The decree spread the way Ben suspected most decrees probably did in a place with no writing and no printing press and nothing resembling a bulletin board: unevenly, imperfectly, and with an alarming number of variations that bore only a passing resemblance to what he'd actually said.

He heard some of them secondhand, in the days that followed, carried past his hollow by tribe members who had no idea he could hear every word of their conversations whether or not anyone knelt to ask him anything. One elder insisted the Oracle had demanded hands be washed exactly seven times before each meal, for reasons no one questioned because seven apparently sounded sufficiently sacred. A pair of children had turned "wash your hands" into a rhyming taunt they chanted at anyone caught skipping the ritual, which Ben found almost unbearably delightful for reasons he couldn't fully explain to himself. Someone else had apparently decided that only the left hand needed washing, since the right hand was the one used for eating and therefore already "clean by purpose," a piece of logic Ben spent an embarrassing amount of internal effort trying and failing to follow.

Compliance, in other words, was spotty. Some households took to it seriously, scrubbing at the mud-caked creases of small hands before meals with the grim determination of people executing a religious obligation they didn't fully understand but weren't willing to risk ignoring. Others treated it the way Ben's own students used to treat homework assigned on a Friday — technically acknowledged, practically forgotten by Monday.

Ben spent those days doing the only thing available to him: listening, endlessly, to the daily texture of a life he was slowly starting to understand from the inside out despite never having lived a single hour of it. He learned the rhythm of the hollow the way he'd once learned the rhythm of a school year — not from any single lesson, but from the accumulation of a thousand small, unremarkable sounds. The particular clatter of the morning foraging parties leaving before first light. The lull in the middle of the day when the heat pressed everyone into whatever shade they could find. The specific, contented murmur of a meal being shared out fairly, and the different, sharper murmur of one being shared out unfairly. He learned to recognize individual voices long before he had names to put to most of them — the elder who complained about her joints every single morning as if freshly discovering the complaint for the first time, the two boys who bickered constantly and yet were never more than a few feet apart, the low, steady hum of someone who sang, badly and often, while mending hides near the eastern wall.

He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he liked them. Not in the abstract, dutiful way he supposed an actual Oracle might have been expected to regard its worshippers, but in the specific, exasperated, fond way he'd liked thirty different classrooms full of thirty different children over the years — fully aware of their flaws, unable to stop rooting for them anyway.

He couldn't do much about any of it directly. That was, by now, a limitation he'd started to map out with the same patient thoroughness he used to bring to figuring out a new classroom's fire drill procedure: he could hear everything, all the time, from every direction the wind carried sound to him. He could not speak unless someone knelt in front of him and asked, and even then, only in response to whatever they'd actually asked, not as some kind of running commentary on everything he happened to overhear in the meantime. He'd tried it anyway, more than once, out of pure frustrated habit — tried to "call out" to a household boiling something in clearly contaminated water thirty feet from his hollow, the exact way he used to call out across a playground to stop a fight before it started. Nothing happened. No valve, no pressure, nothing but the same dead, voiceless stillness that answered every attempt he made without an audience kneeling in front of him.

It was, he decided, the single most maddening part of his entire new existence — worse than the panic of the first night, worse than not having eyes or hands. He could see the mistake happening. He simply had to wait for someone to walk over and ask him about it, and there was nothing he could do to hurry that along.

*This,* he thought, more than once during those first uneven days, *is exactly what it must feel like to watch a kid do their math homework wrong from across the room and not be allowed to say anything until they raise their hand.*

He tried, in those same days, to map out the exact boundaries of what he could and couldn't do, the way he might once have mapped the boundaries of a new curriculum before the school year started. He confirmed, through a slow, frustrating process of trial and error, that the ritual didn't require the exact same words each time — Rekk's formal phrasing worked, but so did the flat, exhausted demands of people who'd stopped caring about ceremony days ago and just wanted an answer. He confirmed that he could apparently sense, in some vague and unreliable way, when someone nearby was building toward kneeling before they actually did — a kind of anticipatory pressure that occasionally let him brace for what was coming, though it told him nothing about what they intended to ask. He confirmed, most usefully, that once someone knelt, he could keep talking for as long as they stayed kneeling and kept engaging, which meant a single visit could stretch to cover a great deal of ground if the visitor was patient enough to let it.

