A week had passed since we left Ytval.
Seven days of walking, hunting, sleeping under open sky, and waking up to Grann announcing the day by cracking his knuckles so loud the birds scattered. My body had started the trip as a stranger to all of it. My legs had burned after the first hill. My lungs had complained by the third. By the end of day two, I'd been trailing behind Lyra and Grann by a full minute, which Lyra had found extremely funny.
"Come on, slowpoke!" she'd called, not even slightly out of breath.
"Give me a moment," I'd wheezed back.
"You've been saying that since the first hill!"
I had. I wasn't proud of it.
The thing was, I had barbarian blood. Reyna's blood. The same blood that let Lyra keep pace with a man twice her size without breaking a sweat. By rights, that same tenacity should've lived somewhere in my bones. But apparently, it had missed me. Or gone into hiding. One or the other.
What changed it, I wasn't sure. Maybe my body got the message eventually. Maybe sheer stubbornness counted for something. But somewhere around day three, something in me definitely changed; like gears catching after grinding too long. My legs stopped screaming. My lungs stopped burning. I could keep pace without falling behind, which I chose to count as a personal victory and told nobody about.
Grann had taken the hardest route on purpose.
I'd suspected it from the moment we reached the mountain on the second day. At the peak, I'd spotted it clearly; a well-worn merchant's road winding through the valley below. Smooth stone, flat ground, and shade from the tree line on either side. Probably used by hundreds of travelers every week.
We had gone straight over the mountain instead. Ridiculous. And Lyra had loved it, every single second.
"That's all?" she'd said at the top, not even pausing to catch her breath. "I was just starting to warm up."
My left eye had twitched. I'd said nothing.
"Too easy," she'd added, already starting down the other side.
Why you little— ugh, she's encouraging Grann to take harder routes! I imagined myself choking Lyra for being this annoying. Too easy. She'd said that about the mountain we had just climbed. I'd spent half of it on my hands and knees.
Grann had glanced back at me with that particular grin of his, the kind that said he found something genuinely amusing and had no intention of hiding it.
"Pick up those feet, cabbage," he'd laughed.
I picked up my feet and did so with what I hoped was dignity.
***
We camped wherever Grann decided it was a good place to stop, which was usually wherever he'd already planted himself and begun unrolling his bedding. No formal decision. No vote. He'd simply stop, look around, nod once, and that was that.
The forest we traveled through was dense and old, the kind of old where the trees were wide enough that it would take three people to wrap their arms around a single trunk. Their bark was dark and ridged like ancient armor. Roots surfaced from the earth in long, tangled arches, and the moss between them was thick and soft and bright green. Everything here felt like it had been growing since before anyone had thought to name it.
At night, the canopy was close enough to muffle the wind but sparse enough that stars still showed between the branches. Not as many as from the roof of our house back in Ytval, but enough. I'd lie on my bedroll and find myself looking for familiar clusters, well, not because I knew the constellations of this world, but because the act of searching was something to do with my hands while my mind wandered.
It wandered, mostly, back to Ytval. To the study room with its four books and the smell of old paper. To the kitchen in the mornings when Mom was already moving, already humming, already making the world feel organized before the rest of us had fully woken up. To Dad at the chessboard, moving his bishop while pretending not to notice mine was exposed.
To Onnie. I wondered if she'd gone back to the hill yet. If she'd sat there alone with her book of paintings and her chess set and found the silence different without someone sitting next to her. Maybe she hadn't gone at all. Maybe the hill felt wrong without company.
I hoped she was okay.
I reached into the side pocket of my pack and touched the edge of the small violet box, just for a moment. Then I pulled my hand back, rolled over, and stared at the fire instead.
***
Grann taught us to hunt on day four.
He explained it the way he explained most things; briefly, practically, and with the expectation that we'd figure out the rest ourselves.
"Watch and listen, cubs. Do not breathe like a broken bellows." He'd looked at me when he said that last part.
