Elias woke to a kind of ordinary light—the soft, pearly dawn that arrives after a storm, when the world seems washed clean and the edges of things are a little sharper. He blinked, rolled onto his back, and for the first few breaths in many long days he felt the luxury of not listening. No need to parse every noise for danger. No instinctual halt at a twig's snap. Just the slow, satisfied realization that he was alive and that the village had kept him safe.
He pushed himself up and peered around. The room smelled faintly of boiled roots and woodsmoke, and the little window was a pale square of frozen white—the world outside still dressed in the storm's final shawl of snow. He rubbed his face, flexed his fingers experimentally, and glanced around the empty bed. The other two were gone.
"They went out again?" he muttered, sitting up fully. He swung his legs off the bed; his calf felt different—real and whole in a way he still had trouble accepting. The memory of stitches, of pain and a hand's green light, flared and then softened like a dream.
He stepped barefoot onto the cold plank and opened the door. A breath of air hit him—icier than he expected, the kind that sharpens the skin and clears the head. Snow drifted in whorls past the eaves and dusted the path in soft white. For a second he simply stood on the threshold and drank the clear, thin calm of morning.
Across the yard Rowan was moving with the easy grace of someone who had spent his life in the rhythm of seasons. The youth was doing something that resembled a ritual: a quick leap, a twist of his hips, a high kick that smashed into one of two wooden dummies propped against a snow-bright clearing. The dummies shattered where the impact hit them, cracks spidering like lightning in wood, then splintered into neat heaps. Rowan spun, landing like a leaf settling on water, and launched the second kick—precise, silent, and impossibly fast.
Elias froze in the doorway, feeling like a child who'd walked into a master class. The sun glanced off Rowan's white hair and the powder of it made the youth look like he wore a halo. No one else moved; the villagers had the courtesy to keep their distance and let the lesson play out.
"Not bad," Elias found himself thinking. "Not just the healing—he can fight."
Rowan's movements were not about brute force. They were measured, calibrated. He seemed to strike through the wood rather than against it, and every kick carried a whisper of control; the dummies could have been stuffed cloth and they would still have broken under his technique. Where the force landed the wood gave way neatly, like paper scored and folded.
One of Rowan's kicks sent splinters whistling up into the cold air. He stepped back, breathing even, and then saw Elias watching. For a moment his face was unreadable, then he crossed the snow to meet him, boots making soft thuds that sounded almost affectionate against the hush.
"Looking at me like that will scare the chickens," Rowan said with a lopsided smile. "Are you well enough to walk?"
Elias felt a childish grin lift his face. "I thought you were… practicing. I didn't think you'd be able to—" He flailed because his brain wanted to say something big and decisive, but the words died in the cold. The sight of such youthful prowess had unsettled him: here was a boy-chief with the hands of a fighter and the temper of a man called to command. It unsettled him in a way that made his skin prickle.
Rowan laughed softly. "It's not all healing and council meetings," he said. "A leader needs to be able to stand on his feet when the world shakes. Come. I'll show you where they went."
They moved together down the snow-smothered lane. Elias's boots bit the crust and slurped slightly in softer spots; puffs of breath puffed out and vanished. Rowan's stride was short and efficient; he had the coat of someone who moved outside by habit, the shoulders darkened where the fabric had been re-sewn more times than one measured. They ran, then—the two of them—over the whitened frames of fences and through leaning hedges. Rowan's athleticism made the route look simpler than it was; Elias had to concentrate on each placement of his feet and found himself panting a little where Rowan barely breathed.
Light spilled across a crooked gate and beyond it an old house sat squat and patient. Its eaves curled in the old style—the roof tiles had been fired once and darkened again by smoke—yet the joints and the walls looked solid. Snow lay like a careful blanket on the beams, and a curling column of smoke suggested someone was still awake by the hearth.
Rowan pushed the door and it swung open with a small sigh. Inside, the house smelled of steeped herbs and sometimes of old paper and sandalwood—comforting things, the kind of smells that stitch the soul back together. Elias blinked, and at the center of the room an old man sat cross-legged on a mat, motionless and small in his white-and-sage robe. His silver hair was bound, neat and ceremonial as a knot. In the shape of his face, in the way his shoulders slouched with practiced ease, there was a softness that did not contradict the feeling of authority. He could have been a farmer sitting in midsummer sun or a scholar in a rare book shop; both possibilities hummed in his posture.
