When Imann was six, his father caught him stealing bread. Not from a merchant. From their own table, after supper, when the lamp had burned low and his mother slept in the next room. Imann had crept back to the kitchen, bare feet silent on cold stone, and reached for the last half-loaf his father had set aside for tomorrow's labor. The hand that closed around his wrist did not squeeze hard. It simply held him there, caught, the bread inches from his mouth. His father said nothing. He only looked at Imann with eyes that held no anger, only a question Imann was too young to answer: Why do you need what is not yours? Then his father did something strange. He let go. He stepped back. He took the bread himself, broke it in two, and held out the larger half. "Eat," he said. Imann did not move. He was crying now, silent tears, ashamed without knowing why. His father knelt. He pressed the bread into Imann's small hands and closed his fingers around it. The crust was rough. The inside was soft and warm. "The hunger is not wrong," his father said. "The taking without asking. That is what breaks things." He wiped Imann's cheek with his thumb, the skin calloused from years of holding tools. "I will not always be here to catch you," he said. "So learn to ask. Even when you are ashamed. Especially then." He stood. He returned to his chair by the dead fire. He did not look at Imann again that night. But the next morning, there was fresh bread on the table. Two loaves, not one. And his father said nothing about it. Ever.
Imann carried that memory into war. He carried it into the clash of shields and the scream of metal, into the hours where the world narrowed to the reach of his blade and the next breath was never promised. He carried it because it was the last place he had ever felt truly seen. Then the arrow storm ended, and the man who had taught him to ask was gone. --- The battlefield was coming apart. Mud churned black and slick beneath his boots. Bodies tangled in shapes that no longer resembled men. Feathers jutted from armor and flesh alike. Broken shields lay half-buried, their painted emblems smeared into anonymity. Torches flickered at the edges of the field, weak and uncertain, as if afraid to look too closely. Imann moved through it all in a daze. He wasn't searching strategically. He wasn't thinking like a soldier. He wasn't thinking at all. His eyes skimmed armor, cloaks, helms, anything that might be familiar. Anything that might end the hollow terror clawing at his chest. Not him. Not him. Not Each face he turned away from delivered a brief, sickening relief, followed immediately by deeper dread. The war had taught him that relief was temporary. That hope always collected interest. The sounds around him blurred. The moans of the wounded. The wet cough of men struggling for breath. The distant commands of officers trying to count what could no longer be counted. None of it reached him. Then he saw him. His father lay half on his side, one arm trapped beneath his body, armor dented and streaked with filth. For a heartbeat, Imann saw only the stillness, and something inside him cracked. "No." He ran.
He dropped to his knees beside him, hands sliding under his father's shoulders. The armor was heavy, unforgiving, cold where it should not have been. But beneath it there was warmth. Weight. Resistance. Life. His father's eyes fluttered open. "Imann." The sound of his name shattered what little control he had left. He pulled his father upright, cradling him from behind, pressing his back against his chest just like when he was small. When his father had held him steady until he could hold himself. "I'm here," Imann said, the words tumbling over each other. "I've got you. You're here. You're" His father's breath hitched, shallow and uneven. "You weren't supposed to see this," he murmured. Each word came thinner than the last. "Not like this." Imann shook his head violently. "Don't talk. Don't. Just stay. We'll get you up. We'll get you to the camp. You'll" "Help me stand," his father said. Hope surged through him, wild and foolish and overwhelming. It filled his lungs, straightened his spine. For the first time since the battle began, Imann drew a full breath that didn't feel stolen. He braced his legs in the mud and tightened his grip, pulling his father's heavy frame upward. For a moment, just one, hope burned bright. He felt his father's heart laboring against his own. He felt the weight of him, familiar and real. Then the world broke. The thunder did not come from the sky. It came from hooves. Before Imann could look up, a shadow swallowed them. A knight on a massive, gore-stained warhorse loomed overhead, faceless behind his helm. The rider did not slow. He did not hesitate. With the ease of long habit, the sword came around in a wide, indifferent arc. There was no clash of steel. Only a sound Imann would never forget. The weight in his arms changed.
It vanished. One moment, his father was there. Warm. Heavy. Alive. The next, there was nothing. Only lightness. Only air where there should have been substance. Only the sudden, sickening absence of everything that had ever held him steady. He stared, unable to move, as his father's head fell free and struck the mud beside his knees, eyes wide and unseeing, already beyond the storm. The knight was gone as quickly as he had come. Hooves tore the earth. Mud sprayed. The war swallowed him without a name. Imann remained on his knees. His arms were still curved in the air, still holding the shape of a man who no longer had one. The silence that followed was absolute. The weight had not left him. It had been torn away. --- Imann looked down at his hands. They were empty. Red with blood that was not his. Trembling with a violence that would not stop. He tried to remember the bread. The crust rough against his palms. His father's fingers closing over his own. He couldn't. The memory was still there, he knew. The kitchen. The shame. The forgiveness without words. But the weight was gone. The thing that made it real, that made it matter, that made it his. Gone. He reached out with trembling fingers, not toward the battlefield, not toward the retreating rider, but toward the mud. Toward the face of the man who had taught him that hunger was not wrong, but taking without asking was what broke things. The man who had held him steady. The man who was now lighter than air. The war would go on. Kings would redraw borders. Commanders would count the dead.
But Imann understood what they never would. The weight had been everything. And now there was only his own arms, curved around nothing, holding a shape that no longer existed.