It’s dark. Still dark. I look around and I can barely see past the soft glow from the fire which even now is slowly dying. It flickers, the flames set in a small circle of stones, the stones set inside a wider circle of sleeping mats, the mats ringed by the shrubs and trees and rock in this clearing, and beyond that the darkness. I try to look harder, but give up quickly, the contrast makes it impossible. Maybe try again when the flames are gone from the fire.

I sit there on my woven mat of reeds and skins, looking at nothing and hearing nothing. The silence is oppressive, it pushes in on me like a great weight around my head, and I begin to feel dizzy. I should be asleep; I should have been asleep hours ago. We’ve all been walking for so long and I’m tired, but just looking down at the worn spot on my bedding where my head rests I feel bitter, and angry. I stop looking at it, and look at the darkness again. My hand rises, and falls on my blanket with a muffled paff sound. My token resistance is swallowed instantly by the silence, which seems to somehow mock the effort. I do it again, harder, but again the pathetic thud is dispersed easily by the unrelenting sea of quiet that I suddenly feel pressing in on me more than I can bear. My head swims, like the silence drowning me. Something snaps inside me and I rise from my bed, take my blade and raise it high, stopping just short of hurling it at the tree directly before me, past another bedroll and its sleeping occupant.

I realise that I’m losing it, that the journey here has been affecting me too much. We’ve been keeping quiet for so long, three days without a word, without more than the occasional snapping of a twig. My breath catches in my throat, I want to shout and scream and slam my sword against a stone until I make so much noise I go deaf. It’s no good, I know it will only get worse, and there’s still a long way to the standing stones where this all started. I take my sword, wrap the deep blue cloak around my neck once more, and pick a random direction. The brass clasp is heavy, it presses against my shoulder, a strong sensation in this sea of nothingness. I pass another bedroll, and nudge the man sleeping in it several times until he looks up at me. His eyes focus, he squints slightly as if he’s not sure what he’s seeing, and I turn and walk away into the woods. I walk for five minutes, enough for them all to wake and move on, and enough for me to find a place with some large rocks scattered about. I grab one, straining and lifting it above my head, and I feel a hard, cold lump in my chest. This is it, the slightest sound calls the enemy and now I’ve picked this rock up there’s no going back, I’m a dead man.

I take a deep breath, try and think of something to yell, but there’s nothing good enough so I just shout as loud as I can, as hard as I can, and bring the stone crashing down against another of its kind, shattering it. It breaks almost cleanly in two, but the split has a small kink right in the middle, just a tiny part where the break moves direction for a bit before resuming its course. I pick one of the halves up and yell again; as my throat protests its use with a sharp quaver in pitch I hurl the stone away at a great boulder which it strikes with a crack like a whip, or a hammer, and I hear it and it’s beautiful. The other half, not making such a satisfying sound but this one strikes a spark, which is excellent. Then as I draw my short blade and swing it against a tree with a clang I feel something grasp hold of my mind, something dark and slick and unwelcome clouding my thoughts.

My vision blurrs, the sound fades and even as I swing my sword against the tree again the sensation in my arm is leaving me. I’ve seen the monsters killing, tendrils wrapping around people and engulfing them, leaving hem pale and emaciated and covered in hundreds, thousands of tiny thin little cuts that go right down to the bone. I swing at it, defying the futility of my actions with more of the same, and my blade bites into something. Instantly the haze around my mind vanishes, and I see something on my blade. Black. . . green. . . blue. . . red. Red stains, blood on my blade, and it’s not mine. At my feet is a man, bearing a terrible gash across his gut. He is naked, and covered in paints that form a pattern my eyes won’t focus on, and my head starts to ache as I look at him there. I look up, and swing my sword against the tree once more, yelling louder than ever. I got one, no idea how but I got one and I haven’t died in vain, I’ve made them pay for my blood.

I find the biggest rock I think I can lift and heave at it, my arms scraping against its weathered surface and the grit somehow getting into my mouth, as it always seems to. I lift it slowly, up to my chest, then lean to the side and let its weight pull me to the great boulder, heaving at the last second with all my might and splitting the rock against it with a terrific thunderclap of shattering stone. A fragment finds my eye, the cheeky b*****d, and I wipe it away with irritation. I find my sword again, and yell louder. More of the same, again and again, and the fog closes in again. I start swinging wildly in all directions, hoping to feel that bite again.

Three days later, the group find me. They’d taken a day to reach the stones, fought off the creatures that once dead were just painted men, shattered the stones they could not return to equilibrium and taken a leisurely walk back through the no longer silent forest. It is only by chance that one of them hears me, collapsed against a tree and still bashing the hilt of my sword against the well-scarred trunk. My blade had taken that exact moment to shatter, the sound they heard, or I’d have not ever been found. I take a swing at one of the things that I can’t even see, and it steps aside and punches me clean across the temple, knocking me to the ground. I tell it it’s a b*****d as I lapse into darkness.

Another week and I open my eyes, again to silence. There’s someone there next to me, and since I can’t seem to move even slightly without intense pain I ask them why it’s still quiet. They tell me it’s a day of silence for the dead, now that the world is set to rights again. I sit up, my eyes popping out of my head from the agony coursing through my nerves, and get the healer - she’s quite pretty, I notice - to carry me to the window. People in the streets have stopped, and are waiting, and it’s just like it was for all those years before. I grab the sill and start shouting.

“Are you all out of your minds? Years of silence and acting like a statue every night after dark, whispering whenever you’re in the shadows and always keeping your breathing slow, and you want to be silent for a day?! Who thought this up, they ought to be dragged out and poked with blunt spears?” The healer tries to tell me to come back inside, I tell her to shush. The irony of this is not lost on me. “Someone sing something! Make a noise, jump about, prove that it’s over damn you all!” Still nothing, they probably haven’t even tried yet. “Fine, then I’ll start!” I sing the first verse of a song that I learned as a kid and was told never to sing because it was so filthy. Only song I know. By the second verse everyone’s joined in, and when it’s finished another one starts, one I don’t recognise.

I feel heavy again and slump down, a pale white haze covering my view of the dancing. I think I might be dying, which would really suck. “I hope this isn’t the end for me, that’d really suck.” The healer tells me no, I’m just heavily sedated. That sounds fine to me. “How’d I get up then?” She asks me how I kept breaking stones and yelling for three whole days, and that sounds fine too. “I’m knackered.” She takes me back to bed and I wonder how she’s able to haul me around like this; I thought she looked quite dainty. I close my eyes to the sound of songs and dancing, and stop thinking. A few hours later, I stop breathing too. It was worth it though, totally worth it. You should have seen those rocks shatter, the sparks and grit flying everywhere, and the sound, the noise, the life. I’d do it again if I could, in a heartbeat.