Dawn arrived the way regrets arrive: quiet, thoroughly polite, as if it had rehearsed apologies and still found them lacking. It touched the camp the same way it touches every camp—on the tents, the banners, the laugh of a boy who thinks the world is simple. But light is a liar when it comes to history. It can gloss over ruins. It cannot mend them.
Arin was awake before the horn. He sat with the watch cupped in both hands, feeling the little pulse beneath the gold. It was not quite a tick. It was a memory trying to sound like a clock.
Alina's voice came from the healer's tent with the practical calm of someone who stitches skin and nerves and also stitches people back to civility. "You're early," she said. She offered a bowl of broth as if the gesture alone could fix wandering souls.
He took it without thinking. "You don't sleep much, do you?"
She cocked her head. "Neither do you."
"Old habits," he said.
She didn't believe him and smiled the way people smile at pleasant lies. "You called my name in your sleep."
He almost laughed. "Did I mention the right syllables?"
"You murmured 'Mira.' Several times." Her eyes narrowed on him with a precision that could have cut steel. "Who's Mira?"
"Someone I haven't met yet," he admitted.
Alina folded the cloth on her lap. "You're making riddles popular again."
Nalen found them by the wagon, adjusting straps as if the world could be organized with leather. Up close he was all beginnings—the jawline that decided borders and the hands that drew them. He barked a quick laugh when he saw Arin's cup. "Broth? Luxury."
"Comfort," Arin said.
Nalen eyed the watch. For a moment he looked younger—eighteen with a scar and a duty shaped like a crown. "That thing's been restless," he observed. "Has it been acting up?"
"It likes certain people," Arin said.
"Which people?" Nalen asked, and the question was not idle curiosity. It was a captain testing a rumor.
"People who belong to it." Arin kept his voice light but not flippant. "People who will make it matter."
Nalen stared at him for a long time, then snorted. "You talk like an oracle and a drunk at once."
"Pick one," Arin shrugged. "Both are honest."
They moved through the camp in a current of small, human things—linen folded, horses swapped, a boy dropping a loaf and an old man cursing and then helping pick it up. The ordinary life of soldiers makes it easy to forget that ordinary is a fragile construct.
"Have you told them?" Alina asked quietly as they passed the training yard.
"Who?" Arin countered.
"About the ridge. About the echo." She watched his face as if cataloguing him. "We can patch armor and stitch hands. We can't stitch certainty."
He wanted to tell them. He wanted to tell Nalen everything — that this was his father's body, this was the sound his father would make when he laughed, that the collapse in Arin's time was not myth but a calendar of loss. He wanted to say: I came back because I couldn't live with the silence.
Instead he said, "I keep thinking the ridge wants something from us."
"Like what?" Nalen asked immediately. Command would come easier than tenderness, but Nalen tried tenderness anyway.
"Answers," Arin said. "Or company."
Nalen gave a humorless chuckle. "Be careful with riddles. People try to learn them like spells. They end up breaking things."
They sparred because men need muscle to keep meaning from drowning. Nalen's blade sang true and exact. Arin moved like a man who had been corrected by war and mercy both—parrying not only to ward steel but to test the space between two hearts. Their motions were conversation: step, thrust, question; parry, reply, the hush of acknowledgement.
Afterwards, when breath had slowed and the men watching tossed guesses about which of them would topple kingdoms, Nalen sat on a crate and said, "So. Tell me plainly. Why are you here, Arin?"
Arin looked at the sky as if he could find an answer scrawled among the clouds. "Because someone forgot what it meant to be human," he said. "Because history has teeth and someone is feeding it the wrong things."
Nalen blinked. "Do you mean to hold me responsible?"
Arin's laugh was a small thing. "Not only you. Everyone who thought choices end when they are made. They don't. They become architecture."
"Architecture crumbles," Nalen said.
"Only when it is poor," Arin returned. "Good architecture adapts."
Alina joined them with a strip of linen and an almost-smile. "I've patched better men," she said, and Alina always spoke like someone who had known both the world and the shape of losing. "I believe you. For what it's worth."
"That's perilously close to marriage talk," Nalen muttered.
"It is," she agreed. "But less expensive."
They laughed, and for a few seconds laughter made them smaller and better—like a wound that forgot it was an injury. Then a courier came sweating across the yard with news that made smiles fall like loose coins.
