The road crumbled to dust long before the village appeared.

Merrow’s Rest lay tucked at the base of the highlands, caught between crooked cliffs and rivers drowned in mist. It never appeared on maps. No soldiers patrolled its borders. No merchant passed through twice.

And maybe that was why it survived.

The village rang with the sound of hammers. Smoke curled from forge chimneys into the late summer sky. Sturdy houses stood neat and well-kept, their walls darkened by years of soot. Blades and tools glimmered outside workshops, proof of steady hands and honest fire.

No one here carried mana, nor trusted those who did. Steel was their craft, their pride, and their power.

Reith leaned against a fence post, her breath shaky, her bones aching. She hadn’t realized how much silence could hurt.

Soran stood a few paces ahead, his back straight. His hood was drawn low against the mist curling along the treetops, casting his face in shadow. A faint burn of crimson flickered beneath the cowl, eyes dimmed to embers. Not bright enough to spark fear, but enough to stir unease.

The fog clung to them like damp cloth, soaking through Reith’s sleeves, stealing the last warmth from her bones. Her legs trembled, but she didn’t let them buckle. Behind them, the road had vanished into the fog. Before them, the village stood quiet, its smoke drifting into the gray sky.

No one waited in the street, though the rhythm of hammer on anvil echoed faintly from somewhere within.

Except  her.

The village elder stood beneath a low-hanging willow by the well. Her hair, a tangle of silver and shadow, was braided into a thick rope down her spine. Her face was lined with sun and years, skin like worn parchment, but her eyes, pale gray and sharp as flint, hadn’t dulled.

She didn’t call out. She just watched them.

Soran moved first. He approached with slow, deliberate steps. His cloak whispered against the mud as he came to a stop a few feet away.

The elder’s eyes narrowed.

“You look like ghosts,” she said at last, her voice low and dry, like metal cooling too fast in water.

Soran inclined his head. “Just a husband and wife looking for rest.”

The lie fell from his lips like something well practiced.

Reith didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. She stood behind him, hands clenched at her sides, cracked skin stinging with every heartbeat. Her throat burned, but not from illness. Just exhaustion. There was no room left in her chest for pride. No strength left to argue the fiction.

Let them believe it. If it got them through the door.

The elder’s eyes flicked between them. From Soran’s shadowed face to Reith’s bent shoulders. From the war-worn boots caked in half-dried mud to the satchel barely hanging from her side. Her gaze lingered on Reith’s hands, fingers scabbed and raw, palms streaked with the faded burns of failed mana.

“You’ve come a long way,” the elder murmured.

Soran didn’t answer.

The woman’s eyes were unreadable. Tempered like steel. Not unkind. Just tired. The kind of tired that had seen wanderers pass through before. Some stayed. Some left. Some were buried before sunrise.

“There’s a house,” she said after a long silence. “Down by the fields. Belonged to a widow. She’s gone now, but her hearth still stands.”

Her voice lowered, as if she was speaking more to the memory than to them.

“No one’s touched it since. Not even the rats.”

Reith blinked.

The elder’s gaze returned to her. “If you can fix it, it’s yours. But don’t come crying if the roof caves in or the ghosts come knocking.”

Soran dipped his head again. “We don’t cry.”

“Good,” the elder said, turning toward the path. “Then you might survive this place.”

“You work?” she asked.

“We do.”

“And you don’t bring trouble?”

He hesitated.

“We left it behind.”

The elder’s mouth curled. Almost a smile.

“No one ever really leaves trouble. But we all pretend we do.”

The house leaned as if weary, its bones groaning with each gust. The door sagged on rusted hinges, windows clouded with years of dust, vines dragging it slowly back into the earth.

A single boot, cracked and half swallowed by moss, sat forgotten at the threshold.

It looked less like a home and more like a memory left to rot.

Reith stepped inside first. The wooden floor creaked beneath her weight, and something scattered, mice maybe. She didn’t flinch. Her knees gave out the moment she crossed the threshold, and she sank to the floor, too tired to stand.

It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t safe.

But it had four walls. A roof, barely. A bed, sunken, moth-bitten, but still there.

Her fingers curled into the floorboards. Dirt and dust caught beneath her nails, her breath hitched.

“I forgot what stillness sounded like,” she whispered.

Soran didn’t answer. He moved through the cabin without a sound, checking each window, each doorframe, tapping lightly with his knuckles. Rafters. Walls. Floor joints. His movements were slow and controlled, like he wasn’t just looking for rot.

But for danger.

When he stepped outside, Reith didn’t follow. She heard the crunch of boots circling the cabin. Then something dragged.

Minutes passed.

Then the unmistakable rhythm of a hammer striking wood.

She sat up.

