The Hermit asked to speak to Cael alone.
This was unusual enough to alarm everyone. Since the battle on the surface, they'd maintained a policy of constant proximity—someone always within earshot, someone always monitoring. The void's escalating influence on Cael made isolation dangerous, and the Hermit's declining health made solitude cruel.
But the old man insisted. And something in his voice—a finality that even his failing orbits couldn't disguise—told them this wasn't negotiable.
Cael sat beside his bed. The machines beeped their steady count. The Hermit's face was gray—not the metaphorical gray of exhaustion, but the literal gray of tissue deprived of sufficient blood flow, a color that Cael's enhanced Sight read as the gravitational signature of a body consuming itself.
"I haven't been honest with you," the Hermit said.
Cael waited. His Touch orbit could already feel the weight of what was coming—a density of confession pressing outward from the old man's failing body like steam from a cracked pipe.
"I told you I tried to open the thirteenth orbit once. That I lost seven orbits in the attempt. That my body aged thirty years in three seconds." He coughed, the sound wet and terminal. "All true. But I left out the important part."
"What part?"
"The part where I succeeded."
The machines beeped. Water dripped sideways in the pipes above. Cael's twelve orbits held their steady rotation, but beneath them, the thirteenth stirred—sensing the proximity of relevant information, of secrets that pertained to its nature.
"I opened it," the Hermit said. "For less than a second. A fraction of a fraction. Just long enough to see what was on the other side." His eyes found Cael's, and in them burned the remnant of a memory so terrible that thirteen years of physical decay hadn't been enough to erode it. "The void isn't empty, Cael. I told you that. I told you the First Core is there, waiting to return. But I didn't tell you what else I saw."
"What did you see?"
"Everyone." The word came out broken. "Every person the Gravity Fall took. Every consciousness erased from this reality when the first door opened sixteen years ago. They're there. On the other side. Not dead—stored. Suspended in the void's medium like insects in amber, their gravitational signatures preserved but inaccessible. Thousands of people. Millions, maybe."
Cael felt the blood drain from his face. "My parents?"
"Everyone's parents. Everyone's children. Everyone who walked toward the light during the Fall and didn't come back." The Hermit's hand gripped Cael's with a strength that his wasted muscles shouldn't have possessed. "The void didn't destroy them. It collected them. And the First Core uses them as bait. Every whisper you hear offering to bring your parents back—it can deliver. They're there. They're real. They're waiting."
The thirteenth orbit pulsed. A deep, resonant throb that Cael felt in his marrow. The void wasn't lying. It never had been. His parents were there, on the other side of the door, suspended in the dark, waiting for someone to reach through and pull them out.
"That's why I lost seven orbits," the Hermit said. "Not from the opening itself—from the closing. When I saw what was there, I tried to reach through. Tried to pull someone out. My wife. She'd been taken in the Fall. I felt her signature in the void—recognized her gravitational fingerprint after eleven years of grief." His voice shattered. "I touched her. For one tenth of a second, I touched her. And the void used that connection to rip seven orbits out of me. Payment for the attempt."
Tears ran down the old man's gray face, cutting channels through the papery skin.
"The void lies about the method, Cael. Not about the destination. Your parents are there. The offer is real. But the cost of retrieving them is always greater than you can afford. Always. The void sets the price after you've already reached through, and the price is always everything you have."
"Then why tell me this?" Cael asked. His voice was barely a whisper. "If knowing makes the temptation worse—"
"Because not knowing makes it impossible to resist. The void's power is in ambiguity—in the maybe. As long as you don't know whether your parents are truly there, the whisper can exploit your uncertainty. Now you know. They're there. They're real. And reaching for them will cost you everything." The Hermit's grip tightened. "Certainty is a shield, Cael. Even terrible certainty."
Cael sat with the knowledge like a man sitting with a live grenade. His parents were alive. Not alive in any meaningful sense—suspended, stored, preserved like specimens in a collection—but their consciousness existed. Their gravitational signatures persisted. On the other side of a door that lived behind his sternum, his mother and father waited in the dark.
And he could never reach them without destroying everything.
"One more thing," the Hermit said. His strength was fading—the confession had cost him dearly, burning through reserves his body couldn't replace. "When I touched the void—when I reached through and felt my wife—something else felt me. The First Core. It was… curious. Amused. It let me touch her specifically so I would try to pull. The extraction attempt was the mechanism it used to damage me."
"A trap."
"A trap baited with the most powerful force in the universe: love." The Hermit closed his eyes. "The void doesn't need to be clever, Cael. It just needs to be patient. And it has been patient for a very long time."
Cael stayed beside the old man until his breathing steadied into the shallow rhythm of exhausted sleep. Then he stood, walked to the corridor, and found Lyra and Dorn waiting—not asking, not pressing, just present.
He told them everything.
When he finished, the silence in the tunnel was the heaviest thing any of them had ever carried. But they carried it together, the way Lyra had told him to, and the weight—while terrible—did not crush them.