"Flux flare again," the boy panted. "Residue stronger at the ridge. Animals behaving strange. Scouts report—"
"—a beacon," Nalen finished. His hand went to his sword as readily as it goes to breath. "We move at first light."
"Take a team?" Alina asked.
"Yes. You with me?" Nalen looked at her like he was asking something more private than presence.
She nodded. "Always."
Later, while men argued routes and packed, Arin walked to the smith's tent. The blacksmith hit iron the way time hits memory—sparks flying, dull thud, another thud that makes the same sound for centuries. The man handed Nalen a strap and cursed softly when it was not perfect. It anchored Arin—steel, heat, smell. The present punched him in the ribs and he liked it.
"Do you ever resent it?" Arin asked the blacksmith out of habit at the question's edge.
"What?" the man grunted, wiping his hands.
"Knowing things," Arin said. "Knowing what breaks and still having to watch it break."
The blacksmith shrugged. "We mend what we can. The rest we don't fix 'cause the gods need job security."
"You have philosophy," Arin said.
"Aye. I sell it cheap," the smith replied.
That night Arin wrote in the journal. The ink pooled like thought. Day 2 — he almost wrote Day 1 again but stopped. The watch lay open and the inscription gleamed: To the one who remembers.
Nalen's voice drifted from his tent, older than his years. "If you are truly my son, you'd better be useful."
Arin smiled into the darkness. "I'll be the kind of son who knows how to build windows before the house catches."
"Practical," Nalen called back. "Good. Then maybe you won't have to apologize as much."
"Apologize for what?" Arin whispered to no one but the night. "For remembering?"
The wind answered with the hush of trees. The ridge lit its ghost in the distance the way a memory sometimes consults itself: brief, a flicker, a question asking to be answered. In the camp a dog barked and was answered by a laugh. People kept living.
Arin closed the journal and put his hand over the watch. It pulsed once like a small, patient heart. He felt less like a stranger and more like an intruder in a mercy joke.
Tomorrow they would walk the ridge again. Tomorrow he would either learn to hold a world or to let go. Tonight he practiced forgetting both and letting the dawn be only dawn.
The sun rose reluctantly, dragging pale light over the tents as if the morning itself hadn't decided to exist.
The ridge waited beyond the trees, quiet and almost polite in its menace.
Nalen's voice broke the stillness.
> "Move out! Three to a line. Keep formation tight."
Armor clinked, horses stirred. Arin adjusted his coat, pretending calm.
Every time he touched the watch, it felt a little warmer — alive in ways a machine shouldn't be.
Alina appeared beside him, braid swinging, calm as gravity.
> "You're joining the patrol."
> "That wasn't a question," he said.
> "Neither was the order," she replied.
He almost smiled. She doesn't know she'll be my mother one day.
That thought hit like a blade he'd forged himself.
---
The forest swallowed the company whole.
Light moved in shards through the leaves; birds called once, then fell silent.
> "Something feels wrong," Alina murmured.
> "You get used to that," Arin said.
Nalen glanced back. "Speak louder, Solis. If the trees are listening, we might as well educate them."
> "They already know too much," Arin muttered.
The Captain raised an eyebrow but let it pass.
They reached the ridge at mid-morning. The soil gleamed faintly, a shimmer like dew and dust and lightning all pretending to get along.
> "Captain," a scout called, kneeling. "Flux readings spiked here. Residue's still warm."
Nalen dismounted. "Warm how?"
> "Feels like… heartbeat," the scout said.
Alina pressed her palm to the ground. Resonance flared around her fingers — pale gold pulsing twice, pausing, once again.
Arin's chest tightened. The same rhythm as the watch.
He crouched beside her before thinking. "Two beats, pause, one. You feel it?"
> "You recognize it?" she asked.
> "Let's say it's familiar," he said.
Nalen straightened, scanning the horizon. "Everyone back. If it's alive, it's dangerous."
> "If it's alive," Arin murmured, "it's remembering."
> "Remembering what?"
> "That we don't belong here."
The ridge hummed again — low, almost human.
Then silence.
Even the wind hesitated.
> "We fall back," Nalen ordered. "Mark the site. No one touches it until the flux cools."
They obeyed. No arguments this time.
---
On the ride back, Alina looked over at him.
> "What did you see, Arin?"
