Six is a strange age. Old enough to notice patterns. Not quite old enough for anyone to explain them to you honestly.
I notice, for instance, that Vereen's nights have settled into a rhythm I've come to know almost as well as my own heartbeat. Guild in the early morning. Whatever unnamed business fills his afternoons — training, or patrols, or the adventuring parties he still runs with more often than any grieving widower probably should. Home before the door needs locking, without fail, the way he promised Lira that first terrible week and has somehow, impossibly, kept every single day since.
I've started keeping my own quiet ledger of the pattern, the way I keep track of most things now — which nights he comes home smelling of pine and cold iron, which nights he comes home with the particular tightness around his eyes that means the patrol found something worth worrying about, which nights, rarest of all, he comes home simply tired in the ordinary way, nothing more sinister underneath it than a long day's honest work. I don't share this ledger with anyone. It feels like something private, a small act of vigilance I've claimed as entirely my own.
I notice the bruises come less often now, or maybe I've just gotten better at not staring at them. I notice he's started sharpening his blade with something closer to routine than obsession, the frantic edge of those early months worn down into something steadier, if not entirely healed. He's started humming again, too, faint and rare, catching himself sometimes mid-note like the sound still surprises him, like some part of him hadn't realized it was ready to make music again.
Lira visits less often now that I'm mostly at the Guild during the day, but she still comes by most evenings, still brings honey cakes on my birthday, still finds small, quiet ways to remind me that grief and joy aren't actually opposites, whatever it felt like in the beginning. She's started courting, I notice — carefully, privately, a village blacksmith named Han who blushes every time she teases him in the square. I'm glad for her. I don't say so directly, but I make sure she knows it anyway, in the small ways a six-year-old knows how — a drawing left on her doorstep, a wildflower pressed into her palm without explanation, small offerings that say what I don't yet have the words to say outright.
I notice, mostly, that I've stopped waiting for the day he doesn't come home. Some quiet, careful part of me still keeps the thought filed away — the way you keep an old scar, not painful anymore but never quite forgotten either — but the sharp, immediate fear has dulled into something I can carry without it constantly weighing down every hour of the day.
I don't know yet that this particular kind of peace has an expiration date. I'm learning, slowly, that most kinds do.
-----Six Months Later-----
The Guild yard has become the shape of my whole world, in the way childhood worlds tend to narrow around whatever occupies them most. Sword forms in the morning. Magic in the afternoon, still stubborn, still slow, though the candle catches more often now than it doesn't. Toren beside me through most of it, sharp-tongued and steady, the closest thing to a brother either of us has ever had.
The other children have mostly stopped whispering about my golden eyes, or my mother, or the strange way I moved through my first sword stance like I'd been born already knowing it. Six months of showing up, day after day, sweating through the same drills as everyone else, has done more to earn their acceptance than any inherited talent ever could. I've learned more names than I can easily count — the girl who can already summon a small, stubborn flame without half trying, the twins who spar together with an eerie, wordless coordination, the youngest boy in our group who still cries at every scraped knee and gets teased for it gently, never cruelly, the way Blumund's children have learned to handle each other's softness since the raid.
Kyle runs us harder now than he did in those first gentle weeks, and I understand, watching the way he studies each of us during drills, that he's begun sorting us — not unkindly, just honestly — into the ones who'll likely register as adventurers someday and the ones who're here mostly to learn enough to keep themselves safe. I don't know yet which category he's placed me in. Some days I'm not entirely sure myself.
Quest Completed: Swing a Sword 67,890/100000 Reward: +1 Strength
ERROR STAT LIMIT REACHED ADDING TO OVERFLOW
OVERFLOW STATS +2 WISDOM
The overflow barely registers as strange anymore. It's simply become part of the rhythm — effort, reward, redirect, repeat — a private accounting the System keeps somewhere I can't see, patient as ever about explaining why.
Ava's students have started calling me "the stubborn one," not unkindly, a nickname I've come to wear the way other children wear the ones about my eyes. I don't mind it. Stubborn feels like something I chose, in a life where so little else was ever left up to me.
The forest reminds us all, one ordinary afternoon, exactly how little any of that peace was ever guaranteed.
I'm in the middle of a sparring drill with Toren — evenly matched more often than not these days, both of us grown enough that the fights actually mean something now — when the ground shudders beneath our feet, sudden and sharp enough that we both stumble out of stance entirely.
The whole yard goes still.
It isn't the first tremor since the raid. The forest still groans sometimes, still shifts in ways that make the older adventurers glance instinctively toward the treeline. But this one carries a different weight than the others — closer, somehow, in a way that has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with the particular quality of dread it drags up from wherever the village has learned to bury it. The practice swords around me clatter against the packed dirt as other children drop them, hands flying instinctively to cover their ears against a sound that isn't quite loud enough to need covering, more felt than heard, a deep bone-shudder that seems to come from everywhere at once.
