The cavern was hidden behind bramble and mist, and the path inside was steep in that particularly personal way, as though it had studied them in advance. Klaus slipped twice and one time Ole performed an involuntary somersault that neither of them has spoken of since.

Inside: a vast underground chamber, and on a pedestal of woven roots, a single glass globe — inside it, a tiny village of whiskered catlets going about their lives with the cheerfulness of creatures who had never read anything alarming.

They came back three days running. By the third visit they had noticed: the sneeze at 9:12, the jam jar at noon, the kite in the chestnut tree before supper. The same things, every day. Like a music box that had forgotten how to stop.

That was when Nibbin shuffled out of the dark. Small, roundish, in a coat that had once been sensible brown, carrying a thick notebook and a mug of something cold it had been meaning to reheat. It had watched the same day repeat for longer than the cave had been a cave. The notebooks formed a considerable tower behind a stalactite.

“The sneeze is always at 9:12,” it said.

It could not go inside. Keepers never could.

“But you could,” it said. Something moved through its voice — not quite hope, but the place where hope had once been. “One day. You’ll know it repeats. And whatever you do in there will repeat. Every day. Forever.”

It let that settle. “I’ll need to note it down either way.”

They stepped inside.

---

The weight of it hit Klaus straight away — not a memory, but a knowing: everything we do today will happen again tomorrow. And every day after that.

They were careful for about four minutes.

Then a kitten named Cress took Klaus by the paw and insisted he join a very important game of mossball, and Ole got swept into a folk song about turnips by an elderly catlet who would not take no for an answer. Klaus helped someone carry a heavy basket and thought: every good thing we do here echoes forward into time we will never see. He felt something open in his chest, wide and a little frightening.

Forever, he thought. And smiled.

Then Ole ruined the stew.

He had only wanted to add a little salt. He added quite a lot more than that. The villagers were very kind about it. Klaus tried a spoonful, put his bowl down carefully, and did not say a word.

“Every day,” he said quietly. “Someone has to eat that.”

The same thought that had felt so warm that morning now felt cold. They fixed it — Klaus’s grandmother’s recipe, reliable as gravity — but he spent the rest of the afternoon watching his every move, which is an exhausting way to spend an afternoon.

What the day gave him instead: mossball with the kittens until his sides ached. The turnip song, which was — against all expectation — genuinely moving. The cherry tree in the last golden light, and Ole asleep beneath it with flowers still in his ears.

Klaus thought about the warning sign he’d placed beside Luma’s root, after she tripped and an older catlet bandaged her paw. He couldn’t stop her falling. But the sign would be there tomorrow, and forever — left by someone who no longer existed in this world but had still cared enough to leave something useful behind.

Maybe that’s enough, he thought. Maybe that’s the whole thing.

He was still deciding when the light dissolved and the cave came back.

---

Nibbin was on its rock, pencil moving.

“How was it?” it asked.

“Complicated,” said Klaus.

“Yes,” said Nibbin. “It usually is.” It looked up — a tower of notebooks, a creature that remembered every one, that could not go inside, that sat in the cold and wrote it all down and called that enough, because it had to. “Would you go again?”

Klaus looked at the globe. Luma’s acorn, rolling. Someone beginning the pickled fish song.

“I think so,” he said. “Not today. But I think so.”

Nibbin wrote that down too.

---

Somewhere below, the warning sign stood at the root’s edge.

The stew — the good batch — simmered on.

The turnip song began.

It would, as always, be unexpectedly moving.