The light did not welcome him.
It struck without ceremony, flattening depth and erasing the careful gradients the cave had taught him to trust. Stone no longer absorbed sound. Air no longer stayed where it was placed. Everything moved at once.
He stopped just beyond the mouth of the passage, one foot still in shadow, the other exposed.
His eyes burned—not with pain, but with excess. Too much space. Too many distances competing for attention. The sky above was not a ceiling. It did not answer to edges.
The Blood Sigil warmed.
Not sharply.
Not urgently.
It held him upright and nothing more.
He waited for the adjustment that did not come.
In the cave, the world had been solved in advance. Light arrived filtered. Sound returned predictable echoes. Errors were caught before consequence could spread.
Here, nothing intercepted the outcome.
He stepped forward.
The ground shifted differently than he expected—firmer, rougher, textured by use rather than erosion. The sensation traveled up through his foot and did not stop. It continued, unsoftened, into muscle and bone.
He adjusted late.
Not enough to stumble.
Enough to notice.
Wind passed across his face, carrying scent that did not belong to stone. Vegetation. Damp earth. Something old and alive. His breath caught, then resumed without instruction.
The Blood Sigil did not suppress it.
He continued.
Each step required negotiation. Not with terrain, but with awareness. Sound arrived layered instead of singular. Movement in the distance refused to collapse into background. Even stillness felt occupied.
He reached a short incline and climbed it slowly, choosing balance over speed. At the top, the land opened into a shallow basin scattered with rock and scrub.
Open.
Uncontained.
His shoulders tightened before he could stop them.
In the cave, there had always been a nearest wall.
Here, the nearest boundary was the horizon.
He scanned instinctively for threat.
There was none.
That absence unsettled him more than danger would have.
He crossed the basin and misjudged the depth of a shallow dip. His foot landed sooner than expected, forcing a quick correction. Pebbles scattered, clicking against each other, loud in the open air.
He froze.
No one turned.
No response followed.
The sound dissolved into wind and distance.
He stood there longer than necessary, listening for consequence that did not arrive.
The Blood Sigil remained warm, present, indifferent.
He moved again.
Hunger surfaced without warning—not as urgency, but as fact. His body asked, plainly, without escalation. There was no internal signal to prioritize it.
He acknowledged the need and kept walking.
Time behaved differently outside. Without walls to measure it, the day stretched. Light shifted gradually, imperceptibly, until he realized the sun had moved far from where he first saw it.
He reached the edge of a sparse tree line and paused.
Shade pooled beneath the branches, broken and uneven. He stepped into it and felt relief that carried no instruction attached. His body responded, not because it had to, but because it could.
That realization landed heavier than the fatigue.
He sat briefly, not to rest, but to orient. The ground was cool beneath him. Insects moved through leaf litter with quiet persistence. None of it aligned. None of it asked him to become anything.
The name behind his sternum remained still.
It did not pull.
It did not fade.
It waited.
He stood.
The world did not close around him when he moved. It widened.
He took another step, then another, feeling the absence of containment with each one. The Blood Sigil stayed with him—no longer smoothing, no longer correcting—only present.
By late afternoon, he realized something simple and irrevocable:
Inside, survival had been quiet.
Outside, survival would be visible.
Every error would leave a mark someone else could see.
He did not turn back.
Not because he was brave.
Because turning back would have meant choosing to be carried again.
He kept walking as the light thinned and the land ahead refused to promise safety.
Behind him, the cave mouth receded into shadow.
Ahead, the world waited—large, unfinished, and unconcerned with what he had been before.