> "Not see. Feel."
> "And what did you feel?"
He searched for words and failed. "Like time was thinking about us."
She frowned. "Time doesn't think."
> "That's what we keep telling ourselves."
The rest of the ride was silent.
---
That night, the camp slept uneasily.
Arin didn't.
He sat by the fire, journal open, writing the pattern again and again.
Two beats. Pause. One.
Each mark felt heavier, as if he were carving it into more than paper.
The watch pulsed faintly in his palm.
He whispered to it, "What are you trying to tell me?"
Only the wind answered — a long, quiet breath that bent the flame sideways and faded.
He didn't notice the faint glow along the ridge in the distance — or the single lantern moving through the trees toward their camp.
Someone new was arriving.
Someone the future would remember far too well.
The night didn't rest; it only dimmed its eyes.
When dawn came again, it didn't feel new. It felt recycled — like the world had taken yesterday's light and tried to pass it off as morning.
Arin woke before the horn. Sleep had been shallow, full of half-dreams: Alina's hand on the glowing soil, Nalen's shadow cutting through mist, the pulse of the ridge echoing in his ribs like an unfinished sentence.
He poured cold water over his face and looked into the basin. His reflection rippled, bending with the surface — as if the world itself wasn't sure where he belonged.
> "Early again," Nalen said behind him.
Arin didn't turn. "You make it sound like a crime."
> "Not a crime," Nalen said. "Just suspicious."
> "Everything about me is," Arin replied.
Nalen half-smiled, but his eyes didn't soften. "You've got that right. Alina says your resonance flared when the ridge did. Care to explain?"
Arin dried his face slowly. "I could. You wouldn't believe me."
> "Try me."
He met Nalen's gaze. The resemblance hurt today. It wasn't just the eyes or the way his mouth tilted when he was curious — it was the steadiness, the certainty that the world could still be managed by people who believed hard enough.
> "The ridge reacts to familiarity," Arin said finally. "Maybe it recognized something in me."
> "Like what?"
> "The future."
Nalen's laugh was quick, but not mocking. "You talk like a priest half the time."
> "And the other half?"
> "Like someone who knows too much to be sane."
Arin smiled faintly. "I'll take that as a compliment."
---
The camp moved around them in practiced rhythm. Breakfast was noise and smoke and the metallic smell of readiness.
Alina passed by with a handful of reports and an expression that could make generals apologize.
> "We're organizing a secondary patrol," she said to Nalen. "South perimeter. The flux readings are calmer, but we should confirm stability before nightfall."
Nalen nodded. "Take Arin."
She frowned. "He's still recovering."
> "He's also the only one who didn't panic when the ground started breathing."
Arin lifted an eyebrow. "You have an interesting way of saying 'thank you.'"
Nalen ignored that. "You leave in an hour."
Alina exhaled through her nose — the kind of sigh that said she'd win the next argument but didn't have time for this one.
> "Fine. But if he collapses halfway, I'm not carrying him."
> "Noted," Arin said. "I'm heavy with secrets anyway."
She stared at him for a long second before the corner of her mouth betrayed her with a tiny smile. "You really are strange."
> "So they tell me," he murmured.
---
The southern path was quieter than the ridge route — wide grasslands fading into fog. The flux residue had cooled into faint streaks of gold, visible only when sunlight hit at certain angles.
Alina rode slightly ahead, her cloak brushing her horse's flank in a rhythm that matched her calm voice.
> "You keep notes," she said suddenly. "About everything."
> "Helps me remember."
> "And what happens when you remember too much?"
> "You start losing what's real."
> "So you write to forget?"
He smiled faintly. "I write to make the forgetting organized."
She didn't answer immediately. When she did, her tone softened.
> "You talk like someone who's already lived two lives."
> "Maybe I have."
She turned slightly in the saddle, her eyes catching his. "If you had, what did the first one teach you?"
> "That time doesn't punish us for what we do. It punishes us for what we try to undo."
The words hung between them like mist.
For a moment, neither spoke. Then Alina said quietly,
> "You'd get along with someone I used to study with — Mira Valen. She used to say things like that. About time having personality."
Arin's heart tripped.
> "Mira Valen?"
> "You know the name?"
He forced his expression neutral. "Heard of her. Scholar, right?"