None of it solved the actual problem in front of him. He still couldn't call out. He still couldn't warn anyone of anything they hadn't thought to ask about. He could only wait, catalogue what he heard, and hope someone eventually walked over with the right question before whatever he'd noticed became urgent enough to matter.

The waiting ended roughly two weeks later, in the worst possible way.

It started small — the kind of small that Ben, in his old life, would have recognized instantly from a dozen different school-year outbreaks of the same thing: a child running a fever, then two, then four, complaints of stomach pain, a few cases bad enough that worried parents kept their kids home from whatever passed for daily chores among Shardkin youth. He heard it building for days before anyone thought to ask him about it directly — heard the coughing, the crying, the low, anxious murmur of adults comparing notes outside their shelters, the specific tired panic of parents watching something spread through their children and not knowing why.

He also heard, with a frustration that had nowhere useful to go, exactly where the problem was coming from, well before anyone asked.

The tribe drew its drinking water from a spring near the eastern wall of the hollow — clean at its source, as far as Ben's borrowed hearing could tell, but funneled downstream through a shallow channel that ran uncomfortably close to the spot where the tribe had, for as long as anyone alive remembered, disposed of hunting waste and anything else nobody wanted lying around camp. It wasn't malice or ignorance exactly, in the way Ben understood ignorance. It was simply how it had always been done, by people who had never had reason to think of "upstream" and "downstream" as anything other than words for directions.

He listened to it for four straight days, unable to say a single word about it, growing more agitated in a way he hadn't expected a rock to be capable of being. He replayed, obsessively, every hygiene lesson he'd ever given a classroom of seven-year-olds, every poster about germs he'd taped to a wall, every single time he'd said the words "wash your hands" without once, in his entire teaching career, having to explain that the water itself might be the thing making everyone sick in the first place. It hadn't occurred to him to mention it, because it hadn't occurred to him that the tribe's water and waste sources were anywhere near each other. He'd assumed — carelessly, he now realized — that basic geography would keep them apart the way it mostly did back home. It hadn't occurred to him to ask.

*Lesson learned,* he thought grimly, on day three of listening to a small, frightened tribe get progressively sicker without being able to say a single useful word about why. *Never assume the thing you didn't ask about is fine.*

He spent that third night, if it could even be called a night for someone with no eyes to close, running through every single decree he'd given so far, hunting for other assumptions he might have made without realizing it — other pieces of geography, custom, or basic fact about this world he'd taken for granted the way he might once have assumed every classroom had the same number of outlets or the same brand of chalk. He found, uncomfortably, several: he had no idea what the tribe actually ate most of the year, no clear picture of the terrain beyond the hollow's walls, no understanding yet of how far the nearest threat might be or what shape it took. He had been dispensing advice with the calm authority of an expert while operating, in truth, on a body of local knowledge thinner than a single unit's worth of lesson planning. It did not make him regret what he'd said so far. It did make him considerably more careful about what he assumed next time, and more determined to actually ask questions of his own the moment anyone gave him the opening to.

By the fourth day, the coughing had spread to enough households that Ben could track its progress almost like a lesson plan gone wrong, each new case another small, specific grief layered on top of the last. He heard a father pacing outside a shelter long into the night, murmuring the same handful of comforting nonsense words to a child too feverish to understand them. He heard, worse, the particular silence of a household that had simply stopped making noise at all, the kind of quiet that in his old life had usually meant either sleep or something considerably worse, and he spent an unmeasured, agonizing stretch of that night unable to tell which.

On the fifth day, someone finally knelt.

It wasn't Rekk this time, and it wasn't Grok — Ben had learned the small one's name by then, passed along secondhand the way most things reached him, and had started listening for that particular light, careful footstep without quite admitting to himself that he was doing it. This time it was a mother, her voice raw with two sleepless nights, kneeling hard enough that Ben heard her knees hit stone without any of the careful hesitation the others had shown.

"My son can't keep anything down," she said, no preamble, no ritual phrasing, just the flat, exhausted urgency of someone who had run out of patience for ceremony. "Half the children in the eastern shelters are the same. Tell me what to do. Please."

Four days of pent-up frustration finally found somewhere to go.

"Your water," Ben said, faster and more directly than he'd spoken to anyone yet, the words coming almost before he'd finished shaping them. "The channel that runs past the waste pits — that's where it's coming from. Not a curse. Not anything in the air. The water your children are drinking is running past where you throw out what the hunt leaves behind, and it's carrying sickness downstream with it every single day."

