The ceiling had a crack in it.
Not a dramatic one. Not the kind that preceded collapse — the kind Liam had learned to photograph and flag and write strongly-worded reports about. This was old. Stable. Sealed by time and dirt into something almost permanent. A scar rather than an injury.
He stared at it for a long time before he remembered he was dead.
Right. That.
The building in Singapore had come down fast. He'd known it would — had known for weeks, filed the reports, made the calls. Load-bearing columns compromised at the sixth floor, rebar substituted for cheaper materials, concrete ratios that a first-year student would have caught if anyone was looking. Nobody was looking. He went back for a final check because he couldn't help it. Because that was the part of his brain he'd never managed to turn off: the part that kept asking *why isn't this falling yet* and needing to know before it did.
He got his answer.
Four seconds. The deep, low *pop* of something critical giving. The floor tilting. Then nothing.
And then this ceiling. This crack. This body.
Liam Reyes sat up slowly, and the wrongness of it hit him before he could prepare — not the stone walls, not the cold seeping through sheets that hadn't been warm in hours. The wrongness of *breathing.* Of being anywhere at all. He'd been dead. He knew what dead felt like now; it had felt like the last second before sleep, and then this. A body that wasn't his, a room he'd never been in, and somewhere in Manila, his sister Elena was going to get a phone call she hadn't been expecting.
He thought about Elena.
Not for four seconds. He just — thought about her. The way she sent voice messages instead of texts because she said typing was impersonal, three or four of them stacked up by Thursday every week, *Kuya, you never call, I know you're busy but you never call—* and he'd been going to call her on Sunday, he'd actually put it in his calendar this time, *call Elena, don't reschedule again,* and now—
He pressed his palm flat against the mattress.
The stone beneath the bed frame was cold through the wooden legs. That coldness was real. Specific. He focused on it.
He could fall apart about Elena later. He could fall apart about all of it later. He'd been in buildings making sounds before — that terrible, low, structural groaning that meant something was giving and you had maybe sixty seconds to make good decisions. You didn't cry in those sixty seconds. You moved. Later, in the parking lot afterward, hands shaking around a cigarette he didn't usually smoke, that was for everything else.
Later.
What was in front of him: a medieval room. Stone walls, mortar darkened black between blocks. A shuttered window bleeding grey morning light at its edges. A writing desk with papers stacked in someone's idea of order. A mirror in the corner that he didn't cross to yet.
The body was wrong. Not damaged — just not his. Too young. Joints that didn't ache, a chest that felt too narrow. Twenty-nine was not old. Twenty-nine was also not eighteen, and eighteen was apparently what this was.
He sat on the edge of the bed and waited for panic.
Something quieter came instead. The feeling after a structural report confirmed what he'd already suspected — nothing left to speculate, only the problem remaining.
The memories came when he reached for them — not his, but accessible. They had the texture of a film he'd watched rather than a life he'd lived. A father. An older brother. A small sister who asked questions. An engagement recently terminated. An awakening ceremony that a room full of people had found funny.
The name surfaced. *Kael Voss.*
He sat with that. Then he stood, because sitting wasn't solving anything, and crossed to the mirror.
---
Eighteen looked worse from the inside than it had any right to.
The face was lean — not healthy-lean but *sparse,* like something had been drawing on resources it had no claim to. Dark circles. A pale complexion with the quality of paper left too long in a damp room. Dark hair uncared-for. Grey eyes doing something he recognized: the flat, locked-down look he got when he was solving a problem rather than experiencing a situation.
Those eyes, at least, were familiar.
The ache in his chest was not. It started at the sternum and radiated outward — not quite pain, more like the background hum of a machine running slightly wrong. The kind you didn't notice until you focused on it, and then couldn't stop. He pressed his hand there. Ribs under his palm, a heartbeat that was fine, and underneath it that persistent *wrongness.*
The memories supplied: *Blood Curse. Stage 2. Active since the awakening three weeks ago, which was a catastrophe, which everyone in the province knows about.*
The curse was drawing on him. Right now, steadily, the way a slow leak drew on a foundation — imperceptible day to day, catastrophic over time.
