The village smelled nothing like home.
Cassian noticed it the moment they crossed into the first ring of houses. No baking bread, no woodsmoke from a dozen familiar forges. Instead there was something sharper in the air, resin and crushed herbs and the faint bitterness of ink, drifting out from open doorways where lamps had already been lit against the coming dark.
"Doran," Toma said, nodding toward his father as they walked. "That’s his name, if you’re going to keep calling him ’the man’ in your head. I could hear you doing it back at the fire."
Cassian felt his face go warm. "I wasn’t doing anything."
"You were." Toma didn’t smile, exactly, but something in his voice came close to it. "My name’s Toma, by the way. Since we’re apparently past introductions being optional."
"Cassian."
"I know. You talked in your sleep." He said it flatly, without any cruelty behind it, and kept walking before Cassian could decide whether to be embarrassed about that too.
They passed a group of children clustered around an older woman near a stone well, all of them watching Cassian with open, unguarded curiosity as he went by. One small boy, no older than six, had a single thin line inked along the inside of his wrist. Cassian found himself staring at it before he could stop himself.
"That’s new," Toma said, following his gaze. "He turned six last month. Every child gets a line like that once they’ve lived through their sixth winter here. It’s not much. Just enough to mark that they made it."
"Made it?"
"The first six years are the hardest ones to survive anywhere, even somewhere as protected as this." Toma shrugged, like it wasn’t worth dwelling on. "After that, the marks mean something different."
Cassian looked at the ink covering Toma’s own forearms, dense in some places, sparse in others, patterns layered over patterns like something built up slowly over years rather than done all at once. Toma noticed his gaze but said nothing.
"So what do yours mean?"
Toma held his arm out without hesitation, tracing one finger along a jagged line near his elbow. "This one’s from my first solo hunt. I was nine. Brought down a marsh serpent on my own, which nobody actually expected me to survive, my father included." He moved his finger to a cluster of smaller marks near his wrist. "These are age marks, one for each winter past the sixth. And this" he touched a heavier, darker band circling his upper arm, "is for the Deer. The one you were fighting when we found you. I took mine down two years ago."
Cassian looked at the dark band for a moment. "What does it do?"
"The mark?"
"No. The Deer."
"When someone kills a beast, some of its particles can remain behind. If their own particles are compatible with them, they can absorb them."
"And then?"
"Then they can inherit certain traits from the beast." Toma looked down at his arm. "Better hearing. A stronger sense of smell. Sharper reflexes. Strength. It depends on the animal and the person."
Cassian frowned slightly. "So everyone here has powers from animals?"
"Not everyone. And not every hunt gives you something." Toma shrugged. "Killing a beast doesn’t mean you’ll absorb its particles."
Cassian’s eyes widened slightly. "You fought one of those? At eleven?"
"Eleven. Same as you are now." For the first time, something like real respect crossed Toma’s face. "Most people don’t manage it until they’re older. You did it alone, with no training from anyone here, and you were already half starved when you found you. That’s not nothing."
Cassian looked at the dark band around Toma’s arm again.
"And you? Did you absorb anything from it?"
Toma shook his head.
"Not yet."
Cassian waited for him to explain.
Toma didn’t.
After a moment, he simply said, "I’m waiting for something special."
Cassian didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing at all.
They kept walking until they reached a wide, open square near the center of the village, ringed with low stone benches and a fire pit large enough to seat two dozen people around it comfortably. An older woman sat near the flames already, her arms almost entirely covered in ink from shoulder to wrist, gray hair pulled back in a braid thick enough to double as rope.
"Yara," Toma said, by way of introduction. "She keeps the histories. If you want to know how any of this started, she’s the one who actually knows."
Yara looked up at Cassian with sharp, unhurried eyes, the kind that seemed to take a full measure of a person before deciding whether to bother speaking to them at all. "So this is the boy who beat a Ridgeback Stag alone." She didn’t ask it as a question. "Sit. You look like you’re about to fall over where you stand."
Cassian sat, more out of surprise than obedience.
"The marks aren’t given," Yara said, as though she’d already decided this was the conversation worth having. "They’re earned. A hunt proves you can protect what’s yours. A birthday proves you survived long enough to try. We don’t ink a child simply for being born, the way some places do with a name at a naming ceremony. Here, you earn every line on your skin, one way or another, for the rest of your life."
"What if someone doesn’t want one?"
"Then they don’t get one." Yara shrugged, entirely unbothered by the question. "Nobody’s forced. But I’ve never met a person here who didn’t want the world to know what they’d survived."
A younger boy jogged past the fire just then, maybe Cassian’s own age, with a fresh, still-reddened mark on his forearm that looked like it had been done within the last day or two. He caught sight of Cassian and slowed, curiosity plain on his face.
"That’s Rook," Toma said. "He’ll talk your ear off if you let him. Fair warning."
Rook grinned, entirely unashamed of the description. "I only talk a normal amount." He dropped onto the bench beside Cassian without waiting for permission. "You’re the one from the east, right? The one who fought the stag?"
"I guess," Cassian said, still not quite used to being talked about like that.
"That’s incredible. Nobody our age has done that in years. Well." Rook paused, glancing sideways at Toma. "Nobody except him."
Doran arrived a few minutes later, settling onto the bench across the fire with the same unhurried calm he seemed to carry into everything. He looked at Cassian for a long moment, then at his son, something quiet and unreadable passing between them.
"He’s asking good questions," Yara said.
"He usually does," Doran said. "Runs in some families, I think. My brother used to ask questions nobody else in the village dared to ask, back when he was young enough to still be underfoot everywhere."
Cassian looked up. "Your brother?"
Something shifted across Doran’s face, brief and hard to name. "Older than me. Stronger than anyone I’ve ever met before or since, myself included, and I’ve met more than a few people worth being afraid of." He stared into the fire for a moment before continuing. "He left the village a long time ago. Before Toma was even born. Nobody’s heard from him since. Some people here still think he’s alive somewhere out past the western ridges. Others think the forest finally found something that could beat him."
"What was his name?"
Doran didn’t answer right away, and for a moment Cassian thought he might not answer at all.
"Kairos," he said finally, quiet enough that the fire nearly swallowed it whole. "We don’t talk about him much anymore. Old wound. Easier left alone most days."
The square fell into a comfortable kind of silence after that, broken only by the crackle of the fire and Rook shifting restlessly on the bench, clearly biting back a dozen more questions out of some rare instinct for tact.
Cassian looked around at all of them. Yara with her sharp, patient eyes. Toma, already treating him less like a stranger than he’d expected. Rook, who seemed incapable of sitting still for more than a minute at a time. Doran, carrying some old grief about a brother named Kairos that clearly still sat heavy in him after all these years.
None of them had asked him for anything yet. None of them had lied to him, as far as he could tell, not even about the hard things.
For the first time since the fire, Cassian let himself sit somewhere without immediately calculating the nearest way out.
"So," Rook said eventually, unable to hold his tact any longer, "are you going to earn one? A mark, I mean. Now that you’re staying."
Cassian glanced down at his own bare arms, then across the fire at Doran, who was watching him with quiet, patient interest and no pressure in it at all.
"I don’t know yet," Cassian admitted. "Maybe."
"Good answer," Yara said, and for the first time since he’d sat down, something close to a smile touched the corner of her mouth. "The ones who rush toward a mark never keep it long. The ones who wait usually earn the ones that matter."