> "Scholar, yes. Idealist too. We argued half our academy years. She believed time wasn't linear. Said it folded around memory. That it could listen."
> "Did anyone believe her?"
Alina smiled faintly. "Only the ones who loved her."
The air felt heavier after that. Arin didn't trust himself to speak.
Because he had loved her — once, in a future that hadn't happened yet.
And time, cruel and precise, had just whispered her name through his mother's voice.
---
That night, when they returned to camp, the stars were brighter than usual — or maybe they only seemed that way because he couldn't stop seeing them reflected in another pair of eyes he hadn't met yet.
He sat by the fire again, journal open, fingers trembling.
He wrote her name once — just once — and then closed the book as if sealing a wound.
> "Mira Valen," he whispered to himself.
The wind didn't answer this time.
It didn't have to.
The storm never came.
It only lingered on the edge of the sky, dark and patient, like a warning the world had decided to postpone.
The camp was quieter that morning — less command, more hesitation. The ridge readings still pulsed faintly on every chart Alina had drawn overnight. Flux patterns that refused to settle, frequencies looping without rhythm.
Arin stared at the lines over her shoulder.
> "You realize these look like heartbeats," he said.
> "Everything looks like heartbeats to you," she replied, still sketching.
> "Maybe because everything alive pretends it's not dying."
Alina stopped, looked up at him, and smiled faintly. "You say morbid things with the voice of someone trying not to care."
> "And do I succeed?"
> "Barely."
He chuckled quietly. "That's enough."
---
Nalen entered then, carrying a half-burned report. "Another reading. North sector this time."
> "Same pattern?" Alina asked.
> "No," he said. "This one's irregular. Like someone's trying to talk through the flux instead of leaving residue."
That froze both of them.
Arin spoke first. "Talk through it? That's not possible. Flux doesn't carry voice."
> "It does now," Nalen said, dropping the paper onto the table.
Scrawled across the soot was a set of resonance spikes — identical to the ridge's rhythm, except… inverted.
Two pauses. One beat.
Arin's pulse faltered. "It's responding."
> "Responding to what?" Alina asked.
> "To us," Arin whispered. "It's learning the language."
> "You make it sound alive," Nalen said.
> "Maybe it is."
The Captain leaned against the table, studying him. "You talk like someone who knows more than he should."
> "That's the curse of knowing just enough to be afraid," Arin replied.
Nalen smirked. "You ever stop thinking in riddles?"
> "Only when the truth's too heavy to say."
---
They left it at that.
But as Arin stepped outside the command tent, he caught fragments of conversation from passing soldiers.
> "New arrivals today."
"Scouting detachment from the Capital."
"Scholars, I heard. Research division."
He froze mid-step.
Scholars.
He didn't move for a moment — just stood there, heartbeat syncing with the name still burned into the back of his mind.
> Mira Valen.
The sound of her name carried in his blood like a prophecy he was trying to unhear.
---
Later that day, Alina found him by the sparring yard. The clang of steel against steel filled the air, but he wasn't watching the match. He was staring past it — into something invisible.
> "You look like you're seeing ghosts," she said.
> "Maybe I am."
> "Do they look back?"
He glanced at her, half-smiling. "That's the problem. They always do."
She studied him for a moment. "Nalen's getting worried about you."
> "That's new."
> "He won't say it out loud, but he thinks you're… different. Not dangerous, just unreadable."
> "I'll take unreadable over understood."
> "Why?"
> "Because once people think they understand you, they stop listening."
That silenced her for a moment. Then softly:
> "You talk like someone waiting for something he already lost."
> "Maybe I am."
> "And if it finds you again?"
Arin looked away. "Then I hope I've learned to keep my distance."
---
The rest of the afternoon blurred — drills, briefings, the quiet hum of preparation for whatever the flux was becoming.
By nightfall, tension spread through the camp like smoke before fire.
A messenger arrived close to midnight, cloak soaked, boots heavy with mud.
He spoke to Nalen in low urgency.
Alina and Arin stood nearby, catching fragments.
> "Capital convoy… delayed by storms… scholars, healers, one commander…"
Then, clearer:
> "They'll arrive by tomorrow night."
Arin didn't breathe.
He didn't need to hear the names to know one of them.
Time had been circling him for days — and now, it was finally closing the loop.
---
Later, as the camp dimmed to embers again, he sat alone, sharpening a blade he didn't plan to use. The metal sang with each stroke, quiet and precise.
