The key to the cellar had belonged to Silas's grandfather, and before that to his great-grandfather, and before that to the man who had built Black Oak Manor in 1822, a man who had come to the Mississippi delta with a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other and a hunger in his heart that nothing in this world would ever fill.

The key was rusted shut. Silas worked it with a knife and oil and three days of patient frustration, and on the fourth day it gave way with a sound like a bone breaking.

The cellar smelled of earth and copper and something sweet, like overripe peaches left too long in the sun. Silas descended the wooden stairs—one step groaned, another crunched—and at the bottom, behind a wall of crates marked with names he did not recognise and dates that went back to the war between the states, he found them.

Seven eggs.

Not chicken eggs, not reptile eggs. Eggs that belonged to no animal Silas had ever seen or read about in his grandfather's books. They were the colour of obsidian, smooth as river stones, and each one was the size of a human head. They sat in a circle on the dirt floor, arranged with a geometric precision that suggested intention rather than accident.

When Silas touched the first one, the egg was warm. Not warm like sunlight on stone but warm like skin, like the forehead of someone sleeping, like the palm of a hand that has just been clenching and unclenching in its sleep.

The warmth spread through his fingertips and up his arm and into his chest, and Silas Houser, who had spent his thirty-two years learning how to be nothing, felt something vast and ancient look back at him through his own eyes.

That night, he dreamed of a world without trees.

Not a desert—a world where the ground was covered in a substance that was neither soil nor stone but something between, a grey ash that stretched to every horizon, and in that ash stood towers that were not built but grown, spiralling upward like the threads of a spiderweb spun by an architect who worshipped only geometry. The sky was a bruised purple, and two suns hung in it, one white and one yellow, and the light they cast made everything look like a photograph developed in the wrong chemical.

Silas walked through the ash-world alone, and he understood that he was walking through the memories of someone else—someone who had lived in that world and died in that world and left these eggs behind as a testament to the fact that they had existed at all.

When he woke, the egg in the cellar was cold.

The changes came slowly, like the seasons changing in the delta: imperceptible until you looked back and saw how much had shifted. Silas grew stronger, not in the way of a man who lifts heavy things but in the way of a man who no longer feels the weight of them. He carried his grandfather's plough through fields of overgrown cotton without tiring. He climbed the oak tree at the edge of the property—sixty feet straight up—and sat in the branches and felt nothing but the wind and the sky.

His dreams grew longer and more detailed. The ash-world became more real to him than Black Oak Manor ever was. He began to recognise faces in his dreams: beings with long limbs and large, dark eyes, standing in the towers that grew from the grey ash, tending to something that pulsed beneath the ground like a heartbeat.

By the fourth week, Silas had found six more eggs hidden across the delta—in the basement of the church where his great-grandfather had been deacon, in the roots of the oak tree, in a tin box buried beneath the floorboards of the master bedroom, in a hollow log beside the creek, in a jar of pickled peaches his mother had made the summer before she died, and wrapped in oilcloth beneath the bed in the room where Silas had been born.

Seven eggs. Seven memories. Seven civilisations.

He opened the last one on a Tuesday in August, when the heat was so thick you could feel it pressing against your skin like a hand. The egg cracked with a sound like a whisper, and inside was not a creature but a light—a blue light that filled the room and filled Silas and filled everything, and in that light he saw them all: the seven civilisations that had left these eggs scattered across the earth like seeds, each one a testament to a world that had lived and loved and warred and died, each one a message in a bottle cast into the ocean of time.

He sat on the porch of Black Oak Manor as the sun set behind the cotton fields, his hands resting on his knees, his body still warm from the light inside him. The cicadas were screaming. The air smelled of damp earth and decaying leaves. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

Silas Houser sat in the fading light and was, for the first time in his life, exactly what he was supposed to be: a man who had seen too much and not enough, a man who carried the memories of dead worlds in his living body, a man who sat on his ancestors' porch and felt the humid delta night settle around him like a shroud, knowing that he was both human and something else entirely, and that this knowledge was both a gift and a sentence.

The porch swing creaked. The night deepened. Silas did not move.