The magnetic latch on the front door clicked shut with a hollow, plastic thud that Raymun felt somewhere behind his temples.
He didn’t turn on the overhead light.
The amber streetlamp outside the fifth-floor window gave him enough to navigate by, slicing across the laminate flooring and illuminating the dust motes hanging motionless in the stagnant radiator heat.
He kicked his work shoes off by the mat—heel against toe, too tired to bend—and dropped his plastic keycard lanyard onto the small glass bowl beside the mail.
It landed with a tiny clatter.
Twenty-nine years old, a senior coordinator for a supply-chain firm whose software broke every third Tuesday, and his lower back had begun to ache before four o’clock every afternoon like an unpaid bill.
He walked into the kitchen, his socks sticking slightly to the linoleum.
The refrigerator hummed its familiar, low-frequency rattle.
Inside: half a rotisserie chicken wrapped in aluminum foil, two beers he’d forgotten about from last weekend, a jar of pickled peppers, and three cartons of oat milk, two of which were sour.
He took the chicken, peeled the foil back with his thumb, and shoved the plastic plate into the microwave.
Two minutes.
While the carousel turned, he leaned both palms against the countertop and let his head drop between his shoulders.
The fluorescent display counted down: 1:42… 1:41… 1:40.
At the office, they had spent three hours debating vendor compliance protocols for a warehouse seventy miles away that none of the six people in the conference room had ever visited.
He had drafted two memos, defused a petty argument between logistics and accounts payable, and approved eighteen shipment waivers because the alternative was filling out an exception report that required three levels of managerial review.
It wasn’t unbearable work.
He was good at it.
He liked numbers when they lined up; he liked finding the quiet, sensible route through bureaucratic friction.
But lately, every day felt like tracing over the lines of a drawing he had finished years ago.
The microwave beeped four times, sharp and demanding.
He ate standing at the counter with a fork, chewing chicken that tasted mostly of salt and refrigerated air, his eyes glazed over the dark glass of his reflection.
When he finished, he threw the plastic container into the trash under the sink, drank two glasses of cold tap water until his throat hurt, and carried his phone into the bedroom.
The mattress gave under him with a familiar groan.
He didn’t bother with the duvet, just pulled the gray wool throw over his legs and laid his head back against the flat pillows.
It was twenty past eleven.
Just a few minutes, he told himself.
Wind down.
He opened his phone.
The blue light washed over his face, harsh and cold against his tired retinas.
He skimmed through the usual things—a forum thread dissecting the feudal levies of the Riverlands, an old essay comparing the logistical footprint of medieval baggage trains to early modern supply depots, a map of the Crownlands posted by an enthusiast who had spent too much time calculating travel times on the Rosby road.
He loved that stuff.
Had since college.
The sheer, grinding weight of pre-industrial reality, where moving five thousand sacks of grain thirty miles meant men died of blistered feet and horses starved before the siege ever began.
Real history, and the fictional worlds that took the trouble to respect it, possessed a texture that his spreadsheets utterly lacked.
His eyes began to burn.
The phone slipped in his fingers, bouncing softly on his chest.
12:14 AM.
He set the alarm for six-thirty.
The screen dimmed, then went black, leaving the ceiling pale in the streetlamp glow.
Tomorrow was Wednesday.
The freight invoices from the southern depot were due.
The team lead meeting was at nine.
He would drink the bad office coffee, fix the errors someone else had made in the inventory ledger, nod through the announcements, and come home to the chicken bones in the bin.
Work again tomorrow, he thought, his chest sinking into the foam.
Again tomorrow.
He closed his eyes.
Something was screaming.
Raymun reached out a hand to smash the silence button on his nightstand, but his arm refused to move.
It felt heavy, liquid, impossibly distant.
Five more minutes, he tried to grumble.
Just five.
The sound went on.
It was raw, frantic, tearing through the dark with an ear-splitting, wet rasp that vibrated inside his own skull.
It wasn’t the chirping chime of his phone.
It was biological.
It smelled like iron and old sweat.
He tried to turn his head, but his neck had turned to jelly.
A cold, violent gust hit his skin, followed instantly by a shock of biting agony across his shoulders.