His own senses were remarkable to witness. I'd known, technically, that barbarians had enhanced hearing and smell. Mom had mentioned it before, the same way she mentioned things that were simply facts of their world—matter-of-factly, without drama. But watching it happen in person was something else.
He'd stopped mid-step on the fourth morning, lifted his nose slightly, and said, "Deer. Thirty meters.. Just behind the bend in the creek."
I'd heard nothing. I'd smelled nothing. I'd stood there blinking while he drew back his spear and, a moment later, sent it whistling through the trees with a soft, decisive thwip.
The silence afterward lasted about two seconds.
Then Lyra had grabbed her own spear and sprinted after him, shouting something about wanting to try. Her first kill was a rabbit. It was quick, and it was unsurprisingly effective, and the spear went right through it with the kind of force that made me genuinely glad I hadn't been standing downrange. I'd looked away before she pulled it free. Some instincts from my old world died hard.
"Good aim, cub," Grann had said, and Lyra had lit up like someone had handed her a trophy.
I tried to mimic the hunting myself. I crouched low where Grann showed me. I listened hard, the way he'd described, not for one specific sound, but for the absence of sound, the quiet that animals make around them when they move. I tried to smell past the pine and the river mud and the campfire smoke still clinging to my clothes.
I heard birds. A creek running somewhere to my left. My own heartbeat, irritatingly loud.
That was it.
I stood back up after a few minutes and wrote something in my journal instead. If my senses weren't sharp enough to hunt, I could at least document what Grann's looked like from the outside. Maybe there was something to understand about it. Maybe it was just biology I didn't have. Either way, writing it down felt better than staring into the trees feeling useless.
Later that afternoon, we stopped by a creek to rest. Grann sat beside me on a fallen log while Lyra waded into the shallows with her trousers rolled up, turning over rocks for no reason I could identify beyond pure restlessness. He watched her for a moment, then looked at what I was writing.
"Still thinking about the hunt?" he asked.
"Documenting it," I said. "There's something methodical in the way you do it. I want to understand the sequence."
Grann was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who had nothing to say, but the quiet of someone choosing carefully.
"Bah. You're chewing on it like a dog with a bone," he said finally.
I glanced up. "What?"
"You're being too hard on yourself."
"N-no, it's okay. I'm not upset. I'm just—"
"You're writing about what you couldn't do instead of what you did." He tapped the edge of my journal with one thick finger. "That's brooding with extra steps."
I opened my mouth to protest, but I stopped myself.
Huh. That's... accurate.
He leaned back on his palms, looking at the creek. "The senses aren't a gift handed out at birth and locked there forever. They're a muscle. Quiet ones, harder to find than the ones in your arms, but muscles still. You ignore them long enough, and they'll sleep. You use them, they'll wake up." He paused. "Some people just never bother."
"Lyra picked it up immediately," I said. Not bitterly. Just as a fact.
"Lyra is older than you, and is physically talented," he said, equally matter-of-fact. "She was born closer to the surface of her instincts. That's something worth acknowledging." He looked at me sideways. "But talent is just a head start, boy. It's not the finish line."
Across the creek, Lyra had found something under a rock that delighted her enormously. She held it up, some kind of large beetle, glossy and dark, and announced to no one in particular that she was going to name it.
He walked toward the water's edge and called to Lyra to put the beetle down.
I looked at my journal. Then I crossed out the part where I'd written not sharp enough and wrote not yet instead. It wasn't much. But it felt more accurate.
After the hunt, Grann set to work. He cooked the way he did everything else; completely, without waste.
That was the part I hadn't anticipated. Back home, Mom was a skilled hunter. She'd field-dressed kills cleanly and efficiently, but she'd always prepared the meat the way most people expected: the usable cuts, cooked simply. She'd brought some of her tribe's food customs with her, but not all.
Grann brought all of them.
He'd hang the deer upside down first to drain the blood. The blood would then go into a small iron pot he carried in his pack, mixed with herbs and simmered low over the fire until it thickened into a dark, rich soup. The organs were cleaned and roasted. The tongue, the brain, uh, all of it. He worked through the animal with the kind of systematic efficiency that suggested he'd been doing this since before I was born in either life.
