Blumund buries its dead three days after the raid, all six together, because grief here doesn't wait for convenience and the ground doesn't care whose turn it is.
I don't remember choosing to attend. I don't remember anyone asking if a four-year-old should be there at all. I just remember standing at the edge of a freshly turned row of earth, Vereen's hand wrapped around mine hard enough to hurt, while the elder speaks words I don't fully understand about spirits and rest and the debt the living owe the dead.
The whole village turns out. Even people I don't recognize, faces from the edges of Blumund I've never seen up close, standing shoulder to shoulder in the cold because six names is enough loss that nobody feels entitled to stay home. Someone has laid out simple wooden markers for each grave, carved with names and little else — there isn't time, this soon after, for anything more elaborate, and nobody seems to mind. The dead don't need elaborate. They need remembering, and Blumund remembers.
Aileen's grave sits third from the left. Someone has already planted a small sprig of the same herbs she used to trade in the square, still faintly green against the dark soil. I don't know who left it. I never find out. Some kindnesses in Blumund arrive quietly and stay unsigned.
Lira stands on my other side, close enough that her cloak brushes my shoulder, and doesn't say anything at all. I've come to understand, over the last three days, that this is what real comfort looks like sometimes — not words, just presence, just someone choosing to stand beside you in the cold rather than explain the cold away.
Vereen doesn't speak during the ceremony. He doesn't cry, either, not where anyone can see. He just stands there, jaw tight, staring at the fresh earth like he's trying to memorize it, and when the elder finally finishes and the small crowd begins to disperse, he's the last one to turn away.
"Come on," he says finally, voice rough. "Nothing left to do here."
I don't think that's true. I don't think either of us believes it. But I let him lead me home anyway, because four years old or not, I understand that some sentences aren't meant to be argued with.
The house feels different in the weeks that follow. Not empty, exactly — Vereen is still there, still moving through the same rooms — but hollowed out somehow, like a shell that's kept its shape without keeping whatever used to live inside it.
He stops humming. I don't think he realizes he ever did, but Aileen's absence makes the silence where his own quieter habits used to sit unbearably obvious. He stops carving. The half-finished wooden toy he'd started before the raid sits untouched on the shelf, gathering dust nobody bothers to clear.
He starts training instead. Every spare hour, every morning before the sun is fully up, every evening once I'm meant to be asleep — I hear it through the walls sometimes, the rhythmic thud of a blade against a practice post, on and on, long past the point where it could possibly be useful.
One evening, unable to sleep, I creep to the window and watch him in the yard instead — stripped to his undershirt despite the cold, running through the same sword form over and over, faster each time, until his breath comes in ragged clouds and his strikes start landing a fraction wild. He doesn't stop when he stumbles. He doesn't stop when he cuts his own knuckle on the practice post's rough edge. He just resets his stance and starts again, like stopping would mean admitting something he isn't ready to admit yet.
I don't know, watching him, whether he's training to protect the next person he loves, or training to punish himself for not being fast enough to protect the last one. I don't think he knows either. I don't think that distinction matters much to a man who's stopped sleeping properly.
"He needs it," Lira tells me once, catching me listening at the door another night. "Some people grieve loud. Some people grieve quiet. Your father's the kind who grieves by trying to make sure it never happens again."
I don't fully understand what she means. Not yet. I will, eventually, in ways I wouldn't wish on anyone.
Lira starts coming every morning not long after, cloak damp with dew, ready before Vereen's even finished his boots.
"I'll take him," she tells him, the first morning she does it, in a tone that doesn't leave much room for argument. "You clearly have somewhere to be."
Vereen hesitates — I see it, the flicker of something that might be gratitude or might be guilt, hard to tell which wins — before he nods.
"Just until—"
"Until whenever," Lira says. "I don't mind. Spirits know somebody should."
And so it becomes the shape of my days. Vereen leaves before I'm fully awake, off to the Guild, or the forest's edge, or wherever the adventuring parties he's started running with are headed that particular morning. Lira arrives shortly after, feeds me something warm, and takes me out into a village that's still learning how to be a village again after losing six of its own in a single afternoon.
