He woke to a roof that didn't argue with the sky and a clock that didn't lie.
12 hours spent. 48 hours left on the "private tutorial." Enough to be useful, not enough to be stupid.
"Today," he told the quiet, "we do the work that keeps tomorrow possible."
He laced the bread Father Aldric had given into his belt, took the short sword in hand, and stepped back into the white morning that insisted on calling itself day.
Prudence wasn't fear. It was the line between hunger and history.
"First we verify," he said. "Then we decide what lives here long enough to argue."
He started with the living.
He checked the sheet the way other men check the weather. Breath had come back with sleep. The short sword lay where he'd left it, honest and without ambition.
First task sat there as soon as he named it: Verify everyone here. Not names—levels. The village was a hinge; if it broke, the west would swing open and cut him in half. Last night's beasts had worn too much weight for a place with hands this green. That meant something larger lived close—or was starting to.
He stood, shouldered the chill, and stepped into the white that passed for morning. The night hadn't ended; it had faded into milk. Fence posts looked like bones again. Faces were bleached flat, expressions hard to read. Work had already begun.
Perfect Sight rose on habit, a thin film over the world. He walked the short distance from watch-house to gate and let the numbers write themselves wherever people moved.
The boy with the pitch-basket — Level 3.The two spearmen from the wall — Level 5.The captain on the parapet — Level 7.The reeve at the scales — Level 5.Father Aldric—hands red to the wrist, voice careful — Level 4.A miller shouldering sacks — Level 2.A smith with a hammer he used like punctuation — Level 3.
Low-leveled, low-voiced. They were what they needed to be to see winter through—until last night proved the season had other plans.
He let the overlay dim. Prudence wasn't numbers alone; it was where you stood when numbers changed.
The empty pallet in the watch-house tugged at him the way a missing tooth does. The captain had said "since Midwinter" and left the rest in the air. The village had done the same. Said and unsaid—a gap that meant a man hadn't come back from the scrub, or the road, or the ridge. He didn't ask. You didn't step on grief to measure it.
"Mission one," he said under his breath, "isn't heroics. It's a census."
He made a slow circuit of the inside first: well, store, gate, the line where last night's tusk had chewed timber. Children ran chores with buckets; women cut the boar into futures; men set new posts where the fence had taken the blow. He pointed once at a brace angle, and the man with the mallet nodded without arguing. They were not proud. They were alive.
Then he climbed the parapet, the short sword bumping his thigh, and looked out into the pale. The scrub wore its usual lies—nothing moving until everything did. He marked the cattle chute, the bend in the gully, the ridge he'd ridden down in the dark. Prudence was mostly memory given maps.
He went down again. The captain was at the gate, speaking with the reeve in the grammar of men who didn't like surprises.
Nameless waited for the pause a man leaves when he can be interrupted without losing his place. "I'll walk the outer lines," he said. "Not to hunt. To listen."
"Prudence," the captain said. He gestured with his chin at the repaired angle. "We'll keep the bell honest. If you see sign heavier than boar, you turn and make it our problem before it becomes yours."
"Understood."
He moved out through the wicket. The white light pressed on everything equally, flattening shadow, stealing distance. A good day to be careful.
He kept to cover, not because he feared being seen, but because he preferred choosing when he was seen. Hedge to stone, stone to scrub, scrub to the small lift of a knoll where last night's chalk still carried claw. Nothing fresh. He dropped to a knee anyway and let the world settle long enough to have opinions.
A kite circled low over the carcass ditch—Level 6 when the eye caught sky. A pair of direwolves moved the distant grass like a thought someone hadn't finished—Level 7, Level 8 — hunting the edge of their comfort after a night that stank of luck and fire. Farther west, the scrub bunched as if something heavy had slept there often. He marked it in his head and did not go closer.
"High weights near low hands," he said to himself, quiet but not amused. "Something drew them."
He let the thought point toward the empty pallet and away again. Probability doesn't need autopsies to work.
He turned at the gully's bend and came back by a different line, testing the palisade's sightlines as he went. The bell clapper hung on a peg just inside the parapet; a boy could reach it standing on toes. Good. The gate bracing was hand-height for a man and knee-height for a woman. Better. The chute had new chalk where hooves had argued with physics; the troughs had been righted and wedged. Best.
No heroics. Just the thousand small decisions that keep a place standing.
He stood a moment at the wicket and watched the village move—men shouldering rails, the boy scrubbing pitch from his hands, Father Aldric arguing gently with a stubborn sinew. Then he found the captain and the reeve where decisions lived: under the gatehouse eave, out of the wind.
"I have a request," Nameless said. "And terms."
The reeve's eyes narrowed the way scales do before they settle. The captain waited.