"Eighty percent," he'd said the first evening, gesturing at the carcass. "You take eighty percent of the animal, you get a hundred percent of its strength. Waste it, and you only get what you chose to take."
It was actually logical. I respected the logic.
The blood soup was the sticking point.
Lyra would take in the smell, and would grin. "It smells good already!"
I can smell the blood soup a few feet away, and I did not like a single part of its smell. He'd handed me a clay cup of it that first night with the casual confidence of a man who has never once considered that someone might not want it.
I'd looked at it. Dark, steaming, the iron smell hit me before I'd even brought it close.
"It seals the strength." Grann had said. "Go on, now. Drink it."
Lyra had already drained half her cup. She'd wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and held it back out for more, no hesitation, no grimace, just satisfaction, like she'd been drinking blood soup her whole life and had simply been waiting for someone to remember to serve it.
I'd taken one slow sip.
The flavor was iron and salt and something deeply savory that I couldn't quite place and didn't want to investigate further. My stomach performed a small, controlled protest that I managed to contain through sheer willpower.
"Mm," I'd said, and set the cup down carefully.
Grann had watched me. "That's it?"
"I'm savoring it," I'd said.
He'd squinted. Then he'd let it go, which I counted as a diplomatic victory.
After that, I stuck to the muscle cuts. Cooked well, seasoned with whatever herbs Grann found along the way. It was genuinely good, actually, better than I'd expected from open-fire camp cooking. I just pretended the blood soup didn't exist and quietly pushed my cup toward Lyra each evening, who never once complained about the extra portion.
***
Water was the other ongoing negotiation. Every time we stopped at a river or creek to refill our skins, I boiled mine first.
Every. Single. Time.
"The water's fine," Grann said, on day two, watching me set a small pot over the fire with an expression of polite bafflement.
"It probably is," I agreed. "But boiling is better."
"People drink from rivers."
"People also get sick from rivers."
He made a sound that was not quite an argument and not quite agreement. Somewhere in the middle. By day five, he'd stopped saying anything at all. Just watched me set up my little pot, waited with impressive patience, and resumed walking when I was done. Maybe he'd decided I was a peculiar child with peculiar habits and that was simply that. Maybe he was humoring me.
Either way, his stomach bothered him twice during the trip. Mine didn't.
I did not say anything about this out loud. I merely noted it in my journal, privately, and moved on.
***
On the fifth evening, we camped on a wide flat rock above a river bend. The water below caught the last of the sunset in long orange strips. Somewhere upstream, a bird called out once and then went quiet.
We ate our meals per usual as the fire continued to burn. After cleaning up, Grann sat by a random log next to a nearby river.
Grann was in an unusually reflective mood. He sat with his arms resting on his knees, looking out over the water, and for a while he didn't say anything. Lyra was nearby, practicing her footwork on the far end of the rock, counting her steps under her breath. I was sitting cross-legged with my journal, but I wasn't writing. I was watching him.
He looked different, here. His usual enthusiasm subsided, replaced with.. I don't know exactly, probably as close I can describe it now is like my Grandfather from my father side back in my previous life, serious, wise and reflective. Away from the momentum of travel, with the fire burning low and the river below catching the last of the light, his face showed its years in a way it didn't when he was moving.
"You're quiet tonight," I said.
"Mm." He turned his head slightly, not fully toward me. "Just thinking."
"About the wedding?"
"About your mother."
I waited. He didn't continue immediately, and I had learned by now not to push Grann toward anything he wasn't already moving toward. So I let the silence sit between us until he was ready to fill it.
"What's on your mind?" I asked, after a moment.
He smiled, not the wide, performative grin he wore when he was being loud, but something quieter. "I'll tell you when you're older."
"Humor me," I said, and shrugged.
He looked at me. The smile stayed, but something in his eyes shifted, like a man recalibrating.
