Project Knightfall

The Man Who Came From Below

(as collected by Anonymous, Third Age)

Long ago, though not so long that no one remembered, and not so recently that anyone agreed on the details, there was a village that lived at the edge of a hole.

The villagers called it the Deep Road.

They said it had no bottom, though no one had ever dropped anything valuable enough to check. Old folk swore they heard wind blowing up from the darkness. Children dared each other to stand near the edge and listen.

“Don’t lean too far,” the grown-ups warned. “Nothing that falls down the Deep Road ever comes back.”

Everyone in the village knew that rule.

Everyone obeyed it.

Until the day something climbed out.

—

The day it happened was not special.

No festival bunting flapped from windows. No comet blazed across the sky. No ominous crow sat on the well and made meaningful eye contact with anyone in particular.

It was just an ordinary day.

Children chased chickens. Mothers argued for cheaper bread. Fathers complained about the weather. The village did what villages do: it carried on, small and busy and mostly content.

Then the bell on the old watchtower began to ring.

The watchtower bell only rang for three things:

Storms

Monsters

Visitors

It did not ring like a storm. Storm-ringing was slow and heavy.

It did not ring like monsters. Monster-ringing was fast and panicked.

This time, the bell rang in a puzzled way.

Bong…

…pause.

Bong…

…pause.

Bong…

“Visitor,” the elders decided.

“From where?” someone asked.

The watchman pointed with a shaking hand.

“From there.”

Every villager who could walk followed his finger.

They gathered at the edge of the Deep Road.

They had always imagined that if anything ever came from below, it would be a monster. It would have claws and teeth, and perhaps it would breathe fire or venom.

What climbed up was… a man.

He was not beautiful, not in the way stories usually describe important people.

He had plain dark hair, plain dark eyes, and a plain, tired face. His clothes were torn and stained. Shadows clung to him even in the afternoon sun.

He pulled himself over the stone lip of the chasm, lay there for a long moment, and laughed.

It was a strange sound.

Laughter.

“Sky,” he whispered. “You’re still up there.”

The villagers stared.

“Who are you?” the eldest elder asked, because someone had to.

The stranger sat up slowly. His movements were careful, as if he had not been a person for a very long time and was still remembering how.

“I’m… not sure,” he said at last. “I used to be a man.”

The crowd murmured.

“Used to be?” a child asked.

The stranger listened to the wind as if expecting it to answer for him. When it did not, he smiled politely instead.

“It’s been a very long climb,” he said. “May I have some water?”

Villagers exchanged looks.

Monsters from below did not ask for water. Monsters did not say please. Monsters did not sound tired and small and almost shy.

So one of the mothers stepped forward with a wooden cup.

“Welcome,” she said cautiously. “Our village has little, but what we have, we share.”

The stranger took the cup in both hands.

“To sharing,” he said.

And he drank.

—

The man who came from below stayed.

At first, the villagers only let him stay in the old millhouse on the hill, the one no one used anymore because the wind had taken offense and turned elsewhere.

They did not know what else to do with him.

He was not a traveler from another town; his clothes were cut wrong, and he spoke of no road they knew.

He was not a priest; he wore no holy signs, and when he looked at the sky, it was not with practiced piety but with something like hunger.

He was not a soldier; he carried no sword or spear, only a walking stick carved with little notches all down its length.

He did have a name, but it did not sit comfortably in anyone’s ears, not even his own. The syllables felt like stones, tumbling together, and no two people repeated them the same way.

So the village children, who are very practical about these things, simply called him:

Below-Man.

—

Below-Man tried to help.

He was clumsy at first.

He helped mend a fence and chose the wrong wood, so the goats chewed straight through it and escaped. He tried to carry water and got distracted halfway, standing in the middle of the path with his eyes closed, head tilted, as if listening to something only he could hear. The buckets overflowed on his boots.

He apologized often.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the farmer. “It’s been a long time since I did things the right way.”

People laughed nervously.

But he did help.

