Happiness was not something I understood well then.
Even now, with Maire walking somewhere ahead of me through this strange forest, with her companions bickering over direction and our new “pet” insisting he knows the way to Harkwood, I still catch myself waiting for happiness to turn on me. For the warmth to curdle. For peace to reveal itself as a trap with soft hands and a pretty smile.
Maybe that is why the memory comes so easily.
Because Calimport began with happiness.
Real happiness.
Brief, fragile, stolen happiness.
After Mira and Darian pulled me out of that corpse cart, they kept me in their home for months. They fed me. Washed years of road and rot from my skin. Forced me to sleep. Forced me to eat slowly, because Darian was convinced I would kill myself on soup if given the chance.
He was probably right.
At first, I was useless. Too thin. Too weak. Too ashamed to meet their eyes for long. But strength returned in small, humiliating increments. A steady hand. A longer walk. A night without fever. A morning where I could stand without gripping the wall like an old man pretending dignity was still an option.
Darian worked during the day, and Mira managed the household with the kind of ruthless efficiency she once reserved for battlefields. I helped where I could. Mostly with the children.
Caedrel treated me like a suspicious stray his mother had dragged in and refused to let go. He would stare at me from behind tables, doorframes, or Darian’s leg, those solemn little eyes trying to decide if I was dangerous, pitiful, or both.
Maeril was easier.
She reached for me without fear.
The first time Mira placed her in my arms, I froze like she had handed me a lit explosive.
“Support her head,” Mira said.
“I know how to hold a child.”
“You are holding her like she’s evidence.”
Darian, traitor that he was, looked up from the hearth. “He is.”
“I am not,” I muttered.
Maeril yawned, curled one tiny fist against my chest, and settled.
That should not have undone me.
It did.
Soon enough, I became part of their little rhythm. I carried Maeril while Mira cooked. I repaired broken toys with magic I was slowly remembering how to reach. I let Caedrel sit beside me while I sharpened kitchen knives, explaining angles and pressure as if the boy were a squire instead of a child too young to know how much blood lived behind those lessons.
“Can I hold it?” he asked once.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because your mother will kill me.”
From the other room, Mira called, “Correct.”
Caedrel considered that with all the gravity of a judge. “Can I hold a smaller knife?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because your father will help her.”
Darian’s voice followed, calm as ever. “Also correct.”
The boy sighed like the world had failed him.
Gods help me, I laughed.
I also took the burden of Maeril’s polymorph from Darian when I could. He had kept the spell on her almost constantly, not because they were hunted anymore, but because peace had made them cautious. Their daughter’s draconic nature remained hidden beneath mortal softness, and every hour I maintained the magic was an hour Darian could spend providing for his family instead of dividing himself between survival and work.
It helped me too.
The spell forced me to reach into the buried places inside myself, to find the magic I had let atrophy under starvation, grief, and madness. At first, the effort left me shaking. Later, it became steady. Familiar. Almost comforting.
For a while, I remembered how to be useful without being violent.
That may have been the most dangerous mercy of all.
The seasons turned while I stayed with them. Calimport shifted around us in color and heat and noise. Markets changed their banners. Festivals rose and passed. The city, enormous and hungry, swallowed secrets by the thousands and kept smiling.
During the day, I healed.
At night, I watched Brandilyn.
Velithra.
Saelrith’s firstborn wore her mortal name like perfume. She moved through Calimport as a patron of beauty and restoration, owner of a fashionable boutique that claimed to return dignity to the scarred, poor, widowed, and forgotten. Her charity work made nobles applaud and desperate women weep with gratitude.
Every time she smiled, I wanted to break her teeth.
In the days before Midwinter, her shop became busier. Packages arrived under guard. Servants came and went. Perfumed couriers visited after dusk. I listened from rooftops, alleys, and shadowed courtyards until the pattern became clear.
Her family was coming.
Not just Saelrith.
Others.
