Hollow Ferry turned out to be nothing more than a name on a contract — a quiet river crossing, a handful of grateful merchants, a payment Draus split fairly enough that my cut covered a real sword, a sleeping mat, and dinner with money left over, which after a decade of paychecks that covered exactly nothing with room to spare felt, if I was honest, more surreal than the body swap had.
The trip back to Caldris was uneventful in the specific, blessed way that follows a genuinely terrifying first contract — nobody mentioned the crater, nobody mentioned the figure in dust-grey that only Borin had caught a glimpse of and dismissed, grumbling, as “probably just some merchant’s scout, nosy bastards, the lot of them.” I chose, for the moment, to believe him.
I had exactly enough bandwidth in my life right now for one looming threat, and Ritnja’s unanswered “earn it” was already occupying the slot.
What followed instead, for the next two weeks, was training.
A lot of training.
“Again,” Draus said, for what I was fairly sure was the eleventh time that morning, circling me in the Coinhouse’s chalked ring with the patient, merciless focus of a man who’d apparently decided my entire existence was now a personal project.
“You’re still bracing like you expect the hit to actually land where you think it’s going to.”
“It usually does land where I think it’s going to,” I said, resetting my stance.
“That’s historically been the whole problem.”
“Not anymore. You’ve got a body that doesn’t get tired and a Will that’s already grown three points in two weeks doing nothing but this — you can afford to get hit wrong on purpose a hundred times until your instincts catch up to what you can actually survive. Most people can’t. Use the gift you’ve got instead of fighting like you’re still afraid of running out of something.” He came in again, slower this time, deliberately telegraphed.
“Watch the hip before the blade. Always the hip first.”
I watched the hip.
I still got hit — softer, this time, more of a tap than a strike — but the read had been right, and Draus’s nod afterward had the specific quality of approval he didn’t hand out freely.
[Skill Improved: Evasion (Lv. 1 → Lv. 4)]
[Stat Growth: AGI +2]
[The Ledger notes a marked improvement in your ability to not get hit, which it considers an objectively reasonable life goal for anyone, mortal or otherwise.]
“It’s doing the thing again,” Draus said, not looking up from resetting his own stance.
“Tell it I said hello.”
“It can hear you fine on its own, apparently it’s been opinionated this whole time and just chose not to mention it to anyone before me.” I wiped sweat off my brow with the back of a wrist that still occasionally surprised me with how broad it was.
“Speaking of opinions — Tamsin’s been cornering me every evening with theory homework. Did you know there’s a whole written taxonomy of Form categories? I have reading assignments, Draus. I died and got reincarnated into a fantasy world and somehow still ended up with homework.”
“Tamsin loves homework. Tamsin would assign homework to a brick if the brick showed the faintest curiosity about masonry.” He grinned, easy, and tossed me a water skin.
“How’s the second Form coming?”
“Slowly. Aimed shapes are harder than I expected — Spark just wants to go in the direction I’m pointed, but Tamsin’s trying to teach me something that actually arcs, and every time I push enough Aether through it to make the arc work, the Will strain spikes and I nearly drop it.”
“That’s not slow, that’s exactly on schedule. Most apprentices take a season to manage a curving Form at all, let alone one with your kind of raw output behind it.” He said it simply, without flourish, the way you’d state a fact instead of handing out a compliment — which, I was learning, was somehow more convincing coming from him than actual praise would have been.
“You’re not behind, Rose. You’re just new. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“Careful,” I said.
“That’s almost a nice thing to say to me.”
“Don’t get used to it. Sela’s up next and she’s been sharpening that blade with what I can only describe as enthusiasm.”
The evenings belonged to the Coinhouse’s back room, where the whole company crowded around two pushed-together tables for dinner most nights, and I found myself, without quite noticing the exact moment it happened, settling into the specific rhythm of belonging somewhere for the first time in longer than I wanted to think about.
“Tell the table about the melon cart again,” Sela said, not for the first time, grinning over a mug of something dark and bitter.
“I want Borin to hear the part where you apologized to a vegetable merchant before you’d even stood up.”
“It’s a fruit cart,” I said.
“Get your produce categories right, the dignity of the story depends on it.”
“The dignity of that story left the building the second you hit it,” Borin said, ribs still wrapped from the Ridgeback fight, grinning around a mouthful of bread anyway.
“Lass, you fell out of the sky. Onto melons. I’ve been hauling supply wagons for this outfit eleven years and that’s still the best entrance I’ve ever witnessed.”
“I’m so glad my near-death experience is this table’s favorite bit,” I said, but I was laughing too, and it landed somewhere warm and unguarded in my chest that I hadn’t let anything land in for a very long time.
Tamsin, predictably, steered the conversation back toward theory within ten minutes — something about Aether density variance across the western trade routes, half lecture and half genuine excitement, the kind of rambling enthusiasm I recognized instantly from my own old life’s late shifts spent half-listening to a regular customer explain, at length, exactly why his specific brand of fishing lure was superior to all others.
I’d missed this.
Not the lectures specifically — the ordinary-ness of it.
People who knew my name, who expected me at the table, who’d built a space with my shape already cut into it before I’d even finished earning it.
Draus caught me watching the room a beat too long, and didn’t comment on it directly, just nudged a second mug toward my hand.
“You’re doing the thing where you look like you’re cataloguing the room,” he said, quiet, just for me.
“What’s the verdict?”
“Verdict’s good,” I said, honestly.
“Verdict’s better than good. I had a life before this where nobody at any table actually knew my name past the name tag. This is — ” I searched for the word, found it, let it land plainly instead of dressing it up.
“This is nice, Draus.”
Something in his expression shifted, briefly, into territory neither of us seemed quite ready to name out loud yet.
“Yeah,” he said, after a beat too long to be casual.
“It is.”
It was past midnight, two days later, when Sela found me refilling a water bucket out back and said, low and flat, all the easy warmth of the dinner table gone out of her voice entirely, “Don’t react. Just listen.”
I kept filling the bucket.
“Listening.”
“There’s a man been asking questions at the Hollow Ferry waystation. Quiet about it, polite about it, the way people are polite when they’ve got actual authority behind the politeness instead of needing to fake it. Asking about a Driftborn arrival. Asking specifically about a ‘crater incident’ in the Caldris trade square.” Sela’s eyes flicked once toward the street beyond the Coinhouse wall, then back.
“Dust-grey traveling clothes. Borin saw him too, on the road. He’s not a merchant’s scout, Rose. Borin’s been wrong about a lot of things in eleven years, but he’s never once been wrong about that particular look.”
The bucket overflowed.
I didn’t notice for a full three seconds.
[The Ledger has nothing useful to file regarding this. The Ledger would like to note, however, that it has begun, very quietly, keeping a separate page.]
“Drevmoor,” I said, very quietly.
“Don’t know yet,” Sela said.
“Don’t love the odds that it’s anyone else, though.”