Durgan
The empire fell on a market day.
Durgan was standing on a wall at the time. Then the wall stopped being a wall.
He did not say the empire’s name. Not out loud. Not even in his head, where it would have cost him nothing.
It cost him something anyway. He had checked.
What he kept instead was smaller. How dry rope holds and wet rope lies. A long knife, its edge ground back so many times the steel had a shape of its own now.
Empire fell. He travelled.
That was the whole story, if anyone asked. Nobody asked twice.
He had learned to make himself smaller than he was — to take up less room than a coat on a hook. People’s eyes slid off a man who wanted that little.
Mostly.
Dogs noticed him. They noticed where he stood, and then something just beside it, and did not like it. He stopped staying anywhere with dogs.
He stopped standing with his back to lamps, too.
Every morning, before food or water, he pressed the back of his hand to his upper lip and looked.
Clean.
“Not yet,” he told his hand.
Someone, somewhere behind him, had told him what to watch for. He did not think about who.
And he practised a sentence.
He didn’t know who it was for. It had arrived one night, whole, and he had been turning it smooth ever since.
I can walk with you, or I can follow you.
If I follow, you won’t know where I am when you sleep.
It sounded like a threat. It was also the most honest thing he owned.
Then one night he woke with his fingers already moving.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then the fist, knuckles white.
Something very old, a long way off, had just stopped. Something new had started. And there was a hook in him now, and a rope, and the rope was pulling.
He didn’t fight it. He had fought enough things.
Three days. The land climbed. The trees went wrong, and the air turned sweet in a way he recognised from bad places.
Different hooks, he thought. Same rope.
On the third night the rope led him to one of the old drake-cut caves and a banked fire just inside it. A paladin in armour, sword across her knees. A dwarf snoring. A woman asleep with one hand on a dagger. Someone humming low, past the firelight.
And a man with fire in his arm, the light coming through his sleeve in slow red pulses.
A thought arrived with an edge on it. Durgan set it down carefully, the way you set down a blade you don’t trust yourself with.
He sat by the fire, where the light could reach him. He never did that.
He didn’t say the sentence. Not tonight.
Across the fire, the man with the glowing arm opened his eyes.
Durgan’s fingers tapped his knee. Once. Twice. Three times.
Then closed.
Enters the story in Chapter 3, Act II — by the fire in the drake-cut cave.