When the miller’s wife’s fever rose too high, he sat by her bed all night and hummed a tune no one recognized. Her breathing slowly softened. By morning, the fever had broken. She opened her eyes and insisted she had dreamed of standing in a garden with no shadows.

When the baker’s baby woke screaming night after night, Below-Man told him a story about a little flame that learned to be kind. The baby listened, hiccuped, and for the first time in weeks, fell asleep with a smile.

People noticed.

“He’s odd,” they said. “But useful.”

Odd and useful is a good way to be kept, in most places.

—

The children liked him best.

He told them stories while the grown-ups pretended not to listen.

He spoke of cities built on bridges with no earth below them, and of forests where every tree had a different color of bark. He spoke of a place where the sun rose three times a day and a river that flowed upward when it grew lonely.

“Have you been there?” the children asked.

“Once,” he said.

“How did you come back?”

He smiled. “I climbed.”

“From where?” they asked.

“From below,” he answered.

It always came back to that.

The Deep Road.

The hole at the edge of their lives.

—

If this were the kind of story that ended with gratitude and a nice stew, perhaps things would have stopped there.

But stories that climb out of holes rarely stop at being polite.

They keep going.

They want more.

—

The first strange thing anyone noticed was that Below-Man did not eat.

People offered him food. Of course they did. They were not barbarians. He accepted cups of water, small loaves, pieces of fruit, and always thanked them kindly.

But he never actually ate.

He would tear the bread and roll the crumbs between his fingers, as if memorizing their shape. He would lift the fruit to his nose and breathe it in, long and deep, like someone smelling rain after a drought.

Then, when he thought no one was looking, he would give the food to someone else. A child. A dog. A crow on the fence.

“It tastes better when you’re hungry,” he said once, when a little girl asked him why.

Another time, one of the women in the village lost her patience.

“We’re not rich enough to feed ghosts,” she snapped. “If you’re going to stay, you’ll eat like the rest of us.”

She pressed a bowl of stew into his hands.

Below-Man looked at it for a long moment.

Then, very carefully, he set it aside.

“I remember,” he said quietly, “what it was like to be hungry.”

He did not explain further.

The woman never asked again.

—

The second strange thing anyone noticed was that animals did not like him.

Dogs growled from a distance but never closer than three paces. Cats arched their backs and puffed their tails, then ran to hide somewhere high. The cows turned their heads away if he passed by their pasture. Chickens, which are usually too busy being chickens to have opinions about anything, would fall silent when he approached.

“They smell under-wind on you,” the shepherd muttered. “Whatever that is.”

Below-Man only smiled.

“Animals are wiser than we are,” he said. “They remember better.”

“Remember what?” asked one of the children.

He considered.

Then he ruffled the child’s hair. “To run,” he said.

—

The third strange thing was the dreams.

At first, only the children noticed.

They dreamt they were climbing.

Not the way one climbs a tree or a ladder or a hill.

They dreamt they were climbing through thoughts, through forgotten songs, through faces that melted into other faces, through words that had no mouths to say them yet.

In the dreams, something climbed with them.

Sometimes it walked ahead.

Sometimes it walked behind.

Sometimes it walked beside them, humming.

When they woke, the children could not remember what it had looked like.

Only that it smiled like Below-Man and spoke with his voice.

They ran to his millhouse.

“We had strange dreams,” they told him. “We were climbing.”

Below-Man listened carefully.

“Did you fall?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

He seemed relieved. “Good,” he said softly. “Keep not falling, if you can.”

The grown-ups shrugged it off.

“Children have strange dreams,” they said. “It’s all the stories he’s been telling.”

And perhaps they were right.

Stories do have teeth.

—

Then the grown-ups began to dream as well.

They did not talk about it.

Grown-ups rarely do.

A farmer woke in the night sweating, certain he had been standing at the edge of the Deep Road, only the hole was in the sky instead of the ground. Something inside it had whispered his name.

The baker’s wife dreamed of a field of candles, each flame burning with a familiar face. One by one, they turned to look at her.

