The weeks following Thump's arrival had settled into something Ben was almost tempted to call routine, if a life spent entirely as a listening, occasionally speaking rock could ever properly be called routine. Wounds were cleaned more consistently now, water drawn more carefully, and the two men Ben privately thought of as his most complicated students continued to orbit each other at a careful, unresolved distance, neither one quite ready to close it. It was into this uneasy, improving quiet that Rekk arrived one afternoon with an entirely new kind of problem, one that had nothing to do with skepticism or grief and everything to do with the ordinary, exhausting difficulty of keeping information intact as it passed from person to person across an entire tribe with no writing to hold it still.

The problem, as Rekk explained it one afternoon while kneeling in front of the stone with the particular weariness of a leader who had already solved several other problems that same day, was that instructions kept drifting the longer they traveled from mouth to mouth. A decree told clearly to one household became, three households later, something subtly different — sometimes harmlessly different, sometimes not. He'd caught one family insisting only cold water counted as properly clean, another convinced the whole ritual only mattered before the first meal of the day and not afterward. Grok did what he could to correct the drift wherever he heard it, but Grok couldn't be everywhere, and small children, in particular, seemed to lose the exact wording within a day no matter how carefully it was first explained to them.

"Children remember songs longer than they remember instructions," Rekk said, half a question, half a complaint. "My own mother could recite hunting chants she learned before she could properly speak. If there is some way to fix your words into something like that, I would hear it."

Ben, turning the request over, felt something almost unbearably familiar stir loose in him — a decade and a half of experience telling him exactly what to do with a roomful of small children who needed to remember something boring long enough for it to actually matter. He had, in his old life, written more simple rhymes about hygiene than he could easily count, sung in a dozen slightly different tunes to a dozen slightly different classes, most of them mortifyingly simple and all of them, without exception, effective in a way that plain instruction never quite managed.

He remembered, with a clarity that surprised him given how much else about his old life had already started to blur at the edges, a particular September years back when an entire kindergarten class had come down with the same stomach bug within a single week, and how the classroom aide, at her wit's end, had finally set the hygiene instructions to the tune of a song already stuck in every five-year-old's head that season, and how the outbreak had simply stopped within days, not because the children suddenly understood germ theory, but because they couldn't stop singing the reminder to each other on the playground. He hadn't thought of that aide in months, possibly years, before this exact moment. He found it strange, and quietly moving, that some fragment of her solution had apparently survived clearly enough in whatever remained of his memory to be useful again, in a cave, for an entirely different species, a lifetime and a death later.

He hadn't expected to ever need that particular skill again. He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he still had it.

"Give me a moment," he told Rekk, aware even as he said it that he had no real idea whether whatever came out of him next would land as intended, and then, before he'd fully decided whether this was a good idea, let the words come out roughly the way they always had, matched to a simple rise-and-fall rhythm a child could pick up after hearing it twice:

*Before you eat, before you rest,* *Wash your hands, wash them best.* *Dirt and rot don't show their teeth,* *Wash above and wash beneath.* *Clean the cut, wrap it tight,* *Sleep in peace, wake up right.*

It was, by any honest measure, an unremarkable little verse, plain and functional, the kind of thing Ben had once dashed off between lesson plans without expecting anyone to remember it past the following week.

There was a silence on the other end of the ritual long enough that Ben genuinely wondered whether he'd made an enormous miscalculation — whether reducing sacred instruction to something that rhymed like a nursery chant would strike Rekk as an insult rather than a gift. He had, after all, no real precedent yet for how far he could push the tribe's evolving image of what an Oracle's words were supposed to sound like, and a silly, singsong rhyme was a considerable departure from the grave, weighty pronouncements Rekk himself had delivered on that very first night.

Ben braced, in the particular helpless way available to something with no face to wince with, for a response that dismissed the whole idea outright.

"Say it again," Rekk said instead, and Ben, hearing something in his voice that sounded almost like delight fighting through the usual gravity, obliged.

Rekk repeated it back once, carefully, then again, and Ben could hear the exact moment the rhythm settled properly into his memory, the small satisfied exhale of someone who has just secured something he badly needed to hold onto. By evening, half the children in the eastern shelters were singing some approximation of it, badly, joyfully, with the specific tunelessness particular to very young children who have grasped the words faster than the melody. By the following week, it had drifted — as everything seemed to, in a tribe with no writing to hold anything still — into three or four slightly different versions, one of which had somehow acquired an extra verse about not licking your fingers before washing them that Ben was fairly sure he'd never said and rather admired anyway for its specificity.