He dressed. The boots needed new lacing at the left ankle; he tied a temporary fix. The morning smelled like old stone, cold air, and something sweet underneath — almost floral, wrong for the season.
He noticed he was looking for things to focus on. Noticed that noticing. Filed neither.
Then he went to find the vault.
---
Aldric Voss's summons had been waiting on the desk. *The eastern vault. The accounting ledgers from the Harven period. Bring them to my study before the midday bell.* The Harven period was sixty years ago. A degrading task, deliberately so — Kael's memories recognized the quiet sting of being handed the errand a servant could do, the particular species of insult that didn't announce itself.
He navigated the corridors with the body's memory-map and his own instincts layered on top. The east passage had a re-plastered section of wall that gave slightly under pressure — wrong in the way things were wrong before they became problems. The drain near the stairwell smelled blocked. The north-facing door had warped in its frame, and someone had planed the bottom rather than fix the frame itself. That was a maintenance philosophy. It told you something about how decisions got made here.
The vault was cold and larger than its door suggested. Stone shelving on three walls — different masonry in places, expansions done at different periods, some carefully and some cheap. He lit the lamp and found the Harven ledgers by their faded labels. Pulled the first, opened it, and within three pages stopped pulling ledgers entirely.
He sat on the vault floor and did the math.
Twenty minutes later he had it. The iron routes through Valdenmoor: diverted over eleven years in increments calibrated to look like seasonal variation. The border defense contracts: cut in a single official stroke five years ago. The Ashfield mining: abandoned three decades back with one ledger entry and no follow-up. What remained was city revenues covering sixty percent of running costs.
Forty percent gap. Reserves at current burn rate: eight months.
He stayed on the floor for a moment with that number. It had the specific weight of numbers that told you exactly how bad things were without telling you what to do about it. He'd sat with numbers like this before, in conference rooms with contractors who needed to hear the building was fine.
It was never fine.
He was reaching for the next ledger when his hand caught the lower shelf — and the world *shifted.*
A vibration starting at the point of contact, traveling up his arm, settling against the curse's existing drain. Where it landed, the ache changed. Gained shape. Gold text appeared in his vision, faint and precise.
*[CURSE FORGE — DORMANT. First relic contact detected.]*
*[Initialization sequence beginning. Please remain still.]*
Thirty seconds. The vibration moved through him like slow current, touched things without names, receded.
*[CURSE FORGE — ACTIVE.]*
*[Welcome, Kael Voss. You've been in this vault for twenty-three minutes and you're only now touching something cursed. I've been waiting.]*
"What are you?"
*[Your advantage. Currently your only one. There are twenty-three cursed objects within fifteen meters. One is viable for forging right now. Do you want introductions, or do you want to know what that means?]*
Behind the crate: a training sword with its blade snapped two-thirds down, hilt leather cracked and dried. The kind of thing that ended up in vaults because disposal required a decision nobody had gotten around to making.
*[RELIC: Training Sword, Voss Family. Age: ~40 years. Curse type: [Iron Rot Curse]. Density: LOW.]*
*[Forge yield: Endurance +12 | Metal Resonance +8 (passive — improves future metallic forge efficiency).]*
*[Forge cost: 8-10 hours. Pain classification: significant.]*
*[This is the weakest relic in this vault. Start here anyway. And don't start here without a plan for the 8-10 hours.]*
He picked up the Harven ledgers and carried everything upstairs. Father first. The sword could wait.
---
Aldric's study smelled of pipe ash, old wood, and the particular medicinal sharpness of something meant to help with sleep. Kael had that from the memories — the sleeplessness was recent, the last two years.
The man himself sat behind a desk drowning in paperwork, and the first thing Kael noticed was his hands. Big hands, a soldier's hands once, now resting on the desk with the careful stillness of a person who'd learned to hold themselves still because motion cost something they didn't have. He didn't look up when Kael entered.
