't use it. Not really. The moment you spend, the moment you buy too much, the world notices. Merchants talk. Guards talk. Friends talk. Enemies listen."
Khalen's gaze flicked to the Wailer's corpse in the corner, to the hunger that didn't care about philosophy. "So they used it anyway."
"Of course," OH said. "A better meal. A warmer house. A small kindness. A single purchase that makes your life feel like it finally belongs to you."
His tone softened, almost sympathetic, then turned again.
"And then someone asks, how did you afford that."
Khalen didn't answer.
"Maybe you lie," OH continued. "Maybe you boast. Maybe you pretend the universe chose you. People love that story."
Khalen's mouth twisted. "Clout."
OH blinked, then actually laughed, surprised. "Clout," he repeated, tasting the word. "Yes. Exactly that. The old world had ten thousand names for it, but the disease was the same."
He leaned into it now, voice low and pleased in the way he got when he was about to lay out a mechanism.
"So the cabinet makes you want to prove you're special. Or it makes you terrified someone will prove you're not."
Khalen's eyes narrowed. "And that's how it gets you."
"That's how it gets everyone," OH said. "Because once one person knows, it stops being your cabinet. It becomes a rumor. A temptation. A test."
He let the beat hang.
"Families split. Friends turn into ledgers. Lovers turn into investigators. Strangers show up smiling too hard. Thieves get careless and buy foolish things. The honest ones get caught trying to be generous."
Khalen stared. "Generous."
"Yes," OH said. "That's the cruel part. Greed isn't the only thing it punishes. It punishes hope."
Khalen's voice came out quiet. "How long did it last."
OH's glow dimmed a fraction. "Not long."
Khalen's jaw tightened. "Someone killed for it."
"Someone killed because of it," OH corrected. "That's different."
He paused, then said, almost gently, "The cabinet did not create monsters. It revealed them. It revealed how thin the line is between wanting to survive and wanting to be worshipped."
Khalen looked down at the strip of spiced plate in his hand.
"So what happened to the cabinet?"
OH's laugh came out bright, sudden, and genuinely merry, like he couldn't help it. "They buried it, of course. Like you do with anything that proves you're not as noble as you rehearsed."
Khalen snorted. "Smart."
"Cowardly," OH corrected, then softened. "But yes. Smart."
Khalen chewed once, thinking, and then looked at OH like he might sprout legs. "So you're surprised I don't know what gold is."
"I'm marvelling," OH said. "First time in human history, survival outweighed shine."
He sounded almost proud.
Then, quieter, almost to himself, "Down here, gold can't buy Breath. That still feels new."
Khalen deadpanned, "You're rambling."
OH laughed again, the sound bouncing off the Valkyrie's ribs like a spark. "I am. I have nine thousand years of context and no one to inflict it on. Let me have this."
Khalen shook his head, but the corner of his mouth twitched. "Tell me another. One that ends with someone getting punched."
"Oh, Captain," OH said, glowing faintly brighter. "In the old world, that narrows it down to nearly all of them."
**
The days settled into a rhythm that was nothing like peace and exactly like survival.
Repair. Scout. Fight. Eat. Sleep. Bind a spar. Burn a carrionling to glass.
Learn again how small a body could be and still be enough.
Near the end of the sixth month by his counting, Khalen sat against the Valkyrie's keel while Breath fell through the dark like snow. Crystal growths crowded the cavern in wild seams and branching fans, catching the ship's soft glow and breaking it into bruised violets, thin blues, and pale gold that slid across stone like slow water.
The Valkyrie was waking, not with engines or thunder, but with a quiet insistence. A steady pulse ran through its ribs. Each breath of light climbed the patched hull and spilled outward, turning dust into glitter, turning the broken city into a cathedral of colour. The illumination did not sit still. It wandered. It refracted. It played, as if the ship were learning how to make music out of old light, and the cavern was its instrument.
Khalen chewed a strip of spiced plate and let his eyes trace the seam he would weld in the morning, the line he'd learned to trust with his life. Above the crate they used as a table, OH hovered in his usual place, violet facets half-dim. His presence felt quieter tonight. His glow softened. His voice, when it came, sounded like it had been resting too.
"Six months," OH said, soft with that private satisfaction he never quite hid. "You have done what my cities could not. You have adapted."
Khalen exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh. The colour slid over his knuckles, over the grease on his fingers, over the scars that had stopped feeling new. "Six months down here," he said. "How long up there."
OH's light shifted, thoughtful. A slow, kaleidoscopic wash moved across his facets as if the Valkyrie were answering him with its own language. "Less. Time moves differently the further down we go. Do not let your mind chew itself raw over it."
Khalen's jaw tightened anyway. Lys. Therrin. Bastion. The surface felt like a story he'd heard once and couldn't quite place, and the cavern's colours did not help. They made everything feel dreamlike, like the world was trying to distract him from the parts that hurt.
OH went on, gentler than usual, as if he hated being gentle but did it anyway. "Everyone you know will still be there when we climb back out. They will have breathed. They will have slept. They will have lived. You have not missed a lifetime, Captain. You have only been… folded."
Khalen swallowed once, hard, then nodded like the motion cost him something. "Folded," he muttered, tasting the word like it might cut.
"Not survived," he said instead. "Adapted."
"Yes," OH said, and for once there was no clever hook in it. Just certainty. "Adapted."
A quiet settled over the wreck, filled with the tick of cooling metal and the faint, steady pulse beneath the stone. The Valkyrie's glow continued to wander across the cavern walls, patient and curious, as if it were practicing.
"Tomorrow," OH said, and even his humor held still for it, "we take the core crystal."
For a moment OH said nothing at all, and he simply hovered with his facets turned inward, as if he'd closed his eyes and let the ship's wandering light wash over him too.
Khalen closed his eyes and felt the pulse under the earth answer like a distant drum.
He slept with his hand on the hull and dreamed of wood that remembered sky.