Willem is killed in the Buried City

Willem’s death in the Buried City is a remembered episode in the solitary girl’s long wandering, and a crucial glimpse of how the Twelve’s influence turns the infected into a force that acts through many bodies. The attack leaves Willem dead among the men and horses, while the girl’s response—grieving for the victims and trying to restrain their attackers—shows the fragile limits of her influence over the dreaming ones.

The attack in the Buried City

The girl reaches the buried city at dusk and sees six men riding six dark horses. They are armed, and she hides in the shadows until night. When the forgetful ones come, she tells them not to attack; nevertheless, they descend on the men in a sudden tumult. Three men die. The account does not identify the attackers as acting from their own independent purpose: the girl understands their violence as bound to the Twelve, whose terrible dreams fill their minds.

Willem is among those killed. The girl approaches the bodies of the men and horses, noting that the horses, like the other victims of this kind of death, have no blood left. Three men are missing. One man’s soul remains nearby, watching without a solid body, while the girl looks at the expression on Willem’s face. She recognizes in it fear, pain, and surrender, the same expression she has seen on earlier dead people during her years alone.

Grief and the limits of resistance

The dead man’s name comes to the girl as Willem. Her attention turns not only to the victims but also to the attackers: she senses that the ones who killed Willem are sorry. She rises and tells them it is all right, urging them to go and not do it again if they can help it. The moment joins pity with helplessness. She can address the forgetful ones, and at times her words affect them, but she knows they cannot simply stop obeying the force in their minds.

That force is named through the repeated declaration, “I am Babcock.” The refrain clarifies why the attackers’ remorse cannot undo the attack: their minds are occupied by the Twelve’s dreams, and hunger remains stronger than the girl’s appeal. Willem’s death thus makes the distinction between the attackers’ sorrow and their capacity to choose painfully clear. The scene presents collective violence not as an isolated assault but as an expression of a power that overwhelms individual will.

The episode’s return in the girl’s journey

The episode belongs to the girl’s recollection of moving through successive nights and years. After the attack, she follows the men across the desert, covering herself with cloth and wearing glasses against the bright days. Later, in a building among the mountains, she finds horses that seem to echo the ones she saw in the buried city; their stillness gives her a sense of peace and reminds her of the Man who cared for her. She stays there, believing her running has ended.

That pause ends when the men return on horseback. The girl shields one of them with her own body and tells the dreaming ones to go, and for a time her urgings work. The other voice in their minds and their hunger eventually prevail, however. After waiting in the dark below the horses and hearing no sign of the men, she leaves again. In this later recurrence, the failure surrounding Willem’s death is not merely remembered: it is repeated in a new encounter, where her compassion can save one man for a while but cannot permanently silence the collective force.

Significance

Willem’s death links the girl’s private history of loss to the novel’s larger account of Babcock and the Twelve. The attack establishes that the forgetful ones can be moved by remorse yet remain subject to a shared dream and hunger that override restraint. Against that compulsion, the girl’s acts are small but consequential: she recognizes the dead as individuals, learns Willem’s name, speaks to his attackers, and later risks herself to protect one of the returning men. The episode frames her compassion as a real force, but not an absolute power; it can interrupt violence without guaranteeing an end to it.