"You're surprisingly mature for your age," he said. "Not in the way people say it to mean 'polite.' I mean you sit still. You think before you speak. Most children your age from the tribe, well, they want to fight something, run off somewhere and make noise." He gestured vaguely toward Lyra, who was still counting her footwork steps. "Even that one. She's exceptional, but she's loud in the way all young things are loud."
I laughed at that, quietly. "I've always been more comfortable watching than doing."
He hummed. Not disapprovingly. Just acknowledging it.
"You remind me of your mother, young cub." he said, after a pause.
"Really?"
"Mm.." Nodding once, he looked back at the water. "Your mother, Reyna, she was the second of my three children. Different from the other two from the time she could walk. Not quieter, she was never quiet. But... what's the word—directed. Everything she did, she wanted to understand."
He picked up a stone from the rock face beside him, turned it once, and held it up briefly in the firelight. "She would find rocks like this when she was small. Not to throw at things. To look at them. She'd carry them around asking what they were made of. Why they were different colors." He set the stone down. "Her grandfather thought it was a phase."
"And you?" I asked.
"I thought it was interesting."
Across the rock, Lyra had finally stopped counting and was now just standing at the edge, looking down at the water below. She wasn't paying attention to us, or pretending not to.
Grann continued, unprompted now, like the story had found its own pace.
"The tribe had a small trading post, about a half day's walk from where we camped in those years. Merchants passed through twice a season. Most of the tribe traded hunts for tools, salt, cloth. Practical things." He paused. "Your mother, she was maybe nine, ten—started hunting on her own so she'd have something to trade."
I sat up slightly. "On her own? At nine?"
"She was better than she let on," he said, with a note of pride that he didn't try to hide. "She wasn't a natural tracker, but she was patient. She'd sit in one spot for half a day if she thought it would pay off. And it did, most of the time." He exhaled slowly. "She'd take her kills to the trading post and come back with books. Just books. Never anything else."
I stared at him.
Books. She had traded her own hunts, at nine years old, alone, for books.
"What kind of books?" I asked.
"Everything. Anything. History, medicine, animal behavior, maps, old religious texts she couldn't even read yet. She'd ask me what the words meant and I'd tell her what I knew, which wasn't much." He laughed, and it was a good laugh, soft and warm. "I started learning things I'd never needed to know just so I could keep up with her questions."
The fire cracked quietly between us.
"She hid them at first," he said. "Under her sleeping mat. Behind a loose panel in the wall of our hut. She thought someone would take them, or that the other children would laugh." He paused. "Then one evening I found one she'd left out by accident. Sat down and read it with her. After that, she stopped hiding them."
I thought about the study room at home. Four books. Worn spines. Mom's handwritten notes in the margins, corrections and additions she'd made herself. I had always thought of the study room as something modest, just what it was. Now I wondered if those four books represented something more deliberate.
"She wanted to be a scholar," His voice was certain.
My eyes widened for a split second. Mom wanted to be a scholar?
He continued, "She was one, by the time she was old enough to leave. She just never had anyone to teach her formally. She built it herself, piece by piece, every hunt she traded away." He turned to look at me directly. "When she was seventeen, she fought to leave the tribe. Not because she hated it, no, she didn't. She fought because she wanted something the tribe couldn't give her. That was the tradition then: if a Mandate woman wanted to choose her own path, the guardian must test it and she had to fight for it. Prove she wasn't leaving out of weakness."
"She fought you?" I asked, something catching in my chest.
"She fought her mother and me both," he said. "That was the custom." He rubbed the back of his neck slowly. "She was good. She'd been training quietly while everyone thought she was reading. Smart girl." Something flickered across his face; not quite sadness, not quite pride, but the complicated thing that lives in the space between them. "She earned it cleanly."
The river moved below us while the fire held.
"You let her go," I said.
"I fought her properly first," he said. "So she'd feel she'd earned it. Then, I let her go." He was quiet a long moment. "The tribe's rules were old and wrong, and I knew it. I changed them after. But she didn't have to wait for that. She made her own path." He looked at me, and something in his expression was very steady. "That's the kind of person she is. She doesn't wait for permission she should already have."