Through the window, she saw him in the fading dusk, lifting warped planks from a collapsed shed out back. Most were rotted, but some still held their shape. With one hand, he braced the ladder against the cabin wall. With the other, he fitted new slats over the worst of the broken beams.

His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, collar loose. The top buttons had come undone with the strain of hauling timber. The fabric clung to his skin, damp with sweat and dust.

He moved with quiet grace. Every swing of the hammer precise. Every step across the sagging porch roof measured.

Reith watched, pulse quickening.

It was stupid. After everything, the spirits and the Stillwood and the blood, this was what made her heart skip?

But she couldn’t stop looking.

Not at his body, but at the calm. The control. A man who barely blinked in the face of death now repairing a roof in silence.

Her eyes trailed the edge of his throat, the way the sun caught his jaw.

Heat rushed to her cheeks. She turned away quickly.

Get a grip.

Each swing of the hammer was deliberate. Clean. Efficient.

He didn’t grunt. He didn’t curse.

He kept moving.

When the repairs were done, he slipped inside again, streaked with dust. He didn’t speak.

Reith handed him a cloth. He wiped his hands. Not his face.

They ate the last of the bread from her satchel, hard and stale. It scraped her throat going down, but she didn’t care.

And then she noticed.

The draft was gone.

She looked up.

The corner of the ceiling that had leaked wind and shadow earlier was now sealed. Rough, but sturdy.

She didn’t say thank you. He didn’t expect her to.

There was only one bed.

They didn’t speak of it. Didn’t look at each other as they lay down. She turned to the wall. He turned his back.

Their spines aligned. Not quite touching.

But their shoulders did. Barely.

And for the first time in days, her breath came easier.

It wasn’t warmth.

But it was enough.

Days passed slowly. Uneven. Quiet.

Soran worked in the village, chopping firewood and fixing roofs. His hands were strong. Too steady. The blacksmith muttered that he didn’t blink enough.

The villagers kept their distance at first.

Until he repaired the temple roof in a single day, without asking for coin.

After that, they nodded at him in passing. A few even thanked him.

Reith spent her mornings in the garden. Kneeling in the dirt, fingers blistered, knees bruised. She didn’t need magic. She had stubbornness, sweat, and the patience to learn how to keep something alive the old way.

Sprouts pushed through anyway.

The blacksmith was the first to truly break the silence.

It happened on a gray morning, the mist still heavy over the fields. Soran had just set a bundle of firewood by the temple steps when a voice cut across the square.

“You there. Ember-eyes.”

The blacksmith stood in the glow of his forge, broad shoulders framed by firelight. His apron was dark with soot, his hands scarred from decades of steel and flame. He jerked his chin toward the doorway.

“Come.”

Soran obeyed. Inside, the heat pressed down like a weight, sharper than the damp air outside. Blades in various stages of completion lined the benches. Half-finished swords, spearheads cooling in buckets, iron bars stacked against the wall.

“You work with your hands,” the smith said flatly. “Not afraid of labor.”

Soran inclined his head.

“Good. Then we’ll see if you’re more than another wanderer. A man should carry a sword made for his hand, not stolen, not bought, but earned.”

He shoved a billet of glowing iron onto the anvil, then glanced past Soran toward the square, where Reith was kneeling in the dirt of the garden, sleeves rolled, hair clinging to her cheek.

“And your wife,” the smith added, voice hard, “should give you something to bind into it. That’s the custom here. A blade’s strength comes not just from fire and steel, but from the life tied to it. Without that, it’s nothing more than sharpened metal.”

Soran’s eyes flickered.

The blacksmith folded his arms. “Take something from her. Something she’s worn, or worked with. Something real. Bring it back. Then we forge.”

Soran left without a word.

Reith looked up as his shadow fell across the garden rows. She squinted at him, puzzled by his silence.

“What?” she asked.

He crouched beside her, gaze steady. “The blacksmith wants something of yours.”

She blinked. “Mine?”

“For the sword.”

Her brows furrowed. She then tugged at the ribbon binding her hair, frayed and sweat-stained from days of labor.

“This?”

Soran nodded once.

She hesitated, fingers trembling as she pressed it into his palm. “Don’t lose it.”

“I won’t.”

Back in the forge, the blacksmith took the ribbon without question, twisting it into the billet as the iron glowed red. The fibers hissed, curling into ash, binding memory and life into the steel.

“Now strike,” the smith said, handing Soran the hammer.

The blow rang out, sparks scattering. Again and again. The billet stretched, folded, reshaped. Each strike deliberate. Each one carrying the faint echo of the ribbon’s thread burned into the core.

“Don’t leave it nameless,” the smith said at last, almost to the fire. “A nameless blade forgets who to protect.”

