The fire is warm.
I know this because the others lean toward it, because the light catches on their teeth when they laugh, because the Miqo'te beside me — Talia, her name is Talia, I made myself remember — keeps pulling her sleeves up past her elbows. The heat is doing something to them. Something I should be feeling.
I catalogue it instead. The way the flames make shadows dance on the stone walls of the tavern's back room. The way the Hyur across from me, Callum, gestures too wide when he tells a story, nearly knocking over his ale. The way the Elezen in the corner, quiet, watchful — Seren, I think — smiles without showing her teeth.
I have been here for three weeks. Long enough to learn their patterns. Long enough to know that Talia talks with her hands when she's nervous and goes still when she's lying. That Callum drinks too much after difficult hunts and not at all on quiet days. That Seren watches everyone the way I do, which means I need to be careful around her.
Three weeks. The longest I've stayed anywhere in months.
"—and then he just stood there," Callum is saying, his voice loud enough to fill the room twice over. "Sword in the dirt, looking at me like I'd grown a second head. And I said—"
Talia groans. "You didn't."
"I absolutely did. I looked him dead in the eyes and said, 'That's what happens when you bring a knife to a knuckle fight.'"
The room erupts. Talia buries her face in her hands. Even Seren, in her corner, lets out a short breath that might be a laugh.
I smile.
It's the right shape. I checked it in a mirror once, years ago, mapped the exact curve of lips and the specific crinkle at the corners of the eyes that makes a smile look real. I practiced it until the muscles remembered without my input. The expression sits on my face now like a mask that has learned to fit.
Callum catches my eye, grinning. "What about you, Ai? You've been quiet all night. Got any good stories from your Adder days?"
The question lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. I feel the ripple spread outward — not panic, not exactly. Just... a recalibration. An adjustment of the performance.
"The military doesn't make for good drinking stories," I say. My voice comes out easy, light. "Too much paperwork. Not enough dramatic sword-dropping."
Talia laughs. "She's got you there."
"Boring," Callum declares, pointing at me with his tankard. "Absolutely boring. We'll make an adventurer out of you yet."
You won't.
The thought surfaces and sinks before I can catch it. I keep the smile in place. I take a drink from my cup — water, not ale, though I've let them assume otherwise. I nod at the right moments and laugh at the right volume and the fire keeps burning and they keep not seeing.
This is what I'm good at.
The night winds down the way these nights always do. Callum's stories get slower, looser. Talia starts to yawn between sentences. Seren slips out first, silent as she came, and I file that away for later.
I'm calculating my exit — two more minutes of conversation, a comment about the late hour, a warm farewell that suggests I'll be here tomorrow — when Talia leans into me.
Her shoulder presses against mine. It's casual. Familiar. The kind of touch that happens between people who have stopped thinking about personal space.
"I'm glad you found us," she says. Her voice is softer now, thick with ale and exhaustion. "I know you said you were just passing through, but... I don't know. It feels like you've always been here."
I should say something. I'm supposed to say something. The script is right there — I'm glad too or It's been nice or any of the dozen phrases I've used before in moments exactly like this one.
But Talia isn't finished.
"You're family now," she says. "You know that, right? You're one of us."
The word hits like cold water.
Family.
I hear it and something in my chest — something I thought I'd carved out years ago — shudders. A hairline fracture in glass I didn't know was still there. The room doesn't change. The fire still burns. Callum is still mumbling something about another round. But the edges of everything have gone soft, blurred, like I'm looking at the world through water.
The Sunless Sea.
I can feel it now. That cold, heavy thing that lives where my heart used to be. It's rising. Pressing against the inside of my ribs. The weight of it makes my lungs feel too small.
Family.
She doesn't know what that word means. She doesn't know that I had a family once — a father who named me Insincere because he'd already lost everything else, a brother who built an empire I helped hold together with lies. She doesn't know that I've heard that word from a dozen different mouths in a dozen different taverns, and every time I heard it, I started packing my things in the dark.
She thinks she knows me. She's looked at this face and heard this voice and watched me smile and laugh and nod at the right moments, and she's decided that what she's seeing is real.
It isn't.
None of it is.
"Ai?"
Talia's voice comes from somewhere far away. I realize I've gone still. The smile has slipped — I can feel the muscles in my face trying to find it again, struggling to remember the shape.
"Sorry." The word comes out automatic. "Long day. I think the ale is catching up with me."
I'm already standing. Already moving toward the door. My legs know this part. They've done it before.
"You okay?" Callum asks. Even drunk, he notices. They always notice eventually.
"Fine." The smile is back now, thinner than before. "Just need some air. I'll be right back."
I won't be right back.
The alley behind the tavern smells like rain and rotting vegetables. The cold hits my face and I lean against the stone wall and I breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The Sunless Sea is still rising. I can feel it in my throat now, thick and dark and endless. It isn't sadness — I lost the word for sadness years ago. It's heavier than that. It's the weight of every smile I've faked and every warmth I've borrowed and every fire I've sat beside while feeling nothing at all.
I knock my head against the wall. Once. Twice. The stone is cold and rough and real.
Think.
But there's nothing to think. The nothing is the problem. I spent years scraping myself hollow — the lust, the love, the small bright hungers that make a person feel — and I thought when I was done I'd be free. Light. Untouchable.
Instead I'm this.
I press my palms flat against the wall. I count the cracks in the mortar. I try to find some thought, some feeling, some spark of something in the vast dark space where my self used to live.
Nothing.
There's only the weight. The water. The slow, cold realization that I succeeded. I won the war against my own heart and the victory tastes like lead and the nothing has become so heavy I can barely stand.
Family.
Talia's voice echoes in my skull. The word bounces off the empty walls in there, finding no purchase, no response.
She'll be hurt when I'm gone. They always are. Callum will be confused, then angry. Seren will understand, maybe — she watches too carefully not to have seen something. They'll talk about me for a few weeks. Wonder what they did wrong. Eventually, they'll stop.
I'll find another tavern. Another Free Company. Another group of warm, sincere people who don't know that the woman sitting beside them is just an empty vessel wearing a convincing face.
The pattern will continue.
The water will keep rising.
I stay in the alley until my hands stop shaking. Until the Sunless Sea settles back down below my throat, down into my chest where I can ignore it. Until I can shape my face into the right expression again.
Then I walk back inside.
"There she is!" Callum waves me over, his grin sloppy and wide. "Thought you'd gotten lost!"
"Just needed a moment." I slide back into my seat. The fire is still warm. I still can't feel it. "What'd I miss?"
Talia smiles at me. Warm. Open. Trusting.
"Nothing much," she says. "Just glad you're back."
I smile too.
It's the best lie I've told all night.
But I wasn't always this hollow. There was a time before the masks fit so well, before the nothing settled into my bones, before I learned to sit beside a fire and feel only the cold.
There was a girl in the Black Shroud who still believed her name was a warning, not a prophecy.
This is how she drowned.