To see the boutique. To attend the festival. To visit her uncle, Lord Oriel of Calimport.
Oriel.
Orothyn, if my suspicion was right.
A lord. A smuggler. A city official with influence over sanitation, corpse routes, dock permits, and every ugly little civic artery through which bodies could disappear.
For the first time in years, the hunt sang cleanly in my blood.
I should have been careful with that feeling.
I wasn’t.
The joy did not last long.
Brumuth appeared first.
He stood across the street from Brandilyn’s boutique one afternoon, soaked in the same rain that had clung to him the morning he brought me the ledger in Elturel. Blood marked his collar where his head should not have remained attached.
Melna stood beside him.
A hole in her chest. My wound. My blade. My fault.
I stopped breathing.
Mira was beside me in the real world, haggling with a fruit seller while Maeril slept against her shoulder. Darian stood near Caedrel, buying sweets he would later pretend were for the boy alone.
And there, between the market stalls, stood the dead.
Brumuth looked at me with those disappointed eyes.
“You did this before,” he said.
Melna’s voice was softer. Worse. “You said we deserved it.”
I backed away.
“No.”
Mira turned. “Lendys?”
Brumuth stepped closer. “Did we?”
“Not here.”
Melna tilted her head. “Did I?”
The crowd pressed around me. Too many bodies. Too much perfume. Too much sun. Too many eyes that were not looking and somehow still saw everything.
My chest tightened.
The world narrowed.
Mira’s hand touched my arm, and I flinched so hard Caedrel startled.
“Lendys,” she said, low now. Careful. “Look at me.”
Brumuth stood behind her.
Melna behind Darian.
Both dead.
Both waiting.
“I need air,” I said.
“You’re outside.”
“I need different air.”
I left before Mira could argue.
That became common in the days that followed. Brumuth and Melna appeared where Mira and Darian’s hallucinations once had, cruel replacements for the comfort my mind had invented. They stood in doorways. Watched from rooftops. Reflected in wash water. Once, Melna appeared at Maeril’s crib, looking down at the sleeping child with a face full of accusation.
I nearly tore the room apart.
Darian found me outside afterward, barefoot in the alley, shaking.
He did not ask what I had seen.
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Midwinter arrived in a rush of bells, lanterns, music, and color.
Calimport transformed itself into a hundred different celebrations stitched together under one winter sky. Streets became rivers of silk and firelight. Bards sang on balconies. Jugglers tossed enchanted sparks between their hands. Vendors sold sweets, roasted meats, spiced wine, charm ribbons, painted masks, miniature idols, and little useless trinkets mortals bought because joy often needs something to hold.
Different districts honored Midwinter in different ways. Amnian merchants hosted gift games. Calishite nobles held perfumed feasts behind carved screens. Sailors made offerings to sea gods near the docks. Dwarves drank, sang, and argued with professional dedication.
Mira found the dragonborn street before noon.
The whole avenue had been turned into an arena of sound and movement. Drums pounded through the stones. Banners painted with scale patterns snapped overhead. Dragonborn performers moved in disciplined lines, their breath weapons timed with music to create arcs of flame, frost, lightning, and acid that burst over the crowd in glittering illusions before dissolving harmlessly into the air.
Then came the dragon dance.
Not the soft festival dance many mortals imagined.
A battle dance.
Sometimes performed by a group, sometimes as a duel between two. This one began as a formation of six dragonborn warriors, each armed with curved practice blades and scaled shields. They circled to the drums, striking in patterns that represented wingbeats, tail sweeps, breath lines, and aerial clashes translated into mortal bodies.
Then two stepped forward.
The circle widened.
A duel began.
Each strike landed just shy of flesh. Each dodge flowed into counterattack. Flame rolled from one dancer’s maw, met by frost from the other. The steam burst upward, catching lanternlight until the whole street seemed wrapped in a dragon’s exhale.
Caedrel and Maeril sat on Darian’s shoulders for the best view.