Kyle's head snaps toward the Guild hall even before the second tremor hits, softer than the first but no less unsettling.
"Everyone inside," he says, voice gone hard and flat in a way I've never heard from him. "Now. Move."
We move. Nobody argues. Six years of living beside a forest that's already taken people we love has taught every child in that yard exactly how seriously to take Kyle's tone when it shifts like that.
Ava herds her students in alongside us, expression carefully neutral in the way adults manage when they're trying not to frighten children who are already plenty frightened on their own. I catch her exchanging a glance with Kyle over our heads — brief, wordless, the kind of communication only fifteen years of marriage can compress into half a second.
"Stay together," she tells us, ushering the last of the mage students through the hall doors. "Whatever's happening, it's happening out there. Not in here."
I want to believe the walls make that true. I remember, with a clarity I wish I didn't have, exactly how little walls mattered the last time the forest decided to reach this far.
Inside the crowded hall, the youngest children start crying almost immediately, and the older ones do their best to comfort them despite their own visible fear. I find myself doing the same without quite deciding to — crouching beside the boy who cries at scraped knees, murmuring the same low, steady reassurances Aileen used to murmur to me, back before I understood exactly how fragile those reassurances could turn out to be.
"It's alright," I tell him, though I don't fully believe it myself. "We're safe in here. Kyle's got us."
He doesn't stop crying, not entirely, but his breathing slows a little, and something in that small act of comfort settles something in my own chest too — a reminder that being scared and being useful aren't actually opposites, whatever six years of quiet vigilance might have half-convinced me otherwise.
The tremors pass within the hour, though the tension in the Guild hall lingers far longer.
Word trickles in slowly, the way it always does — a courier here, a returning patrol there, fragments assembling into a picture nobody fully trusts yet. Something large moved through the deep forest today. Nobody's certain what. The patrols that went to investigate haven't all reported back yet, and the ones that have don't agree on what they actually saw. Some claim they glimpsed something massive moving through the deep canopy, faster than anything that size should be capable of. Others insist it was nothing more than a particularly large boar spooked into a frenzy by something else entirely. The elder, when he arrives to check on us personally, offers no theory of his own — just a tired, watchful patience that unsettles me more than any of the wilder rumors.
Toren finds me in the crowded hall, uncharacteristically subdued. "You alright?"
"Fine." I glance toward the doors, toward the yard beyond them, toward the treeline further still. "You?"
"My ma's out there somewhere. Herb-gathering party, west ridge." He doesn't say anything else, doesn't need to. We both understand exactly what that particular silence means, better than most children our age ever should.
We wait together, the two of us, until word finally comes that his mother's party turned back early, spooked by the first tremor, unharmed. Toren's shoulders drop about two full inches the moment he hears it. I don't comment on it. I remember, too well, what it feels like to wait for news that doesn't come the way you're hoping.
"Sorry," he mutters afterward, a little embarrassed by how visibly relieved he'd been. "Didn't mean to make it weird."
"You didn't." I mean it. "I'd have been the same, if it were me waiting."
He glances at me sideways, understanding passing between us without needing further words — two boys who've both learned, in their own separate ways, exactly how quickly an ordinary afternoon can turn into something you never fully recover from.
Vereen finds me at the Guild hall himself, rather than waiting for me at home the way he usually does — a small deviation from routine that tells me, better than any words could, how seriously he's taking whatever just happened.
"You're alright?" he asks, hands checking me over out of old habit, the same instinct that hasn't fully left him since the day he found me in that doorway six years ago.
"I'm alright. We were inside. Kyle got everyone moved fast."
"Good man. Good instincts." Something in his shoulders eases, fractionally, though it doesn't fully leave. "I want you staying close to the Guild the rest of the week. No wandering after sessions, understood? Not until we know more."
"Understood."
He studies me a moment longer, like he's checking for the argument I'm not giving him, then nods, satisfied, and we start the walk home together.
We walk home together, slower than usual, both of us listening to a forest that's gone unnervingly quiet in the tremor's aftermath — the same wrong-shaped silence I remember from six years ago, the kind that doesn't feel like peace so much as held breath.
"Is it the same thing?" I ask him eventually, unable to hold the question in any longer. "Like before?"
He's quiet for a long moment, choosing his words the way he's learned to since Aileen's death — carefully, honestly, without the comfortable lies some parents might reach for instead.
"I don't know," he admits. "Nobody does yet. Could be nothing. Could be everything starting up again." He glances down at me, something protective and tired in his expression. "Whatever it is, we'll be careful. Same as always."
Same as always didn't save her, I think, and immediately hate myself for thinking it. I don't say it out loud. Some thoughts are too sharp to hand to someone already carrying enough.