What he had not anticipated, and what he found almost unbearably funny once he understood what was happening, was how quickly the song stopped being merely useful and became something closer to ceremony.

It started small — a handful of households singing it together before sharing a meal, the way a family might once have murmured a private word of thanks over food. Within two weeks, it had spread into something performed collectively, entire clusters of shelters gathering at mealtimes to sing the whole thing through together, hands raised and mimed through the washing motions as they sang, before anyone actually touched food at all. Someone had added a small bow at the end, directed generally toward the hollow, that Ben suspected was meant sincerely and struck him, every single time he heard it happen, as one of the most absurd things he had ever been on the receiving end of in either of his two lives.

*I wrote a song about germs for seven-year-olds,* he thought, more than once, listening to a cluster of grown warriors solemnly humming the melody before dinner, their voices deep and gravelly and entirely unsuited to a tune that had once been sung by small children in bright classrooms. *It has become a religious rite. I don't know whether to be proud or extremely alarmed.*

He mentioned as much to Grok, half-joking, the next time the boy knelt to ask an unrelated question, and was met with a response that startled him into reconsidering his own amusement.

"Why does it need to be only one or the other?" Grok asked, with the particular directness Ben had come to expect from him whenever a question actually interested him. "The elders sing chants over the hunt before it leaves, and nobody thinks that's strange, even though everyone knows the chant itself doesn't guide anyone's spear. It isn't really about the words doing something magical. It's about everyone doing the same thing together, at the same time, so it feels like one tribe instead of a hundred separate people who happen to live near each other. Your song does the same thing. I don't think it matters that it started as something simple you made up to help children remember to wash their hands. It's ours now. That's allowed to be true even if it's also a little bit funny."

Ben found he had no immediate answer to that, turning over, for the first time with real seriousness, the possibility that he'd been quietly underestimating something all along — treating every strange, reverent turn his simple lessons took as an amusing misunderstanding to be corrected eventually, rather than as the entirely legitimate, organic way a group of people built something to hold themselves together. He wasn't at all sure, sitting with the thought, that Grok was wrong to see it the second way.

"That's a wiser way of looking at it than I managed on my own," Ben admitted. "I think I've been quietly hoping, this whole time, that things would eventually go back to being simple instructions taken exactly as I meant them. I'm starting to think that's not actually possible, once something's been out in the world long enough for people to make it their own. Maybe it isn't supposed to be possible."

"Is that bad?" Grok asked, with a note of genuine uncertainty that suggested the question mattered to him more than he was letting on.

"No," Ben said, and meant it more than he'd expected to when he started the sentence. "I think it might be the best thing that's happened here so far, actually. Better than any single decree I've given. A rule people follow because they're told to eventually stops the moment nobody's watching anymore. A song people choose to keep singing, long after they've forgotten it was ever just an instruction, doesn't need anyone watching at all."

Thump, predictably, seized on the song with the same unstoppable thoroughness he'd brought to everything else since his conversation with Ben. Ben heard him, within days, insisting that the song be sung in full — every verse, including the finger-licking addendum he'd apparently decided was canonical — before any meal he happened to be present for, correcting anyone who mumbled through it or skipped a line with the same flat, immovable authority he might once have used to correct a hunting formation.

Ben noticed, in the days after the song first spread, a smaller but no less telling shift taking place alongside it: the youngest children of the tribe, the ones barely old enough to walk steadily, had started performing the hand-washing gestures unprompted, well before anyone reminded them to, simply because the motion had attached itself to the melody in their minds too firmly to separate the two. He found himself unexpectedly moved by this, in a way the grown warriors' reluctant compliance never quite managed to match — there was something almost unbearably hopeful about watching an entire generation absorb a piece of basic survival wisdom so early and so completely that it would likely never occur to them, as adults, that hands could ever reasonably go unwashed before a meal. Whatever came next for this tribe, Ben thought, that generation would carry this one small, solid piece of it forward without even remembering there had ever been a version of themselves that needed to be taught.

This went, for the most part, reasonably well, until it collided directly with Grum.

Ben heard it happen from a distance — Thump's voice, carrying easily across the camp, informing a cluster of warriors including Grum that the song would be sung properly, all the way through, before the shared evening meal, no exceptions, and Grum's voice, sharp with the specific irritation of a proud man being told what to do by someone he'd have once considered an equal at best.

"I did not survive as many seasons as I have by singing children's rhymes before I eat," Grum said, loud enough that Ben suspected it was meant for the whole gathering rather than just Thump.