She's kind in a way that doesn't try to replace anything. She never pretends to be anyone but herself. When I ask about Aileen, she answers honestly, without flinching, without the careful softening some adults try when they think a child can't handle the truth.
"I miss her too," she tells me once, simply, stirring a pot that isn't quite as good as my mother's cooking and never will be. "Every single day. That doesn't go away. It just gets quieter, eventually. Not gone. Quieter."
I hold onto that word for a long time afterward. Quieter. Not a promise that it stops hurting. Just a promise that it changes shape.
Lira doesn't keep me shut inside, grief or not. Some mornings we sit quietly at home, and some mornings she bundles me up anyway and takes me to the square, insisting — gently, but firmly — that a four-year-old needs other four-year-olds as much as he needs anything else.
The freckled girl finds me within minutes, as she always does, though her usual bossiness has softened into something more careful.
"My ma says I'm supposed to be nice to you," she informs me, with the weary honesty of a child repeating adult instructions she doesn't fully understand the weight of. "On account of your mother."
"You don't have to be nice," I tell her. "You can just be normal."
She considers this, then brightens, visibly relieved to be let off the hook. "Normal I can do."
We chase each other around the well anyway, same as always, and the boy with the missing tooth cheers when I trip, same as always, and for an hour the ache in my chest goes quiet enough that I almost forget it's there. The smaller girl with the wooden horse sits beside me at one point, without a word, and simply holds my hand for a while before running off again — a small, wordless kindness I don't fully understand until years later, when I finally learn her own grandmother died that same spring, from causes that had nothing to do with wolves at all. Grief recognizes grief, even in children too young to name it.
Lira watches from the edge of the square, arms crossed, and I catch her smiling once — small, but real — like she's relieved to see me act like a child instead of a mourner for a little while.
"You needed that," she tells me afterward, ruffling my hair as we walk home. "Don't feel guilty for it. Your mother would want you laughing more than she'd want you sad on her behalf. Trust me on that one."
I do trust her. I'm starting to understand that trust is easier to give to people who never once ask you to pretend.
Vereen comes home late more nights than not, and some of those nights, he comes home wrong.
Not wrong in any way I have words for at first — just off, somehow, movements a fraction too careful, favoring one side without seeming to notice he's doing it. The first time I see the bruise blooming dark along his jaw, I don't say anything. I don't think I'm supposed to have seen it at all.
"Rough patrol," he says, when he catches me looking anyway. "Nothing serious."
It doesn't look like nothing. I've started to understand, watching him, that nothing serious has become the phrase he reaches for whenever something very much is.
Lira notices too, more than once, and doesn't let it pass as easily as I do.
"You can't keep coming home like this," she tells him one evening, arms crossed, standing between him and the door like she might physically block his next patrol if she has to. "He needs a father who comes home in one piece, Vereen. Not a hero. A father."
"I am coming home," he says, quiet but firm. "Every time. That's the part I'm not willing to bend on."
"That's not the same as coming home safe."
"No," he agrees. "It isn't. I know."
He doesn't promise to slow down. I notice that, even at four years old — the careful way he agrees with her without actually agreeing to change anything at all.
Lira catches my eye over his shoulder, and something passes between us — not quite an apology, not quite a shared frustration, just the quiet acknowledgment of two people who both love the same stubborn man and have both, separately, already accepted they can't argue him out of his own grief.
"Stubborn as a mule," she mutters, mostly to herself, gathering her cloak. "Fine. Have it your way. But I'm not burying you too — you hear me?"
"Loud and clear," he says, and there's something almost fond in it, buried under the exhaustion.
She leaves shaking her head, and he watches her go with an expression I don't have words for yet — gratitude, maybe, for someone willing to fight with him about it instead of just quietly worrying from a distance.
I think, watching them both, that grief makes people fiercer about the ones they have left, not gentler. I understand that better than most four-year-olds could. I've lost people before. I know exactly how loud the fear gets, underneath all that fierceness.
But he never misses a night. Whatever happens out there — and I'm old enough now, and remember enough of another life, to guess at some of what "out there" might actually mean — he always comes home before the door needs to be locked against the dark. He always sits with me by the fire, even on nights I can tell it costs him something just to stay upright. He always taps the doorframe twice, going and coming, the same ritual he's kept since before I could walk.