The village elder, who prided herself on fearing nothing, dreamed she was sitting at her usual table, but every person who came to speak with her had Below-Man’s eyes.

In the morning, they shook it off.

There were fields to tend, bread to bake, tables to sit at and be wise.

You cannot feed a village on bad dreams.

—

The fourth strange thing was not strange at all.

It was ordinary enough that no one noticed it right away.

People stopped speaking of where they came from.

Not intentionally.

Not out of shame.

The question simply wasn’t asked.

“Oh, our ancestors crossed the mountains from the north,” an old hunter would usually say.

But now, when asked, he would frown a little, as if the memory had grown slippery.

“They came from… from the road,” he might say instead, and if pressed to elaborate, he would gesture vaguely toward the main gate.

“Everyone comes from the road. Don’t ask silly questions.”

The village midwife, who knew every person in town and could recite their grandparents’ quarrels by heart, hesitated one day while telling a birth story.

“Your uncle was born in… the dark?”

“You mean, ‘in the house with the blue shutters’.” the mother prompted.

“Yes,” the midwife said slowly. “Yes, that’s right.”

She did not remember why she said “the dark”.

No one did.

Except Below-Man.

He remembered everything.

That was the problem.

—

One evening, as the sky went mauve and the first stars pricked through, a little boy named Tavi climbed the hill to the old millhouse.

He carried a lantern and a serious expression, which are the two most important tools a child can bring to a difficult conversation.

He found Below-Man sitting on the step, watching the village lights.

“Everyone’s scared of you,” Tavi said, because children are also excellent at opening conversations.

Below-Man blinked. “Are they?”

“Yes,” Tavi said. “My mother says you brought bad dreams. My father says people are forgetting things. Old Mara says you have ‘heavy eyes’ and that never means anything good.”

He paused.

“I like you, though,” he added loyally.

Below-Man smiled. For a moment, in the lantern light, he looked almost like an ordinary man. His shadow sat neatly on the step behind him.

“Thank you,” he said. “I like you too.”

“Are you a monster?” Tavi asked.

If an adult had asked, Below-Man might have laughed, or turned the question aside with clever words. Adults hear what they expect. Children hear what you say.

So he considered the question.

“I used to be a man,” he said slowly. “I remember that much clearly. I remember walking in the sun. I remember having only one voice in my head, and it being loud enough.”

“That sounds lonely,” Tavi said.

Below-Man huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh.

“It was,” he admitted. “I thought I wanted more.”

He looked down at his hands.

“In the Deep places, you can always find more,” he said. “More voices. More wanting.”

Tavi shivered.

“Did you live down there?” he asked. “In the Deep Road?”

Below-Man’s gaze drifted past him, toward the hole at the edge of the world.

“I… changed there,” he said. “I fell, and I changed, and I climbed back up. I wanted to see if the sky was still here. If I was still… me.”

He tilted his head, studying Tavi’s small, serious face.

“What do you think?” he asked gently. “Am I still me?”

Tavi thought about it.

“You’re kind,” he said. “You fixed Granny’s fever and scared my nightmares away. You don’t shout when the goats escape. And you remember everyone’s names.”

Below-Man smiled.

“Then I am at least partly myself,” he said. “That’s something.”

Tavi hesitated. “Will the bad dreams stop?” he asked.

Below-Man was quiet for a long time.

When he finally answered, his voice was very soft.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought climbing up would make them easier to carry. I didn’t realize they would spread.”

He closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he added.

Tavi sat beside him on the step.

“It’s all right,” the boy said. “I’m not scared when you’re there.”

—

The villagers held a meeting, as villagers always do when something becomes too strange to ignore and too frightening to name.

They gathered in the common house, under the beams darkened by generations of smoke. Outside, the wind worried at the shutters. Inside, their whispers worried at the air.

“He makes us forget.”

“He brings dreams.”

“He climbed from the Deep Road. Nothing good every comes from below.”