"Then you'll survive a few more seasons singing this one," Thump said, entirely unmoved, "or you'll go hungry at this fire tonight. Your choice."

There was a long, tense pause — long enough that Ben, listening intently, genuinely couldn't guess which way it would break. Grum was proud, and prouder still in front of witnesses, and Ben half expected him to simply walk off to eat alone rather than concede anything at all, particularly to a man enforcing a rule that had, however indirectly, elevated his own son's standing in the tribe.

What actually happened surprised Ben rather more than either outcome he'd braced for.

Grum sang it. Badly, flatly, through what sounded like gritted teeth, skipping the bow entirely and refusing to mime the hand motions with anything resembling sincerity — but he sang every verse, all the way through, in front of the entire fire circle, because the alternative was visibly, publicly going hungry over a children's song, and even Grum's considerable pride apparently had a limit to how much dignity it was willing to spend defending that particular hill.

Ben heard, in the ripple of quiet laughter that followed from the rest of the gathering — not cruel laughter, he noted, more the kind that comes from watching a proud man lose a small, harmless battle he'd picked entirely on his own — something that felt, cautiously, like the first real crack in Grum's armor since the whole business with the stone had started. Not remorse. Not warmth toward his son, not yet, not anywhere close. But a crack, small and involuntary, in the specific certainty that none of this deserved to be taken seriously.

Ben thought, listening to it, of the many small, undignified compromises he'd watched stubborn adults make over the years, usually right before they finally let go of a position they'd been defending out of pure inertia rather than any belief still left in it. It rarely happened all at once. It happened exactly like this — one grudging, badly-sung verse at a time, in front of witnesses, because the cost of holding the line had finally outgrown whatever the line was originally defending.

*Small mercy,* Ben thought again, borrowing his own favorite phrase from weeks earlier, listening to the fire circle settle back into its usual evening murmur once the song had finished its work. *But I notice you're still counting them, so I suppose they're adding up to something.*

Even Skritch's small remaining circle of holdouts, Ben noticed, had quietly begun mumbling along by the third week, less out of any change of heart than out of the simple social awkwardness of being the only voice at a fire circle staying silent while everyone else sang. Ben found something almost endearingly human in that particular failure mode of stubbornness — that peer pressure, in the end, could accomplish in a matter of weeks what philosophical argument alone had failed to manage in months.

By the time the season turned, the handwashing song had become simply part of how the tribe ate a meal, sung without much thought by most, muttered through by a stubborn few, but sung all the same, every single time, by nearly everyone in the hollow — a strange, small, indestructible thread of shared culture that Ben had never once intended to create, born entirely by accident out of a tired man's habit of turning boring instructions into something children could hold onto, and now, somehow, holding an entire tribe together in a way none of his careful decrees about water and wounds had quite managed on their own.

He noticed, too, small variations continuing to bloom around the edges of the song the way wildflowers crept into a garden no matter how carefully it was tended — a second verse someone had added about checking a friend's back for wounds they couldn't see themselves, a slightly different melody sung by the households nearest the eastern wall that had drifted, over enough repetitions, into something almost unrecognizable from what Ben had originally hummed. He thought, more than once during those weeks, about how differently he might have reacted to this same drift back in his old life, standing in front of a classroom insisting on the one correct version of a lesson, correcting every deviation as though precision alone were the point of teaching anything at all. He understood now, with a clarity that felt hard-won rather than simply given, that precision had never actually been the point. The point had always been whether the lesson survived long enough, and traveled far enough, to still be doing its quiet work years after the person who first spoke it had been forgotten entirely. Measured against that standard, a slightly mangled verse about checking a friend's back for hidden wounds was not a failure of his teaching at all. It was, if anything, the clearest proof yet that the teaching had actually worked.

He found, to his own quiet surprise, that he'd stopped minding the drift entirely. If anything, he'd started listening for it, curious each time what new shape his small, silly rhyme would be wearing by the time it reached whichever household happened to be singing it that particular evening.

He thought, one quiet night listening to three different versions of his own song overlapping faintly from different corners of the hollow, that this was probably the closest thing to legacy a rock with no hands and no children of his own was ever going to get to leave behind — not a single, perfect, unchanging truth handed down exactly as given, but something messier and more alive than that, something that belonged to the people singing it now considerably more than it belonged to whoever had first hummed it into existence.

He found himself wondering, listening to it echo across the hollow on a particularly clear evening, what other accidental pieces of his old, ordinary teaching life might end up reshaping this place in ways he couldn't yet predict — and found, rather than dread at the thought, something closer to quiet anticipation.