"I'm right here," he still says, every single night, even now.
I've started to wonder if he says it more for himself than for me.
I find out I'm right, on a night I'm not supposed to be awake to find out anything at all.
I wake for no reason I can name — a creak of floorboards, maybe, or just the old instinct of a mind that's died once before and never quite learned to sleep as deeply as it should. The fire's burned down to embers. The house is dark, except for the faint orange glow near the hearth, where Vereen sits alone, believing himself unwatched.
His shoulders are shaking.
He isn't loud about it. He's never loud about anything, not anymore. But I can see it, even from across the room, even through half-closed eyes I keep carefully still — the way his whole frame curls forward, the way one hand presses hard against his own mouth like he's trying to physically hold something in that's already escaping anyway.
In his other hand, I realize slowly, he's holding something small. A scrap of fabric — pale blue, familiar in a way that takes me a moment to place. One of Aileen's old headscarves, the one she used to tie back her hair while she cooked, worn soft from years of use. He's turning it over and over between his fingers like it might unravel if he holds still too long, like the motion itself is the only thing keeping him upright.
"I don't know how to do this without you," he whispers, so quietly I almost don't catch it at all. "I don't know how to be enough. For him. For any of it."
The fire cracks softly. He doesn't seem to hear it.
I don't move. I don't make a sound. Some instinct older than my four years understands, with total clarity, that this isn't a moment meant for witnesses — that if he knew I was watching, he'd swallow it down and never let it surface again, and something in him needs this more than he needs to protect me from seeing it.
So I watch. Silently. And I feel something crack open in my own chest that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a promise I don't yet have the words to make.
I'm going to get stronger, I think, watching my father grieve alone by a dying fire, carrying a weight he refuses to let anyone else help hold. Stronger than this. Stronger than whatever's out there that took her. Strong enough that nobody I love ever has to bury someone again because I wasn't enough to stop it.
It isn't a child's promise. I don't make it like one.
A faint hum stirs, so quiet I almost miss it.
Will +1 Reward: A Promise Kept Quiet
No fanfare. No quest header. Just the System, marking something that was never meant to be a task in the first place.
Eventually, Vereen's shoulders still. He wipes his face with the back of one hand, tucks the pale blue scarf carefully into his shirt pocket like something too precious to set back down, and draws in a breath that shudders only slightly on the way out. He sits up straighter — rebuilding, piece by piece, the same careful strength he'll wear again tomorrow like nothing happened at all.
I close my eyes fully before he can catch me watching.
I don't tell him what I saw. Not that night. Not for a very long time after.
The weeks fold into months, the way they do, even after losses that feel like they should stop time completely and never let it move again.
Winter passes. Spring returns, quieter than the year before, the village still healing in the slow, uneven way villages do — grief tucked into daily routines rather than displayed openly, six empty chairs at six different tables that everyone has learned, carefully, not to mention out loud.
I turn five in the early warmth of that spring, and Lira marks the occasion with a small honey cake she clearly spent more coin on than she should have, and Vereen manages something close to a real smile when he watches me eat it.
"Five years old," he says, mostly to himself, turning the words over like he's testing whether they still make sense. "Spirits. Where does the time go."
"Nowhere good," I tell him, echoing words I haven't heard in a long time, and something flickers across his face — surprise, maybe, or the particular ache of hearing someone else's voice in a familiar joke.
"No," he agrees quietly. "No, I suppose it doesn't."
That evening, once the cake is gone and the fire's burned low, he sets something down on the table between us — a letter, Guild-stamped, the wax seal already broken.
"There's a training program," he says. "For the village children. Starting soon. Sword work, mostly. Some magic, for those who want it." He hesitates, in a way that isn't quite like him. "Your mother always said you were curious about everything. I think she'd want you to have the chance to be curious about this too."
I look at the letter. I look at him.
Somewhere behind my ribs, the promise I made by a dying fire months ago stirs, patient and quiet and entirely certain of itself.
"I want to go," I tell him, and mean it more than I've meant almost anything in either of my lives.
He nods slowly, like he expected nothing less, and for the first time in a long time, the silence between us doesn't feel hollow at all.
It feels like the beginning of something.