“But he’s helped us,” someone protested. “He saved the miller’s wife. He soothed the children. He hasn’t hurt anyone.”

“That we know of,” someone else muttered.

Voices layered over voices until they sounded like the dreams they were afraid of.

At last, the eldest elder raised her hand.

“We do not know what he is,” she said. “We know only this: since he arrived, our dreams have turned strange. Our memories fail. Our animals whisper warnings with their feet. Whatever he carried out of that hole is too heavy for one village.”

“So what do we do?” someone asked.

“We ask him to leave,” she said.

The room went very quiet.

No one wanted to be the one to tell him.

No one wanted to be the one to make him stay.

—

They needn’t have worried.

Below-Man was already waiting when they stepped outside.

He stood at the edge of the square, walking stick in hand, shadows gathered politely about his feet.

“You’ve decided,” he said.

The eldest elder swallowed. “We…” she began.

He spared her.

“You would like me to go,” he said.

She closed her mouth, then opened it again. “We are grateful for what you’ve done,” she managed. “Truly. But the dreams, and the forgetting, and the… the feeling in the air…”

She gestured helplessly.

“I understand,” he said. “It was… optimistic of me to think I could climb all this way and not bring the Below with me.”

Tavi slipped out of the crowd and grabbed his sleeve.

“Don’t go,” he blurted. “We can build more walls! We can put salt on the windows, and hang charms over the doors, and…”

Below-Man knelt so their eyes were level.

“You were born up here,” he said softly. “Under sky and song. This village is your world. You should not have to learn how to fight mine.”

Tavi’s eyes filled with tears.

“Will you go back down?” he asked.

Below-Man looked toward the Deep Road.

For a heartbeat, everyone imagined he would leap in and vanish, as if he had merely made a wrong turn and was now correcting it.

“No,” he said. “I think I’ve had enough of falling.”

“Then where will you go?” the elder asked.

He smiled a small, crooked smile.

“There are other roads,” he said. “Other borders. Other places where people draw lines and pretend nothing lives on the other side.”

He rose to his feet. Shadows rose with him.

“I will walk,” he said. “I will look. I will try not to spread.”

That last word sounded like an apology and a promise.

He took a step away.

Then stopped.

“If your dreams ever grow teeth,” he said, loud enough for every villager to hear, “You will know I am awake again.”

The wind hushed.

“What does that mean?” someone whispered.

Below-Man did not answer.

He adjusted his grip on the walking stick, nodded once to the village that had given him water and almost given him a place, and walked down the road that led away from the Deep.

He did not look back.

The villagers watched him go until the dust swallowed his shadow.

—

Life went on.

It always does.

Fields were planted. Bread was baked. Babies were born and grew and learned where not to play.

The dreams faded, at least the sharpest ones.

Memories smoothed over their missing pieces. People remembered enough to be themselves, and that was sufficient.

As for the Deep Road… well.

The villagers built a fence around it.

Not a high fence, because high fences challenge clever children.

Just a modest ring of posts and rope, enough to say: Here is the edge. Don’t test it.

Now and then, someone would stand near that rope and listen.

On certain still days, when the wind held its breath and the world leaned closer, they were sure they could hear footsteps far, far below, climbing some other road toward some other sky.

“Just the stones settling,” they told themselves.

It was easier to say that than to remember the man who had smiled like a question and spoken like a door half-opened.

—

Children still tell the tale in that village.

They sit in a ring and take turns, each adding their own flourishes.

“He had a cloak made of shadows!”

“He had a walking stick with one notch for every dream he’d stolen!”

“No, no, he was a hero, he just… got lost.”

Grown-ups, listening from the doorway, shake their heads.

“It’s only a story,” they say.

Stories, of course, are never only anything.

Especially the ones that climb out of holes.

—

And somewhere, out beyond the fields and fences and Deep Roads of the world, a man who used to be a man walks between borders and battles and dreams.

He remembers the village that gave him water.

He remembers the boy with the lantern.

He remembers that he once climbed up.

And the Below, which remembers everything, walks with him.