He seems to catch some shadow of it anyway, some flicker crossing my face I don't quite manage to hide, because his hand finds my shoulder, steady and grounding.
"I know it feels thin," he says quietly. "The promise. 'We'll be careful.' I know how little it actually managed to protect, last time. I think about that more than you probably realize." His voice catches, just slightly, before he steadies it again. "But it's still the only promise I know how to make. Vigilance instead of certainty. It's not enough. I know it's not enough. It's just what I have to offer."
"It's enough," I tell him, though I'm not entirely certain I believe it myself. "You're still here. That's more than a lot of people can say."
He doesn't answer right away, just tightens his grip on my shoulder briefly before letting go, and we finish the walk home in a silence that feels, somehow, less lonely than it should.
That night, I lie awake long after the house has gone quiet, listening for tremors that don't come.
A faint hum stirs, quieter than usual, no header attached to announce it.
Will +1 Reward: Learned Vigilance
I stare at the words in the dark. Not a reward that feels like a gift, exactly. More like an acknowledgment — the System noting, in its own strange, wordless way, that some kinds of growth only come from learning to live inside fear without letting it consume you entirely.
I think of Aileen, and the emergency bag she used to keep by the door. I think of Vereen, sharpening his blade every night regardless of whether he's scheduled to patrol. I think of my own steadily climbing numbers, capped and overflowing in equal measure, evidence of a childhood spent preparing for a danger nobody can quite name yet.
Down the hall, I hear Vereen moving quietly through the house — checking the window latch, checking the door, the same careful ritual he's kept every night since the raid, though he's never once explained it and I've never once asked. Some promises don't need explaining. I understand that better than most six-year-olds could.
I think about Toren, waiting today to hear whether his mother was safe, wearing the exact same expression I must have worn once, in a doorway, waiting for Vereen. I think about how much of Blumund carries some version of that same waiting now, quietly, underneath all our ordinary days — a village that learned, the hard way, exactly how thin the line is between safe and not.
I think, too, about the boy who cried today, and how much comfort a few steady words seemed to give him, however uncertain I felt saying them. I wonder if that's simply what being older looks like from the outside — not the absence of fear, but the willingness to speak steadily through it anyway, for the sake of someone smaller and more frightened than yourself. I wonder if that's what Vereen's been doing for me, all these months, every single night he comes home and taps the doorframe twice despite whatever the day actually cost him.
I don't know, lying there in the dark, whether the tremors mean anything at all, or whether they're just the forest's old habit of reminding Blumund it was never truly safe to begin with. Vereen says nobody knows yet. I believe him. I've learned, over six years, that not-knowing is its own kind of honest, even when it doesn't feel like comfort.
I only know that somewhere in the last six years, I stopped being a child who simply endured danger, and started becoming someone actively preparing to meet it. The sword forms, the stubborn candle, the hundred thousand repetitions still not yet finished — none of it is really about becoming strong for its own sake. It's about making sure the next time something reaches for the people I love, it finds someone standing in the way who's actually ready.
I'm not ready yet. I know that clearly, lying here, counting Vereen's footsteps as he finally settles for the night. But I'm closer than I was yesterday. Closer than I was the day of the funeral, or the day I first held a practice sword, or the day I chose not to spend my last card on a shortcut I'd have regretted.
Closer, one small, deliberate choice at a time.
I fall asleep eventually, the way I always do, trusting the dark in a way I never once trusted it in my first life.
But some part of me stays alert anyway, listening, long after sleep finally takes the rest of me under — a habit I suspect I'll carry for the rest of both my lives combined, however many more of those I end up living.
In the morning, the village wakes to find the tremor's aftermath already softening into rumor and half-memory, the way most frights do once enough ordinary hours pass on top of them. The market stalls open. The Guild yard fills again with children eager to pretend, for one more day, that the ground beneath their feet is as solid as it looks. Kyle runs us through drills with a fraction more intensity than usual, though he never says why, and none of us ask.
Toren finds me at the edge of the yard before the morning session starts, quieter than his usual self.
"Thanks," he says, not quite meeting my eyes. "For yesterday. Waiting with me."
"You'd have done the same."
"Probably." He shrugs, some of his usual brightness returning to his expression. "Still counts, though."
We fall into step together, heading toward Kyle's side of the yard, and for a moment the ordinary rhythm of the morning — sparring, laughter, the familiar ache of muscles being pushed toward something greater — settles back over both of us like a blanket pulled snug against the cold.
I don't know what's moving in the deep forest, or whether it means the world is about to change again the way it did six years ago. I only know that whatever comes, I intend to meet it a little more prepared than I was the last time, one repetition, one small choice, one quietly kept promise at a time.
The forest, for now, stays silent. I choose to let that be enough, at least until it decides to be something else.