A pause, and Ben could hear the woman's breathing change — not relief exactly, not yet, but the specific shift of someone who had just been handed something they could actually act on instead of something to simply endure.

"Move the drinking channel," Ben went on, laying it out now with the same methodical clarity he'd used with Rekk on the first night, unwilling to waste a second of this rare opening. "Draw water only from above the waste pits, never below. Boil it first if you can manage fire near the channel — even a little heat kills most of what's making the children sick. And whatever water has already touched that channel below the pits, don't use it for drinking or cooking, no matter how thirsty anyone is. Use it for anything else. Just not that."

"That's it?" the woman asked, and there was something almost angry in the question — not at Ben, he realized, but at how simple it sounded held up against four days of watching her son shake with fever, against everything she must have already tried on her own out of sheer desperation before finally kneeling here at all. "Move where we get water from, and that's enough? After everything, that's all it was?"

"It won't fix what's already sick today," Ben said, as gently as he knew how to manage. "But it will stop more children from getting sick tomorrow. And most children who are sick from bad water, not from something worse, get better on their own once the bad water stops. Keep them drinking clean water, even if they don't want to. That matters more right now than almost anything else you could do."

The woman didn't say anything else. Ben heard her rise, unsteadily, and hurry off faster than she'd arrived, and he understood, without needing to be told, exactly where she was going and how fast the news would travel this time — faster than the first decree ever had, carried by people frightened enough to actually listen closely to every word instead of turning it into a rhyme within the hour.

Within that same day, Ben heard the channel work begin — voices arguing about where exactly to redirect the flow, a disagreement about whether the change should be permanent or just until the sickness passed, someone insisting they should ask the Oracle again just to be sure they'd understood correctly, which they promptly did, three more times over the course of the afternoon, each time getting the same answer delivered with the same patient repetition Ben had spent a career perfecting for children who needed to hear a set of instructions more than once before it stuck.

He didn't hear about Grok again that day, not directly, but he thought about the boy anyway, more than once, in the gaps between anxious visitors — wondered whether he was among the sick children, wondered whether the sharp little mind that had asked the only real question on the first night was lying somewhere in the eastern shelters right now, feverish and frightened like the rest.

It would be two more days before Ben learned the answer, and when he did, it would come from a very different direction than he expected — not from Grok himself, but from the furious, grief-thickened voice of an old warrior who had lost patience with all of this long before tonight, and intended to make that clear to the entire tribe at once.

In the meantime, the tribe's response to the water decree spread with a speed and seriousness the hygiene decree had never quite managed on its own, carried this time by fear rather than curiosity, which Ben had learned by now was a far more reliable engine for getting anything actually done. He heard the channel-moving finished by the following evening, faster than he'd expected given how little proper tools the tribe seemed to have for the work — mostly hands, a few crude wooden implements, and the sheer stubborn effort of people frightened enough to dig through the night. He heard someone else, a few households over, boiling water over a small fire with the meticulous, slightly obsessive care of a person who had decided this single act was the one thing standing between their family and disaster, checking and rechecking that the flame stayed lit long enough.

He heard, too, the inevitable questions that came with any new practice adopted under pressure rather than fully understood — how long counted as "boiled enough," whether water that had merely gotten warm counted at all, whether the change needed to continue once the sickness passed or could be abandoned once things felt normal again. He answered each one as it came, patiently, the way he'd once answered the same three questions from different students in different words across an entire career, understanding that repetition wasn't a failure of teaching but simply the ordinary cost of it.

By the sixth day, the fevers among the children who'd fallen sick first had begun, slowly, to break. Ben heard it in the change of tone in the households he'd been tracking most closely — the frightened murmuring giving way, gradually, to something closer to exhausted relief, a mother laughing, briefly and shakily, at something her recovering son had said. It wasn't proof of anything by Skritch's later standard, not yet. But it was, to Ben, the first real evidence that something he'd said from inside a rock in a world he still barely understood had actually, measurably, made a difference to someone who would otherwise have kept getting sicker.

That night, at least, Ben allowed himself something he hadn't quite let himself feel since waking up in this cold slab of rock: something close to hope. Not certainty. Not yet. Just the quiet, cautious satisfaction of a teacher who had finally, finally gotten a lesson through to a student who badly needed to hear it — even if it had taken four unbearable days of silence to get there.

*Small mercy,* he thought, listening to the sound of the redirected channel beginning to trickle along its new course in the dark. *But I'll take it.*