"The ledgers," Kael said, and set them down.
Aldric looked up. Something moved across his face — not recognition, he knew his own son. More like he'd been expecting a version of Kael that hadn't walked through the door.
"You're late," he said.
"I was reading them." Kael sat without being invited. The chair creaked. "We have eight months of solvent operation. Roughly. I'm assuming you know that."
A pause. The pause was an answer.
"The iron route diversion aligns with the Cavren trade agreements of eleven years ago. There are breach clauses. Why haven't they been exercised?"
Aldric was quiet for long enough that Kael looked up from the desk to check his expression. What he found was not evasion. It was closer to the look of a man who had already climbed this particular staircase in his head, alone, at night, many times.
"Because exercising them requires resources we don't have," Aldric said, "against a house that has resources we don't, in front of an imperial court where Cavren holds three better relationships than we do." He set his hand on the ledger — not picking it up, just touching the cover. "I'm aware of the situation, Kael."
"I know you are." Kael kept his voice level. "I'm not here to tell you the house is failing. I'm trying to understand which moves are already off the board so I don't waste time reaching the same conclusions."
His father looked at him steadily. "Why?"
The question landed with more weight than it should have. Not *why are you asking* — something older. More tired. The question of a man who'd watched this son retreat further inward for three years and had stopped expecting anything different.
Kael didn't have a clean answer. *Because I'm not actually your son* wasn't an option. *Because I'm a dead engineer with nothing to lose* wasn't better. "Because I don't think eight months is nothing," he said instead. "And it seems like everyone here has decided it is."
Aldric was quiet for a moment. Then, slower than expected: "The Ashfield contracts. The original documents are in the secondary vault, eastern annex. Before you ask about those next." He picked up his quill. "You're dismissed."
Not warm. But the location of the documents, unprompted — that was something. That was a door left fractionally open by a man who'd forgotten how to open doors fully.
Kael stood. He was almost to the threshold when Aldric spoke again, not looking up from his work.
"You sound different."
"Do I."
"Your mother used to talk like that. Like she was three steps ahead and deciding whether to tell you." A beat. "It's not a complaint."
Kael didn't have anything to say to that. He left.
The hallway was cold and he stood in it for a moment with his hand on the stone wall, feeling the temperature of it, thinking about a woman in the memories he'd barely looked at yet. *Your mother used to talk like that.* Past tense, no elaboration, the specific economy of grief that had been carried so long it no longer needed full sentences.
He added it to the weight of things he'd get to later.
---
He found Roran in the courtyard, which was not where Roran usually was.
It wasn't intentional — Kael was crossing to the steward's office and Roran was standing near the well with his arms folded and the look of a man who'd come outside to be angry somewhere with more air. He glanced up when Kael passed. Didn't say anything. The default between them, apparently.
Kael stopped.
He wasn't sure why. The memories supplied years of silence between them — Roran's resentment of a position that had always been out of reach, Kael's retreat from a brother who hadn't tried to conceal the contempt. A clean, mutual avoidance. Nothing to disrupt.
Except he was looking at Roran with eyes that weren't Kael's, and what he saw wasn't contempt. It was a man standing alone in a cold courtyard, looking at nothing, in the practiced stillness of someone who'd been having an argument with himself for a long time.
"Roof's going to need work before the thaw," Kael said. It was the least loaded thing he could think of.
Roran's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I know."
"Southeast parapet especially. The stone's separating."
"I *know,* Kael." Flat. A little tired. "I've known for six months. There's no money for it."
"There might be, if the Ashfield contracts—"
"There's nothing in the Ashfield." Roran turned to look at him properly then, and the expression was harder to read than contempt would have been. It was closer to something that had *been* contempt and was now uncertain. "Father sent you to the vault for ledgers and you came out wanting to restart a mining operation that's been abandoned for thirty years. Why?"