> "You ever get the feeling," he whispered to the night, "that the future's walking toward you with your own footsteps?"
The wind didn't answer.
But somewhere, in the far distance, a faint pulse shimmered through the air.
Two beats.
Pause.
One.
And in that rhythm, the night whispered a single word —
soft, broken, inevitable:
> "Soon."
The air changed before the clouds did.
It thickened, heavy with iron and waiting, the kind of pressure that makes men check their blades even when no enemy's in sight. By late afternoon, the horizon had turned the color of old bruises.
Arin watched it from the ramparts, a single figure above the hum of the camp. The wind kept shifting directions, carrying pieces of conversations, metal clinks, and the faint copper scent that always came before rain. He pressed the watch in his palm—warm again, pulse irregular, like it knew something the sky hadn't said yet.
> "Still staring at weather?" Nalen's voice came from the stairs.
Arin didn't move. "Weather's honest. It always tells you when it's about to break."
> "Unlike you," Nalen said, stepping beside him. "I get the feeling you'd let the sky fall before admitting what you know."
Arin smiled without humor. "You make that sound noble."
> "No," Nalen said. "Just exhausting."
They stood in silence. Below, the camp moved with the rhythm of men pretending they weren't nervous. Torches were being set early. The ridge shimmered faintly miles away, barely visible through the haze.
> "Convoy should've reached the valley by now," Nalen said. "Scouts say they were delayed by storms."
> "Maybe the storms were delayed by them," Arin murmured.
Nalen gave him a sidelong look. "You keep talking like that and people will start calling you a prophet."
> "Or a lunatic," Arin said. "History rarely decides which until it's too late."
Nalen grinned despite himself. "I'll take prophet. At least they get statues."
> "Statues crumble," Arin said. "Memory lasts longer."
> "You'd know," Nalen said quietly, then left him alone with the wind.
---
The Convoy
Miles away, wheels ground through mud.
The storm hadn't broken yet, but the sky kept teasing the sound of thunder. Lanterns swayed from wagon hooks, their light pale and stubborn against the dusk. Six riders led the front line, cloaks soaked, armor etched with gold—the seal of the Capital's Research Division glimmering beneath the grime.
Inside the second carriage, a woman lifted the flap to glance out. Rain hissed across the canvas roof, and her reflection flickered in the glass pane opposite—sharp eyes, dark hair, that calm focus of someone who treated danger as data. She studied the horizon where lightning pulsed behind the ridge.
> "We're close," said the guard beside her. "Another league, maybe less."
She nodded, noting the resonance meter vibrating faintly on the seat between them. The frequency was irregular but familiar. Too familiar.
> "The pattern's human," she said softly.
> "Meaning?"
> "Meaning whatever caused this anomaly is thinking."
The guard frowned. "Ma'am?"
> "Nothing," she said quickly, closing the meter. "Just a theory."
When she leaned back, the lightning illuminated her face—calm, analytical, quietly alive with the thrill of the unknown. She whispered to herself, almost a prayer:
> "If you're real… then maybe I wasn't wrong after all."
Her name, unspoken here but waiting on the next chapter's breath, was Mira Valen.
---
Back at Camp
By the time the first thunder rolled over the valley, Arin felt it—not the sound, but the resonance beneath it. The ridge and the storm were speaking in the same rhythm now: two beats, pause, one. It wasn't coincidence; it was a call-and-response. Something—or someone—was answering.
He descended from the rampart as rain began to fall, thin needles striking the canvas roofs. Alina was in the command tent, bent over maps that refused to stay dry.
> "Scouts?" he asked.
> "No contact yet," she said. "They should've been here by sundown."
> "They'll make it," Arin said, though his voice betrayed doubt.
Alina looked up. "You sound like you know more than you say."
He hesitated. "I think the flux is drawing them in."
> "You mean the ridge?"
> "I mean whatever the ridge woke up."
She frowned. "Time doesn't lure travelers, Arin."
> "Then something wearing time's skin does."
The tent flap burst open; Nalen stepped in, soaked and breathless.
> "Signal fires," he said. "They're close. Maybe a mile out."
> "Through this storm?" Alina asked.
> "Through whatever's left of it," Nalen said. "They're riding the lightning."