He gasped—or meant to—and the air that rushed down his throat burned like coarse salt.
His chest convulsed.
The scream tore loose from his own throat.
Wait.
Stop.
He tried to snap his mouth shut, tried to raise his chin, tried to think, but his lungs simply pumped, involuntary and frantic, driving another shriek into the freezing air.
I am screaming.
Why am I screaming?
Rough hands seized him.
Not the gentle grip of a paramedic or the grip of a doctor in rubber gloves.
These fingers were thick, hard-calloused, and smelled intensely of lye soap, horse grease, and wood smoke.
They lifted him by the torso—his body weighed nothing, an absurd, sickening lightness that made his stomach pitch—and wrapped him in something that felt like dried heather and coarse, unwashed wool.
The fabric scraped against his skin like sand.
“He’s breathing, Mara.
God’s grace, he’s breathing.”
The voice was a deep, gravelly baritone, muffled as though heard through three feet of water, trembling with a ragged vibration that reverberated directly through the ribs pressed against Raymun’s temple.
“Bring him.
Garran, bring him here, let me see.”
A woman’s voice.
Weak.
Thin as pulled linen, cracked at the edges, wet with exhaustion.
Raymun tried to force his eyes open.
His eyelids felt glued together with grease.
When they cracked apart, the world was a terrifying, smeared abstraction of orange and black.
No drywall.
No ceiling fans.
No amber streetlamps.
Beams.
Dark, rough-hewn oak rafters stained black with decades of soot.
A low ceiling that caught the fluttering, flickering glare of an open hearth fire.
The heat hit his face unevenly—scalding on his cheek, freezing along his bare scalp.
A dream, his brain fired back frantically.
Sleep paralysis.
Hypnopompic hallucinations.
You fell asleep with the phone on your chest and the radiator hissed.
He tried to say What’s happening?
What came out was a high, thin wail: “Waaa-h.”
The terror struck then, cold and absolute, bypassing logic and seizing his nervous system.
He tried to straighten his fingers.
His hands were tiny, wrinkled, mottled red and purple, the nails translucent and soft as wet paper.
He couldn’t open his fist all the way.
His knuckles curled inward on their own, clutching empty air with a desperate, primitive grasp reflex.
The hands passed him downward.
The smell changed.
The sour tang of sweat and blood gave way to the deep, warm scent of wool, dried herbs, and fevered skin.
He was pressed against a soft, damp chest.
A chin rested against the crown of his head.
“Look at him,” she whispered.
Her breath hitched, catching on a sob she seemed too tired to finish.
“Look at his hands, Garran.
He’s whole.”
“He’s whole,” the man agreed.
A heavy hand, the skin rough as tree bark, rested briefly over Raymun’s back, covering nearly the entirety of his torso with a single palm.
The weight was immense, grounding, yet careful to the point of terror.
“Lanna said the cord was clear.
The fever’s broken, Mara.
You’re both here.”
“A boy.”
“Yes.
A boy.”
Raymun lay trapped against her collarbone, his cheek mashed against damp linen.
He could hear her heart hammering—rapid, shallow, exhausting itself in the hollow of her chest.
I had a lease, his mind screamed through the static of pure panic.
I had an IRA.
I had a performance review next month.
I have a car parked on Forty-Second Street.
He tried to shove himself upward, to demand an explanation, to look this woman in the face and tell her that there had been a profound, catastrophic bureaucratic error.
His muscles twitched.
A small, pathetic burp escaped his lips, followed by a warm, sour trickle of fluid over his chin.
Then his bowels loosened completely.
A hot, sticky mess filled the rough cloth bound between his thighs.
I had a job, he thought, staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the flickering chimney stones three feet away, his vision swimming with tears he couldn’t stop.
I paid my taxes.
I was a grown man.
And I have just shit myself.
“There now,” the woman murmured, shifting him with an exhausted, rhythmic sway that made his inner ear swim.
Her hand stroked down his spine, clumsy with fatigue.
“There, little one.
The fire’s kept.
You’re home.”
Above them, grease popped in the hearth.
Beyond the low walls of the room, somewhere outside the thick timber door, a horse stamped in straw, snorting against the chill of an unfamiliar wind.