"Because it's the only revenue source that wasn't taken from us. We walked away from it."
Roran stared at him. "The Ashfield is cursed land. Attribute poisoning. The people we sent in came back wrong."
"I know." Kael met his eyes. "I'm not suggesting we send anyone in yet."
*Yet* hung in the air between them.
Roran looked at him for a long moment with an expression Kael couldn't fully decode — some calculation running, some reassessment happening that hadn't been anticipated. Then he turned back to the courtyard and said nothing, which wasn't agreement but wasn't the dismissal Kael had expected either.
He moved on to the steward's office and didn't look back.
---
He took the sword from the vault after dark, locked his door, and sat on the bed with it across his knees.
*[RELIC CONTACT — Iron Rot Sword. Analysis confirmed.]*
*[Confirm forge?]*
"What happens after?"
*[Attribute flux for 48 hours. Mild physical instability. Don't fight anything. After that: marginally better than you were. This is the weakest forge available. But you are not in a position to be selective.]*
He thought about eight months. The forty percent gap. The east wall with its fresh plaster over something it shouldn't have. Aldric's hands on the desk with their careful stillness.
*You don't start with the walls,* he thought. *You start with what's underground.*
"Do it," he said.
---
Significant was the right word.
The first hour was almost manageable — breathe through it, the way he'd breathed through close-call inspections when the building was groaning and there was nothing helpful to do. Then it stopped being manageable. Around the two-hour mark it became *total* — the forge process arguing with every system in his body simultaneously, loud, refusing to be reasoned with.
He held the bedpost. Bit down on folded cloth. Didn't make noise, because the walls were thin and he didn't know who was listening.
He thought about Elena because he didn't have enough left to stop himself.
He thought about her voice messages, the stack of them he'd have on his phone that would just — sit there now. No one to delete them. He thought about her at their mother's kitchen table being told, and the specific way her face would go very still before it broke, because she'd always gone still first, even as a kid, that half-second before the grief hit where she was deciding something. He thought about not being there for it. He thought about all the Sundays he'd rescheduled.
The pain crested. He held the bedpost harder and let the thought of her sit in his chest where it belonged, next to the blood curse's drain, next to this body's eight months, next to everything else he was carrying. He didn't file it. He just let it be there.
*I'm sorry, El.*
Then the door opened.
He hadn't latched it properly — mechanism worn, needed realignment, a problem he'd noted and not solved. A figure stood in the gap. She took in the scene without expression: the lamp turned low, his white-knuckled grip on the bedpost, the sweat, the general evidence of a situation she hadn't been invited to.
Copper-brown skin. Silver hair braided back. Gold eyes that caught firelight at an angle that wasn't quite human — *Lyra, handmaiden, elf, mostly ignored, assigned here as part of a debt settlement she hadn't been consulted about.* The last detail surfaced late, and he held it. She was here because a negotiation between dead men had moved her like furniture. She'd been in this house for two years.
She brought him water without asking. Set it within reach and stepped back to the doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms loosely crossed. Not the posture of someone intending to stay. More like someone deciding whether to.
"I didn't ask for anyone," he managed.
"No." She looked at him with those gold eyes that gave nothing away except patience. "The latch has been broken for six weeks. I heard it from the corridor." A beat. "You don't have to tell me what's happening."
"I wasn't going to."
"I know." She didn't move from the doorway. "I've been in four houses. Seen most things that happen in them at night." Something shifted in her expression — not softening exactly, more like she'd made a decision. She pushed off the frame and crossed to the chair near the window and sat down. "I'll stay until it passes. You can be angry about it in the morning if you want."
He drank the water. It tasted exactly like water. He couldn't think of anything to say to that.
She stayed. No questions. When the water ran out she refilled it, when the fire dropped she fed it without being asked. She had a small knife she'd been cleaning when she arrived — he saw it at some point, a short blade, maintenance rather than threat, something she did with her hands when she was waiting. The domesticity of it was strange. It helped, somehow.