Arin felt the watch pulse hard against his palm. One long beat, then stillness—as if it recognized the approach of its own origin.
> "You feel that?" he whispered.
> "Feel what?" Alina asked.
> "Familiarity."
---
The Storm Breaks
They stepped outside together. The sky had turned the color of molten slate. Rain came sideways, fierce and cold, each drop like a shard. Lightning tore the horizon open, revealing silhouettes on the distant ridge—torches moving in waves, too steady to be random.
> "That's them," Nalen shouted over the wind. "Form the line!"
Trumpets answered, muffled by rain. Knights scrambled, lanterns flared. The storm lit the valley in flashes, painting everyone in brief gold.
Arin stood still amid the motion. The world felt like it was spinning around a single point—the pulse in his hand. Two beats, pause, one. The storm's rhythm matched it perfectly now, as if the sky itself had learned his secret.
Alina tugged his arm. "You need shelter!"
> "I'm fine."
> "You're soaked through—"
> "So is time," he said.
She gave him a look halfway between concern and surrender. "You're impossible."
> "Inherited trait," he said, and she rolled her eyes but smiled.
Lightning struck closer this time, shaking the ground. The ridge in the distance glowed for a second—pure white—and in that flash, Arin saw the convoy's lead wagon crest the hill.
Figures. Horses. Armor. A banner bearing the Capital sigil.
And among the riders, one silhouette held still when the rest pressed forward—a calm outline against chaos, head tilted toward the camp, as if searching for something familiar in the storm.
For half a heartbeat, Arin forgot to breathe.
He didn't know why.
He didn't know who.
Only that the storm had stopped sounding like rain and started sounding like recognition.
---
Calm After
When the first of the convoy reached the gates, Nalen was already there to greet them, shouting orders over the dying thunder. Alina moved among the healers, helping unload supplies. The air was electric, literal and otherwise.
Arin lingered near the fire lines, watching. Lanterns cast shifting circles across wet earth. Every face was new and yet painfully familiar—like memories he hadn't lived yet.
One of the scouts passed by.
> "Capital sends its finest this time. Scholars, healers… even a few Resonance theorists. Heard one of them's a genius."
Arin forced casual tone. "Name?"
> "Didn't catch it. Starts with an M, I think."
The world seemed to tilt for a moment. The rain hissed louder, though it was almost gone.
> "M," Arin repeated softly. "Of course it does."
He looked back toward the ridge where lightning still blinked on the horizon. Each flash echoed inside him like a heartbeat calling through distance.
> "You took your time," he whispered. "But you found me anyway."
---
The storm ended as suddenly as it began. The air cooled, smelling of ozone and wet soil. Voices faded into the low hum of rebuilding campfires.
Somewhere beyond the tents, footsteps crunched on gravel—measured, unhurried, precise. A woman's voice carried briefly, instructing soldiers on where to store instruments. Arin didn't turn toward it. He couldn't. Not yet.
Instead, he looked up at the clearing sky. Stars blinked shyly behind retreating clouds. He smiled faintly.
> "Tomorrow, then," he murmured. "Let's see what you remember."
Morning came soft and swollen with light, like the world exhaling after holding its breath all night. The storm had rinsed the air clean; every leaf dripped, every blade of grass shimmered as if the earth itself had been forged anew.
Arin woke to the sound of hammers—soldiers repairing a gate hinge—and the distant laughter of people who'd survived something they didn't understand. For the first time in days, the watch in his hand was silent. No pulse. No whisper. Just still metal and his own uneven breathing.
He stepped outside the tent. The camp had changed overnight. New banners fluttered beside the Solis sigil: the silver sun of the Capital Research Division. Wagons lined the eastern fence, their wheels sunk deep in mud. He could smell parchment, oil, and the faint sweetness of stored herbs—scents that didn't belong to war. The scholars had arrived.
Nalen stood near the center, directing repairs. Alina was already talking with a group of uniformed newcomers. Their cloaks were trimmed in blue rather than gold, marking them as civilians under military escort. Among them, one figure moved differently—steady, deliberate, every gesture precise. Even from a distance, Arin felt the air bend around her.
He looked away quickly. He didn't need to see her face. His blood already knew the shape of that presence.
> Not yet, he told himself. Don't look yet.
---
He found Nalen by the armory racks, pretending to inspect a sword that didn't need inspecting.
