Davan Crucis

Who He Is

Davan Crucis is a man who came back from the Depths Below Thought, which almost no one does, and who has spent twenty-four years since his return trying to be the person who came back rather than the person who went in. He is not sure how successfully he has managed this. He does not think the distinction matters as much as he once thought it did. He is forty-seven years old. He looks older in some lights and younger in others, which is what happens when the face has settled into an expression of permanent equanimity - without the usual markers of ongoing emotional weather, age becomes harder to read. He is large and very still and carries his great axe with the casual familiarity of someone who has been carrying it for twenty-four years. The stillness is not calm exactly, or not only calm. It is the stillness of someone who has discovered that most things resolve themselves if you wait long enough, and who has the patience to wait long enough, and who learned that patience in a place where patience was not a virtue but a survival requirement.

He speaks in sentences that are shorter than the thoughts they contain. Not because he lacks words - his vocabulary is extensive, his thinking is precise, and he reads when he can find things worth reading. But the Depths took something from his relationship to language that he has been slowly recovering for twenty-four years and has not entirely recovered. He trusts physical things. He trusts what has already happened. Abstract futures and complex plans require a specific kind of cognitive trust that the Depths spent eight months carefully dismantling, and which he has rebuilt, imperfectly, piece by piece.

Where He Came From

He was twenty-three and a soldier in a war that has since ended and been mostly forgotten, which is the fate of most wars. He was not remarkable. He was brave in the way that people who have not been tested yet can be brave - with the specific confidence of someone who does not yet know what the testing feels like. He was good at what he did. He had a partner who was better, and who he would follow anywhere, and who was taken into the Depths Below Thought by something that came out of a lower-realm portal during the battle's worst hour.

He went in after her. The decision took approximately four seconds and he has never reconsidered it in the twenty-four years since. He did not know what the Depths were. He had not heard the name. He went in because she went in and he was not the kind of person who did not follow.

He was in the Depths for eight months. Time moves strangely there - for him it felt like two years and like two weeks simultaneously, which is what happens when the faculty that organizes experience into sequence begins to fail. He found her. He found her in the specific way you find something in the Depths: not by navigating toward it but by moving toward what he most needed to find, which is the only navigation that works in a place where spatial logic has been dissolved. He found her and she was not recoverable, which is a word he chose carefully for what he means, and which he does not explain further.

He came back alone. The Gate Keeper at the Depths' boundary held him for what felt like three days - testing something, weighing something - and then let him through. He has not asked the Gate Keeper what it was weighing. He is not certain he wants to know. He walked out of the lower-realm transit into the Material and sat down on the ground for an hour before he could make himself stand up and move.

What He Does Now

Davan goes where he is needed, which is a sentence that sounds like heroism and is actually more specific than that. He goes where something difficult needs to be endured by someone who knows how to endure difficult things. He has been in seventeen lower realms, three specialty realms, and more demirealms than he has counted. He has helped parties survive environments that should have killed them, not by being stronger than the environment but by being patient enough to outlast it.

He does not charge for this. He does not charge for anything. He has almost no possessions and no expenses and no fixed location and has not needed money in a meaningful way for the better part of two decades. People offer him things and he accepts what is useful and returns what isn't, and everyone involved understands this is not generosity or philosophy but simply the accounting system of someone who travels light for reasons he does not entirely explain.

He is working on the letter. It has been fourteen pages for six months now, which is the longest it has stayed the same length. He thinks he may be approaching something he can say. He is not rushing it. He has learned that the things worth saying cannot be rushed, and he has learned this the way he has learned everything since the Depths: by discovering the cost of the alternative.

What he carries from the Depths - what he will always carry, in the specific way that certain experiences become architectural rather than biographical - is a relationship to impermanence that most people spend their lives avoiding. He does not avoid it. He has been in the place where thought itself becomes difficult, where language retreats, where the self thins to its most essential components. He came back. He knows what came back. Most days he considers this enough.