By dusk, the rough shape of a blade lay cooling on the bench. Not finished. Not perfect. But no longer just iron.

The smith grunted in approval.

When Soran stepped back into the misty air, Reith was waiting by the porch. Her hands were still dusty from the garden.

He held her gaze for a long moment.

Her lips parted. “The sword?”

He nodded. “For us.”

By the time the blade cooled to sullen dark, the dough she had set beneath a cloth had risen tall. He came home smelling of coal and oil. She met him with flour on her wrists and a tired, proud smile.

She baked her first loaf of bread. It was hard enough to break a window.

The second was better.

By the third, an old woman clutched her hand and wept.

“Tastes like my mother’s,” she said. “Haven’t had bread like that since before the war.”

Reith smiled. Almost.

The old woman pressed a bundle of dried herbs into her hands.

“For tea,” she whispered. “It warms the bones.”

Reith brewed it in the kettle they had found buried in the shed. The taste was bitter, but the steam felt like proof she was alive.

They shared space quietly.

The cat showed up on the third morning.

Grey, lean, scarred across one ear. One eye milky with age, the other sharp and unblinking. It slinked from beneath the porch as if it had always been there.

It didn’t meow. Didn’t beg.

It just followed Soran.

Everywhere.

Reith stood in the doorway, tea steaming in her hands. She sipped as the cat padded after him across the yard, tail flicking, steps precise.

“She’s following you,” Reith said, her voice light.

Soran crouched by the firewood stack. He didn’t look back.

“She’s waiting for me to die,” he replied evenly.

Reith nearly choked. “What?”

“So she can eat my eyes.”

She almost spilled her tea. “That’s your first joke.”

“It wasn’t.”

But she laughed anyway.

The cat circled his boots, then sat. Tail curled.

Soran stared down with the same wariness he reserved for blades and ghosts.

He didn’t move away.

Reith’s smile faded. Fingers tightened around her mug.

Back home, she had had a dog. Seamus. Fifteen years old. Too much fur around the eyes. A little bark that sounded like he was scolding the world.

He had gone quiet in the end. Barely ate. The vet had said pain would come next. She could wait, but waiting would hurt him.

They offered the choice.

And she made it.

She held him. Whispered his name. Told him he was good and loved until his last heartbeat faded.

He hadn’t suffered.

She had.

“I chose to end his pain,” she murmured, almost inaudible.

Soran didn’t turn.

The cat yawned and pressed against his shin.

“You should name her,” Reith said, forcing her voice steady.

“Why?”

“Because she’s claimed you. And if she eats your eyes, I want to know whose name to curse.”

He paused.

“Grave.”

Reith blinked. “Grave?”

“She sleeps like the dead. And she bites.”

Grave sneezed and flopped into the dirt like royalty.

Reith whispered into her cup, “Seamus would have liked her.”

She didn’t explain who he was.

That night, Soran placed a flower on the table. Blue petals. Beneath the ash on his fingers lingered a faint, singed sweetness. Her ribbon, carried home on his skin.

She didn’t ask why.

She just set the flower in water.

Evenings passed. Soran rarely slept deeply.

Once, she cut her hand on a jar. He was there instantly, binding it with cloth torn from his sleeve.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

“Many times.”

“For yourself?”

Silence.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“That I wasn’t strong enough. You fought. I froze.”

His hands stilled.

“You’re alive,” he said. “That’s more than most.”

The village began to accept them.

A boy gave her a flower. A girl called Soran “handsome.” The blacksmith offered him a place by the forge.

Reith smiled. She laughed.

And once, just once, she imagined staying.

Maybe this could be real.

That night, she dreamed of warmth.

A kitchen. Light through the window, gold and soft. Bread fresh from the oven. The kettle hissing.

Soran behind her, barefoot, holding a baby in one arm. Rumpled shirt. Longer hair. A small smile.

Laughter.

Stillness.

A life not won with magic or blood. Simply lived.

When she woke, her pillow was wet.

“Please,” she whispered. “Let this be real.”

No one answered.

Outside, frost clung to the porch. Soran stood barefoot in the dirt, staring at the stars. The air felt wrong. The wind carried the scent of iron.

“It’s starting,” he murmured.

Far away, beneath the spires of the Council Citadel, the Seer’s voice cracked the silence.

“She lives.”

The Arch Inquisitor did not move.

“She and the man have taken refuge.”

A long pause.

“Send the Rook,” the Inquisitor said. “Burn the field. Leave no ashes.”

Inside the cabin, Reith stirred beneath the quilt, a small smile still on her lips.

She didn’t see Soran watching her. The way his jaw clenched. The way his hand hovered over her face before brushing away a strand of hair.

Outside, the wind howled softly.