> "Morning," Arin said.
> "You sleep?" Nalen asked without looking up.
> "Define sleep."
> "Closing your eyes without dying."
> "Then no."
Nalen grinned. "Thought so. You hear the news? Capital sent their best minds. Apparently the ridge scared them enough to loosen their bureaucracy."
> "That's new," Arin said.
> "Don't mock progress," Nalen replied. "One of them's some kind of prodigy. Temporal theorist. Wrote half the manuals our mages pretend to understand."
Arin's hand tightened around the hilt of the sword he was pretending to test. "What's the name?"
> "Mira Valen."
The world dimmed for a second. Not the light—just everything behind his ribs.
> "You know her?" Nalen asked, catching the flicker in his expression.
> "Heard of her," Arin managed. "From… stories."
> "Then you'll have plenty to discuss. She's leading the analysis team. Report to her after midday."
> "What?"
> "Orders from the Capital envoy. You're listed as 'field liaison.' Guess they liked your riddles."
Arin forced a laugh. "Yeah. I'm everyone's favorite mystery."
Nalen clapped him on the shoulder. "Then keep being mysterious. It suits you." He walked off toward the barracks, leaving Arin standing in a puddle of sunlight that suddenly felt too heavy.
---
He retreated to the outer fence, where the ground sloped toward the valley. From there he could see the convoy clearly—soldiers unloading crates, scribes cataloging data, and the small knot of scholars reviewing equipment. She stood among them, hair catching the morning gold, coat still damp from rain. Her voice carried softly through the air: calm, instructive, confident. It wasn't what she said that froze him; it was the rhythm. Every syllable landed in time with the heartbeat he'd been hearing in the flux for days.
Alina appeared beside him. "They want volunteers for the data run. You should go."
> "Why me?"
> "Because you're the only one who doesn't flinch when the word time comes up."
He tried to smile. "That's because time already hates me."
> "Then maybe it'll listen."
She turned to leave, then paused. "You all right?"
> "Just… remembering something that hasn't happened yet."
She gave him the same look she always gave when his words made too much sense to argue with and walked off toward the main tents.
---
He stayed a long while at the fence. The air smelled of wet iron and cedar. A group of scholars passed near the supply wagons; their conversation drifted on the wind.
> "Commander Valen's orders—move the flux samples to the central tent."
"She said the readings matched human resonance."
"Impossible."
"That's what she said about lightning once."
Arin closed his eyes. Commander Valen. Not "Miss," not "Lady." The title fit her even in his memory of her older self—the friend's mother who had spoken softly and carried storms in her eyes. She'd been kind to him once. Too kind. And now here she was, eighteen years younger, walking toward the center of his impossible exile.
> Don't look, he told himself again. If you look, you'll start remembering her laugh, the way she used to say—
> "Excuse me."
The voice came from behind him.
He froze.
It was exactly as he remembered: clear, balanced, the sort of tone that made questions sound like gentle commands. He turned before he could stop himself.
She stood a few paces away, holding a set of rolled parchments pressed against her chest. Her cloak was half-fastened, one strand of hair escaping the tie. She looked at him the way she probably looked at everyone—curious first, kind second, analytical third.
> "You're blocking the path," she said, not unkindly.
For a moment, Arin forgot how language worked. Then, with effort: "Sorry."
He stepped aside. She nodded once and started past him—but paused. Her eyes lingered on the crest engraved on the watch chain hanging from his belt.
> "That emblem," she said. "House Solis?"
> "Family heirloom," he said quickly.
> "Strange," she murmured. "You don't wear it like a noble."
> "Maybe I'm not one."
> "Maybe," she said, studying him a heartbeat longer. "Still… interesting choice."
She gave a small nod and walked on. The scent of rain followed her, faint and clean.
Arin stood there long after she disappeared into the maze of tents. His pulse refused to slow. The watch in his hand started ticking again, steady, patient, as if satisfied.
> "You had to speak first," he whispered to it. "Of course you did."
The horizon brightened; sunlight spilled over the ridge like forgiveness that hadn't decided whether to arrive. Somewhere behind the tents, Mira's voice rose again—giving orders, calm and certain, completely unaware of the man who would spend the rest of his borrowed time trying not to love her.
Arin exhaled and smiled a sad, private smile.
> "So this is how it begins," he said softly. "Again."
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