"I'll stay," Nameless went on, "until I'm fit to walk the west without making a new grave. In return, I don't claim meat you kill on your wall. No tusks, no hide, no argument at the hook."
The captain's mouth tilted. "What do we get besides a hungry stranger who knows our bell?"
"Patterns," Nameless said. He tapped the gouge in the brace where tusk had kissed timber. "You fix this angle denser, not higher. I'll show your spearmen the shoulder seam that ends charges and the eye-line that ends arguments. I'll time your gate—from shout to brace to arrow—and shave the waste off it. I'll walk your lines and mark where your fence invites weight instead of denying it. The boy with the pitch keeps the basket but learns where not to stand."
Father Aldric had come close without trying to. "And the cuts?"
"Yours," Nameless said. "All of them. I'm not here for meat. I'm here to leave alive. Knowledge is my share."
The reeve and the captain traded the kind of look men use when coin is real and the price is fair.
"Say we agree," the captain said. "What keeps you from luring every beast between here and the ridge to our door and calling it prudence?"
"Breath," Nameless said. "And a bell code."
Father Aldric nodded once, priest to problem. "A pallet costs us nothing. Bread and water we owe any traveler who leaves a place better than he found it. The wall we can share with a man who treats it like a tool and not a stage."
The captain looked at the boy with the clean hands and at the fence they had just set. He held out his palm as if sealing an oath against the grain of the gate.
"Pallet stays yours while you keep to your own law," he said. "You draw only under bell and eye. Inside the wall, the kill is village share unless we name it otherwise. Outside, what you kill is yours, so long as it doesn't follow you home. You teach what you claim to know."
Nameless took the offered hand. It was the kind of grip men used when they intended to outlive their promises.
"Done."
The reeve added, grudging but honest, "If your plan costs a man, the debt is yours."
Nameless didn't flinch. "If my plan costs a man, I won't be here to argue."
Silence held just long enough to be formal. Then work flowed back into the gaps. The captain turned to the rail and pointed at the seam in the brace. "Denser," he told the men with mallets. "Not higher."
Nameless moved with him, not ahead of him. He set the short sword against the rail and took up a dull practice spear.
"Here," he said to the spearmen, showing the angle that slid along muscle rather than bounced from bristle. "Not the lunge you want—the line you need. Shoulder seam, then step through, not back. You're breaking motion, not proving courage."
To the boy he said, "You keep the pitch. When they shout 'low,' you aim where tusk meets cheek, not at hair and anger. And you stand here," he tapped a scuffed board where a last sweep would catch a shin, "not there."
The boy swallowed and nodded too hard. The captain watched without comment and without smile.
When the rail-men paused for breath, Nameless walked the chute with a bag of chalk the reeve grudged him, dusting the places weight would skate, marking where a boot should not land. He set a pebble against the clapper's peg and moved it one notch lower so a smaller hand could ring true.
He wasn't brave. He was writing rules in wood and white dust.
At the end of an hour, the village looked the same to anyone who didn't live there. To those who did, it felt like a place with fewer ways to die.
The captain met him at the wicket, chin lifting in the smallest nod a man can give and still mean it. "Pallet's yours," he said. "Bread you already have. Water's a well with a rope. If you plan to draw anything today, you tell me before you tell the bell."
"Today I plan to listen," Nameless said. "I'll bring you only what refuses to be left."
The reeve snorted, then, almost a laugh. "Prudence," he said, as if tasting the word and finding it adequate.
Nameless glanced once at the white horizon, then back at the wall. "Prudence," he agreed. "It buys tomorrow at today's price."
He shouldered the short sword and stepped off to begin the slow, deliberate work of earning his bed.
"Practice caution now," he told himself. "Not when the shouting starts."
Beasts were honest; people wouldn't be. By tonight there'd be rumors on the road. By the next days there'd be players—bright-eyed, loud, convinced they were the main story. Guild flags, bargains whispered under bells, knives hidden under charity. Information would be the only real currency, and it would spend like blood.
"In Devir," he reminded the quiet, "death sticks." No respawns. No mercy loops. One mistake and the sheet went dark, name and hours locked in amber. He'd written it that way on purpose. Not for cruelty. For clarity. A world where you don't get to practice being alive without the cost of it. Strip the fantasies off the fantasy and see what's left when steel answers the question.
"I wanted it hard," he admitted, almost amused at his own stubbornness. "Hard enough that modern hands blister. Hard enough to make prudence a habit and not a speech."
So: caution with monsters; caution doubled with men. Don't show your power unless the price is worth the secret. Don't boast levels. Don't trade maps—sell directions. Share nothing you can't afford to watch used against you. He'd built a game that punished theater and rewarded patience; he'd play it as written.