Van and Yuna’s meeting with Suohl, the Echo Master of Yomida Forest, turns Van’s uncanny experience running with the Rochai into a lesson about how illness may work. Suohl calls Van’s condition otsufah, or being “inside out,” and offers a forest as his model of the human body: a community of small lives whose interactions can sustain or harm it. The idea becomes urgent when Van connects it to the scar left by a Rochai bite—and another bitten man is carried into the cavern before their conversation can resolve what that injury means.

The Summons and the Meeting

Assenomi, messenger of the Echo Master, approaches Van with two glossy raven feathers, one large and one small, and a request that he bring Yuna to meet her master. The Echo Master lives deep in Yomida Forest, where fire-flows seep from the earth and boiling water gushes forth. Assenomi urges them to travel during the brief break between blizzards. Yuna takes the feathers before Van can answer, delighted by them; the small gesture brings her unguarded curiosity into a summons whose purpose remains unknown to Van.

The meeting itself comes only the following evening. The Echo Master has spent until dawn following a child’s spirit and sleeps until the afternoon, delaying Van’s audience for a day. The wait also gives Van time to rest in the mountain caves, eat familiar, simple food, and study the tunnels while Yuna sleeps. Accustomed to judging a new place for defense and escape routes, he learns the layout even as he listens to patients describe their host’s difficult-to-define character and unquestioned powers.

Suohl receives Van in a great cavern, welcomes him as though he were an old friend, and invites him toward the hearth. Van bows but goes straight to the reason for his visit. Before Suohl properly introduces himself, a huge raven descends from the cavern roof and perches on his shoulder and arm. Suohl explains that the bird sometimes possesses him when no one is around, and that she had wanted to see Van through human eyes. He then identifies himself as Suohl and explains that he summoned Van after seeing him while riding with the raven: she carries his spirit, rather than bearing him physically on her back.

Otsufah and the Rochai

Suohl tells Van that, when he saw him on the earlier night, Van was completely otsufah. He had seen Van and Yuna running with the Rochai, black wolves crossed with Ossam. Assenomi’s report that the raven’s feathers had not looked black to Van and the child supports Suohl’s conclusion: even in ordinary circumstances they are already, to some degree, “inside out.” When body and soul switch places, Suohl says, sight and smell are affected. His explanation recasts the strange perception of that run not as an isolated oddity but as evidence of a condition involving the relation between body, soul, and the senses.

The meeting does not end with that revelation. Suohl says there is also something important he must tell Van about the Rochai, but postpones it to explain otsufah first. That promised information remains pending as the conversation shifts from Van’s unusual perception to the more immediate question of what may be happening inside his body.

The Body as a Forest

Suohl begins from a problem familiar to anyone who becomes sick: people cannot directly see or hear what is happening inside their own bodies, and in that sense know them less well than they know other people. His long experience treating the sick has led him to think of the human body as resembling a forest. Van feels close to understanding, then loses hold of the idea as Suohl develops it through the image of the lights Van saw while running with the Rochai.

In Suohl’s account, a forest is not a single, simple thing but a gathering of lives. Beasts and insects inhabit it; grasses and moss grow there; birds roost among the trees. These lives can have opposing effects: insects that chew leaves may make trees wither, while birds eat the insects and enrich the soil with their droppings. The forest persists through their interactions, not through the action of one life alone.

Suohl applies that interdependence to the body. It, too, is inhabited by tiny lives, some possibly present from birth and others entering later. He does not claim to know precisely when they arrive; he offers this as an emerging theory from his practice. Illness, he suggests, may arise when some of these creatures cause harm, as bugs eating a tree can damage the forest. The comparison makes the invisible interior of the body imaginable without making its inhabitants simply enemies: the forest’s birds and insects can injure, feed, or sustain one another, and the body’s health likewise depends on relations among lives too small to see in ordinary conditions.

The Bite and the Interrupted Lesson

Suohl grounds the analogy in everyday responses to injury. A person pricked by a muddy thorn would pull it out and suck the wound; a cut from a dirty blade might be allowed to bleed a little, washing away what was harmful. Van then rubs the scar from his encounter with the Rochai and asks whether something harmful entered his body through its bite, as sickness can spread through the saliva of an infected dog. The gesture ties Suohl’s broad account of illness to a specific mark on Van’s skin and to a danger he has reason to consider personally.

Suohl’s narrowed eyes and recognition that one of the Rochai did bite Van confirm that the wound matters to his explanation, though the conversation supplies no diagnosis or outcome. Urgent voices and hurried footsteps interrupt them. Assenomi rushes in with men carrying another person on a wooden door; the injured man, she reports, has also been bitten by a Rochai. The encounter thus moves from an invitation about Van and Yuna, through a difficult account of perception and bodily life, into an immediate case that makes the Echo Master’s unfinished teaching consequential.