Caedrel shouted every time the blades clashed.
Maeril clapped so hard she nearly toppled sideways, and Darian had to catch her ankle with one hand without looking.
Mira leaned close to me and smirked. “You’re smiling.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m observing.”
“You’re smiling like an idiot observing.”
I looked away.
She laughed.
The sound warmed me more than the festival fires.
By nightfall, the city shifted into the gift-giving portion of the celebration. Families gathered beneath lanterns. Children fell asleep with sugared mouths and sticky fingers. Mira and Darian were both tired enough to admit defeat, though Mira did so with great personal resentment.
Caedrel slept in Darian’s arms.
Maeril slept in Mira’s.
“I’ll stay until midnight,” I told them. “I want to see the final fireworks.”
Darian studied me a moment too long.
Mira did the same, but with less subtlety.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.
“I never do.”
She gave me a flat look.
“Fine,” I said. “I rarely do anything stupid without purpose.”
“That is somehow worse.”
Darian adjusted Caedrel against his shoulder. “Come home before dawn.”
Home.
The word almost stopped me.
“I will.”
They left.
I watched them go until the crowd swallowed them.
Then I went hunting.
Brandilyn and her family had avoided the dragonborn street. Sensible. Too much draconic symbolism. Too many eyes trained to notice small tells. Instead, I found them near the city center, among nobles, merchants, magistrates, and wealthy patrons who had gathered beneath the glow of Calimport’s lordly manor.
At first, I recognized none of them.
That was what frightened me.
Their forms had been altered so thoroughly that even a seasoned druid or suspicious wizard might have seen nothing but mortals. Glamour layered over cosmetic alchemy layered over surgical artistry. Hair styled differently. Eye color softened. Scales hidden. Scent masked beneath perfume so precise it bordered on sacrament.
Without Ishavelle’s amulet, even I might have missed them.
But the trinket hummed.
Once.
Then again.
Then again.
Too many pulses.
The family reunion.
Brandilyn stood near the center of it, smiling beneath a jeweled veil. A lord with black hair streaked silver watched from above—the beloved Oriel. A veiled woman in gold spoke with merchant princes. A narrow man with ink-stained fingers observed exits. Another with amber lenses laughed quietly with a young noble girl near one of the side balconies.
I had no clean plan.
I was still not what I had been. Stronger than the corpse-cart beggar, yes. Strong enough to wield Judgment again. But not strong enough to face all of them at once in a crowd of thousands without consequence.
Surprise, then.
Isolation.
One throat at a time.
Near midnight, Lord Oriel stepped onto the balcony of the lordly manor.
The crowd erupted.
He lifted both hands, smiling with the practiced warmth of a man beloved by people who did not know how many bodies moved through his city because he allowed it.
“My friends,” Oriel called, voice carrying with the aid of subtle magic, “tonight Calimport stands not as a city of coin, nor bloodline, nor station, but as a family beneath winter’s turning sky.”
The people cheered.
“Midwinter reminds us that darkness is not an end. It is a threshold. We give gifts not because wealth defines us, but because generosity binds us. We open our doors because no home is whole when the forgotten remain outside it.”
Applause rolled through the square.
I wondered how many forgotten had passed through his corpse carts.
Oriel continued, one hand pressed to his chest. “This year, we honor those who restore dignity to the wounded, the poor, and the overlooked. We honor new works of charity. New houses of renewal. New hands willing to lift the fallen.”
Brandilyn bowed modestly below.
The crowd adored her.
I wanted to laugh until my throat tore.
“So tonight,” Oriel said, “eat well. Love loudly. Give freely. Remember those who stand beside you, and those who wait for your kindness. Calimport endures because we endure together.”
The final words were swallowed by thunderous applause.
Then fireworks burst overhead.
Perfect.
While the sky exploded in gold, red, blue, and green, I slipped through the press of bodies and into a side alley beside the manor. A few cooks stood outside the kitchen entrance, faces turned upward toward the spectacle, smoking and laughing. The door behind them remained cracked open.