I didn't say anything.
I was thinking about my mother standing in our kitchen, flour on her apron, talking us through a subtraction problem with infinite patience. I was thinking about the notes in the margins of the study room books, the handwriting I'd always called charming and slightly frustrating. I was thinking about a nine-year-old girl sitting still in the forest for half a day, waiting, because she had decided the books were worth whatever it cost to get them.
So no wonder he tolerated my habits. The boiled water. The journal. The sitting still and watching instead of doing. He'd seen all of it before, just in a different child, in a different forest, a long time ago.
Across the rock, Lyra had turned around. She was looking at Grann and I.
Grann caught her looking and immediately sat up straighter, his whole demeanor reassembling itself into its usual authority like a door being shut.
"Why are you standing there?" he said. "Get those feet moving. I didn't say we were done."
Lyra's mouth twitched at the corner. She turned back to her footwork.
I looked down at my journal. I wrote: Mom traded hunts for books at nine. She built the study room herself, one book at a time. She always knew what she wanted and found a way to get it.
Then, below that, in the same careful Japanese characters: I think I understand her a little better now.
I closed the journal and looked at the water for a long time after that, while the fire burned down and the river kept moving and the stars came out one by one above the treeline
***
On the sixth morning, Lyra tried to write in my journal.
She'd been watching me scribble for days and had apparently decided it looked achievable. It was not achievable. Not by her, not that morning. The result was something between a map of a battlefield and a bird that had walked through ink. I stared at it for a long moment before looking up at her.
"You should've paid attention in Mom's lessons." I snatched my fountain pen and my journal back.
"Shut up," she said, and yanked my hair out of nowhere.
"Ow! Ow! Ow—!"
"Now, will you two quiet down?" Grann's voice cut across us without turning his head. His gaze was fixed on the horizon. "We're almost there."
Lyra let go of my hair. We both looked up.
The trees were thinning ahead. The path had widened gradually over the last hour without me noticing, the soil turning from dark forest earth to something lighter, drier, faintly sandy. The air had changed too; I hadn't registered it until now, but there was something different in it. Salt, maybe. And something else I didn't have a word for: the smell of large, open water.
Then the treeline broke entirely and we stopped.
There were walls that rose ahead of us in the distance, pale stone catching the morning light. A town. A proper town, with gates and rooftops and the distant sound of people moving through it. And beyond the town, beyond the walls, past the rooftops, stretching to the edge of the visible world...
Water.
The sunlight scattered across its surface in long irregular patterns that moved and broke and reformed continuously, like something breathing. And at the horizon beyond the water, purple colored mountains were visible. That's must be the Demon Continent.
"Wah!" Lyra broke first, jumping once. "Is that the sea?!"
I pulled my map from the journal and unfolded it carefully. Between the Light Continent and the Demon Continent, a massive channel cut through the land; the Great Thunder Vein, the map called it. It stretched like a vein across the geography, branching at intervals into smaller rivers that fed the surrounding terrain. On either side of it, the continents.
"It's a river, albeit a massive one." I corrected her.
"We're taking a boat," I said. Not quite a question.
"Obviously," Grann said. He stretched his arms overhead with a long, satisfied crack of his shoulders, then looked down at us. "What? Were you expecting to walk across the massive river?"
"I was hoping you'd say no," I admitted.
He laughed. A big, uncomplicated, genuine laugh that startled the birds out of a nearby tree. Then he started walking again, toward the town, toward the port, toward the water.
Lyra sprinted ahead immediately.
I stood there one moment longer, map still in my hands, looking at the ocean.
Somewhere behind me was Ytval. Our farm. Mom and Dad and the familiar creak of the study room door. Onnie on a hill with a chess set and her eyes closed and a smile she only let people see when she forgot to hide it. All of it small now, behind me, getting smaller.
Ahead was everything I hadn't seen yet.
I folded the map and put it away. Then I followed them down the path toward the town.
[End]