Lyra and Daren were already there, standing before him like students awaiting a verdict. Lyra's cheeks were flushed; Daren's arms were crossed, a half-grin threatening to break into mischief. They both looked relieved, the kind of relief that allows jokes to surface like warmed bread.
Rowan bowed low in a practiced motion. The old man's eyes opened slowly, serene and clear as pond-water. "Master," Rowan said, his voice carrying a note of reverence that surprised Elias for its sincerity. "I have brought three."
A thin smile split the old man's face. He looked at Elias like a man who'd been expecting a certain tessellation of days to fall into place, and the weight of that look landed in Elias like a hand on his shoulder.
"Good." The voice was soft and weathered but carried unconsciously measured timing. "Bring them closer."
Elias moved forward on instinct, his boots whispering against the wooden planks. Up close he could see the old man's hands—veined and patient—and the way he held himself with a time-taught economy of motion: no frills, no wasted gestures. The robe's faint blue tint hinted at years in shadow and study rather than in high sunlight. Elias felt an odd peace descend; the room felt like a safe cove.
Rowan's head tilted. "They all made it through the storm?"
Daren's laugh was small and wry. "We almost left him for the snow and called it a mercy," he said, nudging Elias with an elbow. "But we decided he'd do better in stitches than in a snowdrift."
Lyra scowled theatrically. "And besides, his acting as though he's invincible took up too much camp space."
The old man's eyes tracked Elias as if measuring the man's inner weather. "You're the one who keeps restarting, aren't you?" he asked, casual, as if speaking about the day's clouds. Elias's mouth went dry.
"How…?" Daren started, then fell silent; his gaze flicked to Elias with an unasked understanding.
The old man's small smile deepened. "Names matter. What one calls a man's burden is often how the world keeps him. Speak, child. Tell us your name."
Elias swallowed and found the voice he had used as a promise in the small room the night before. "Elias—Elias Everen," he said. Speaking it aloud seemed to steady him like tying a rope.
The old man's gaze cut to that name, and something unspoken passed over his face. He nodded, slow and considered, as though the syllables fit into a larger pattern. "Yes. The name will do." He folded his hands and the air in the room changed minutely—like a wind being tautened across an instrument.
Rowan spoke up. "Master, this one found the gate and collapsed in the storm. We pulled him in and given him Mara's attention—but we thought it right you should see him. There are threads here that do not reach to us."
The old man listened as if compiling, then his eyes softened. "Bring him closer." He motioned with a single finger, and Elias took another step.
Up close, Elias could smell the faint medicinal smoke that clung to the old man, the scent of pine and crushed mint. The old man extended a hand not in command but in invitation, palm open and patient.
"Sit," he said.
Elias obeyed, a little like a child following a map. He sat and the floor seemed familiar as if he'd once sat before such a figure in the half-remembered attic of another life. Lyra and Daren stood at either side, watching with the sort of fierce protectiveness born from shared hardship.
The old man's eyes crinkled. He studied Elias a breath longer and then said, lightly, "You have survived what would have taken many. That is both luck and a sign. The question is what that path asks of you now."
Elias opened his mouth to reply but found that the answer was not a thing for immediate speech. Instead something like memory unrolled: the echo of the book's burned pages, the bear's pause, the green light that had closed his wound. All of it braided into a single thread: a path that was not solely his but tugged at him like a rope attached to a far-off bell.
The old man's look turned almost kindly. "Eat, rest, and be quiet for now," he said. "Tell your story when your bones stop complaining. When the wind has passed, there will be time for questions and for the old songs. For now—you are among people who know to shelter those whom the storm tosses."
Rowan bowed his head slightly, as if sealing the sentiment with an agreement. Lyra shrugged and muttered something about food and a bed, which the old man accepted with the humor of one who knows the smallest needs keep a person human.
As Elias sat in the warm house, listening to the low sound of the hearth and the old man's even breathing, he felt the edges of all his frantic, frantic thinking soften. Being alive, with stitched wounds that could be healed by a green light and companions who fought and joked, felt like a map with compass points. The old man's presence was a new point on that map—an anchor that suggested this village had patterns and rules of its own, and that perhaps within those rules there might be answers.
For the moment, they would rest. For the moment, they had survived. The old man's chuckle, dry and pleased, and Rowan's quiet satisfaction folded together like a benediction.
The runtime of their day narrowed to the small and manageable: bread, hot soup, a roof. Outside, the storm would tire and bleed away. Inside, by the hearth and under the watch of a man who had seen many winters, Elias allowed himself the small luxury of simply breathing.