When the worst of it crested and broke she handed him a cloth. He hadn't been able to ask for one. She'd read the shape of the night and prepared accordingly, and he found himself wondering what four houses looked like from the inside of a debt settlement. What you learned to anticipate when anticipating was the only agency you had.
He didn't thank her yet. But he stopped treating her as furniture.
---
The System confirmed just past midnight.
*[FORGE COMPLETE.]*
*[Endurance: 28 → 40 (+12)]*
*[Metal Resonance: +8. Passive.]*
*[Attribute flux: 48 hours. Rest.]*
*[Twenty-two relics remain. I'll be here.]*
*[Also: the elf stayed. That's not standard behavior for assigned handmaidens. Worth noting.]*
He lay back. The ceiling crack was still there — patient, indifferent, unchanged by what had just happened in this room.
He felt different.
Subtle — nothing dramatic. More like a recalibration. The blood curse still drained at his sternum, but it sat differently against the new baseline. The way a compromised structure felt different once you'd reinforced something upstream of the problem. Marginally better. He could work with marginal.
Lyra had fallen asleep in the chair, which he hadn't expected. He took the extra blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed and set it over her shoulders. She didn't stir. Her breathing was slow — the ease of someone who slept light by default and had decided, deliberately, that she didn't need to here. That was its own kind of statement.
He went back to bed. Lay in the dark and thought about his father's hands. Roran in the courtyard. Aldric saying *your mother used to talk like that.*
He thought about Elena one more time. Let himself do it properly, without the parking-lot deferral. She'd be okay. She was the kind of person who broke and then rebuilt, always had been, even when they were kids and he was the older one who was supposed to be steadier. She was steadier, actually. She always had been.
*I'll find a way back,* he thought, which he didn't believe yet, but he needed something to put there.
He was still working out what he believed when voices came through the wall.
---
Two hours before dawn.
He woke to them — not loud, the opposite. The specific quality of sound that didn't belong, voices being kept deliberately low, filtering through the re-plastered section of the east wall. His eyes opened in the dark and he lay still.
One voice was Roran's. He recognized the blunt rhythm even muffled. The other was flatter. Careful in the way people were careful when they were being precise about something.
Words came in fragments. Then the conversation shifted, the way conversations through walls sometimes did, and one sentence came through clean.
*"—the youngest one won't survive the winter anyway."*
Silence.
Roran's voice, lower, a response that didn't reach him.
He lay in the dark with the cold that had nothing to do with temperature. Not surprise — he'd known there was something wrong before he'd had its shape, the way you knew a building was in trouble before you'd identified the failure. He'd just found the failure.
*They built a passage,* he thought. *Behind that re-plastered wall, within the last decade, while someone in this keep was watching and said nothing.*
And Roran had been using it. Roran, who'd stood in the courtyard today looking at nothing with the look of a man losing an argument with himself.
*I'm not suggesting we send anyone in yet,* Kael had said.
The *yet* had registered. He'd seen it register. And still, hours later, Roran was on the other side of a hidden wall with someone discussing whether the youngest Voss would survive.
He pressed his hand against the mattress. Felt the new Endurance sitting in his bones. Forty, where twenty-eight had been. It wasn't much. It was more than yesterday.
He thought about Roran's expression in the courtyard — not contempt, something more confused. Something that might be a man not entirely sure of what he was doing.
He thought about a sentence he hadn't heard fully. *Won't survive the winter.* Prediction or plan. Those were different problems.
He needed to know which.
Outside, something moved on the roof. Wind, probably. He lay still and listened until the keep settled back into its particular nighttime quiet — old stone, cold corridors, the low creak of a building not maintained as well as it needed to be.
*I've rebuilt from worse,* he thought.
He wasn't sure if that was true. But he knew one thing Liam Reyes had always known, standing in buildings that were making sounds:
You could work with marginal.
You just couldn't stay still.
---