Careless.
I slipped inside.
The kitchen was chaos. Servants rushed plates. Wine decanters passed hand to hand. Spiced meats steamed on silver trays. No one looked twice at a man moving with confidence through the confusion.
Confidence is the finest disguise ever created.
I found the servant quarters, stole a clean livery coat, tied my hair back, and took up a tray.
Within minutes, I was inside the party.
The manor was all marble, silk, lanternlight, and lies. Nobles glittered in winter colors. Musicians played from a raised alcove. Servants moved like ghosts through the revelry. I positioned Ishavelle’s amulet in my right breast pocket and adjusted the enchantment until it would hum when draconic blood came close.
Then I began to circulate.
Wine. Hors d’oeuvres.
Polite nod.
Lowered eyes.
Silent steps.
Eventually, I reached a side balcony away from the worst of the crowd and the lingering fireworks. There stood the man with slick black hair, amber lenses, perfumed robes, and a smile smooth enough to curdle milk.
Mr. Vell. Mordravax.
He stood with a bright-eyed brunette who looked barely old enough to know which dangers came dressed as charm.
She held a tiny crystal vial between her fingers.
“So it changes with mood?” she asked, delighted.
Mr. Vell smiled. “With intention, my dear. Mood is too crude a word. This perfume responds to the body’s magical warmth. A joyful woman becomes sweeter. A grieving one, softer. A woman in love…” He leaned slightly closer. “Unforgettable.”
She blushed. “And it’s safe?”
“Everything beautiful requires trust.”
Fucking predator.
I stepped forward and offered the tray. “Wine, my lord? My lady?”
The amulet hummed. Loud.
My eyes widened before I could stop them.
A mistake.
Mr. Vell noticed.
Annoyance flickered across his perfect face. “That will be all.”
He turned to dismiss me.
I released a pulse of fear into the woman first.
Not enough to harm. Enough to lock her throat shut and freeze her body where she stood. Her eyes went wide. The vial slipped from her fingers and shattered soundlessly against the balcony floor.
Mr. Vell inhaled to scream.
I drove my fingers into his mouth.
His amber lenses caught the firework glow as recognition dawned.
Not of my face.
Of the end.
That look—the sudden, pleading horror of a creature realizing the hunt has finally arrived—filled me with a familiar, ugly satisfaction.
I gripped his jaw and tore.
Blood sprayed across the balcony rail, my stolen coat, my hands.
His scream became a wet, useless gurgle.
I crushed his windpipe before the sound could carry, then shoved him over the balcony into the alley below.
The woman did not scream.
She couldn’t.
She stood there shaking, painted in his blood and trapped behind the fear I had placed in her.
For a heartbeat, she reminded me of the little girl in the abbey.
The one I had told to hide under a blanket.
The thought almost stopped me.
Almost.
I stripped off my servant coat, wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders, and pulled her back into the party.
Then I screamed.
“He exploded!” I shouted, forcing panic into my voice, dragging every eye toward us. “Mr. Vell—gods, he just—he just exploded in front of her!”
At first, the guests only stared.
Then they saw the blood.
The woman trembling in my arms.
The empty place where Mr. Vell had stood.
Panic moved through the balcony like flame finding oil.
Servants rushed forward. A noblewoman fainted with theatrical commitment. Someone shouted for a healer. Someone else shouted for guards. I let myself be guided away with the girl, both of us covered in enough blood to make the lie grotesque and therefore believable.
They took us to a washroom.
The moment the door closed, the woman began to find her breath.
I saw the scream forming.
I caught her before it left.
A quick strike. Precise. Merciful enough, by my standards then.
She collapsed into my arms, unconscious.
I lowered her to the floor, locked the door, and listened to the party begin to unravel outside.
One dead.
Many more close enough for the amulet to sing.
Midwinter had finally become useful.