Chương 2: Old Things

[SYSTEM] Registration complete. Under the words, a thin line of light, the color of old honey. Then that part of it folded away, like a seal closing over a letter already delivered. She was still deciding whether that mattered when the room told her something new. The box was still sitting where Daven had left it, shoved to one end of a side table nobody had bothered clearing. Empty. She'd known that already, she'd been the one to empty it. It made a sound all the same. Not a sound like any she knew.

A low, tuneless hum, coming from wood and cloth that had no business humming at all. The same wrongness the core had carried, the smell with no name, except this time it came through her ears instead of her nose. Whatever she'd swallowed, it hadn't finished with her yet. Made sense, in a way. A strong smell outlasted whatever had made it. Maybe this did too. She hopped down and crossed to the water bowl by the hearth, nose close. Nothing. Checked the leg of the table Garr was always meaning to fix.

Nothing there either. Whatever this was, it didn't come from everything. Just the box. Just the thing that had held the core. She didn't have a word for what she was hearing. An hour ago the box had been just a box. Now it wasn't. [SYSTEM] Skill Acquired: Mana Sense The words meant nothing to her. The hum did. That was enough to be going on with. Interesting. She filed it next to the warmth still sitting under her ribs and went to see about the rest of the hall. The chaos had settled into ordinary noise.

Someone sweeping glass. Bram banging pots with more force than the pots strictly required. The new one sat across the hall, still eyeing her like she might do it again.

"She's not going to bite you for no reason," Thorn said, not looking up.

"She bit me for no reason."

"You reached first." She left them to it and jumped up onto the windowsill, where the light was thin but real, and where she could watch the door. Ren came through it not long after, a stack of papers under one arm. The walk over hadn't improved her mood any. She dropped the stack on the counter hard enough that Bram glanced over from the kitchen. Didn't stop to greet anyone. For Ren, that was its own kind of announcement.

"The city lord's office again," Flint said, not really asking.

"The city lord's office again." Ren didn't look up from sorting the papers.

"Half the border towns stopped answering their mail, and my father's spent three days deciding what to do about it."

"Sounds like a father problem," Thorn said.

"Not a Ren problem."

"It became a Ren problem the moment he handed me the paperwork."

"So tell him no."

"Oh, I'll just tell the city lord no. Wonderful idea. Why hasn't anyone thought of that." She slapped one paper flat onto the counter, but some of the sharpness had gone out of it. Her ear turned toward the slap, then settled again. None of this was hers to sort out. She watched regardless, the way she watched most things that made noise without being food. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Miss Ren, personally overruling her own father," Flint said.

"Very heroic. Very dramatic."

"Shut up, Flint."

"I'm just saying, if you need someone to march in there and tell your father no, I volunteer. I'd enjoy it."

"You'd get yourself banned from the city."

"Worth it, for the look on his face." That got a real laugh out of her, short and surprised, like it had escaped before she could stop it. She caught sight of the cat on the windowsill and something in her shoulders eased further.

"At least somebody in this building isn't asking me for anything." Ren went back to her papers eventually. Nobody else came through the door after that. Dishes clattered somewhere in the back, low and ordinary, the sound of a night deciding to be quiet. She got bored of the window before anything else did. Garr hadn't come down since he'd gone up.

On an ordinary evening he'd have made at least one pass through the hall by now, checking on something, correcting somebody, existing loudly enough that she always knew where he was without looking. Tonight, nothing. She went to find him. He was in his chair by the low fire, already looking like the day had won. She jumped onto the arm of the chair and settled there, close enough to the fire to matter, close enough to him that he'd have to work to ignore her.

"You still checking that chair," he said, not really a question.

"The one that old man used to sit in. Every morning, near enough." Nothing came back from her worth calling a response.

"He's not coming back, Amber." He said it plain, no dressing it up. She didn't fully understand what he meant by it. She understood the chair, and the smell that had gone from faint to gone, and that he'd noticed her noticing. He talked after that, low and even, in the voice of a man who wasn't really talking to anyone. He picked a folded letter up off the side table, turned it over once without opening it, and set it back down. It wasn't sealed.

It didn't need to be, not yet, not until he found the words to fill it. She'd seen him write these before. Never many words. Never needed many. A name, a date, a place, and the kind of sentence that ended a family's waiting for good.

"Should've written back to that one weeks ago," he said.

"Keep telling myself I will." She started washing a paw, mostly to have something to do with her mouth besides not answering. Most of what he said washed past her. Some of it stuck. Fewer new faces this month. She'd noticed that herself, before he ever said a word of it. Fewer boots at the door. Fewer bowls needing refilling. Fewer strangers worth the trouble of sizing up. More empty chairs, too. The one by the second window had company now. He never said why, not straight out.

He wasn't the type to sit a cat down and explain a war. But it came through anyway, in pieces, the way most of what mattered to him did. That road east. Three groups gone now, maybe four. Nobody fool enough to take it since. She'd been feeling it for days as something like neglect. Fewer hands reaching for her without looking. Fewer scraps dropped her way. Now she understood it differently. Nobody had less love to spare for her. Everyone just had less of everything, and it thinned out however far it had to stretch.

The fire popped. Neither of them moved much, the quiet settling in around both of them.

"We're both getting old, aren't we." He was looking right at her when he said it, not past her at the fire like he usually did. She looked back. She supposed they were.

"Must be why we're both so tired lately." He dragged a hand down his face, and for one second he looked every bit as old as he'd just claimed to be. Then the corner of his mouth pulled up anyway, same as it always did. He stood, and she hopped down off the arm before he could dislodge her. He shuffled toward the door.

"Should've opened an inn," he muttered, mostly to the doorframe.

"Nobody dies running an inn. Nobody. And here I am." He didn't finish it. He didn't need to. The door clicked shut behind him, his grumbling fading off down the hall. She sat alone on the arm of his empty chair. The window was still there, waiting where she'd left it. [UNNAMED] The word just sat there, plain as a tag on a crate. She looked past it, same as she looked past most things that didn't move. Then it changed.

Detected Name: Amber She'd heard that word from his mouth more nights than she could count, tossed out the same way he tossed out grunts and sighs and the occasional order to Bram. She had never once thought of it as hers. It was just a sound he made when he wanted her attention, no different from a whistle or a knock on the floor. The window seemed to think otherwise. She put a paw against the empty air where the word sat.

The same useless motion as the one that had started all this, back before the box, back before any of it. Nothing there. Just the word, staying put this time, the way nothing in her life had ever bothered to. The guild had walls. The guild had a roof, and a flue that stayed warm, and doors she knew the sound of before anyone opened them. She had never once needed to know what was past the gate, because everything that mattered had come to her instead.

She wondered, not for the first time, what the rest of it looked like. The roads Garr talked about. The cities nobody named right. Whatever it was that swallowed adventurers whole and only sometimes sent them back. All of it out there somewhere. Going on without her. The way it always had. She got up. Walked as far as the window. Stopped there. From here the gate was just a dark shape past the fence line, closed the way it was every night. Every time she'd turned back before it. Without deciding to.

Tonight her paws hadn't turned yet. She sat with that a long moment, tail twitching once. She looked back at the fire, at the chair still warm from where Garr had sat, at everything the years had built into a shape called home. Then she looked at the gate again, and did not look away.