The Weary Wanderer glowed like a lantern in the dark. Resin still clung in my nose—pine and ash and pork fat—but the moment I stepped inside, the inn’s smells shouldered it aside.

  Bread. Onions. Roasting meat. And underneath, Elspeth’s cardamom thing, warm and faint and home-like in a way I refused to think about too hard.

  My legs moved like someone had swapped them out for badly rigged prosthetics. Every muscle a dull protest. My ribs throbbed in time with the creak of the floorboards.

  Finn spotted me first.

  “There she is! The fence?saver!”

  Three tables banged with fists and mugs. Someone whooped. Beakly tried to duck in behind me, hit the lintel with his beak, and squawked loud enough to rattle the crockery. Half the room jumped. The other half laughed.

  Elspeth leaned over the bar with a ladle, hair escaping its knot, cheeks flushed from the stove.

  “Emily, sit before you fall. I kept a plate aside. Finn, clear her a space or I’ll use your head as a serving board.”

  A bowl of stew landed in front of me, then a heel of bread, then a mug that steamed faintly of herbs and something sharper.

  I lowered myself onto the bench with all the dignity of a dropped sack of turnips.

  “Scale of one to dead,” I muttered, “that fence owes me at least a seven.”

  Harrold from the mill lifted his mug.

  “To the stranger who makes wood into stone.”

  Others echoed it, mugs up. The sound rolled around the rafters, rough and sincere.

  I dipped my spoon. My hand shook a little. Nobody commented.

  “Eat,” Elspeth called over the noise. “Then you can break yourself on more mad projects.”

  The bench dipped beside me.

  “You walk like a pilgrim at the end of the mountain road.”

  The voice carried age, but not fragility. Dry, amused, very awake.

  I glanced over.

  The woman could have been anyone’s grandmother, if grandmothers wore sun?disc pendants and robes with more pockets than my old lab coat. Her hair lay in a tight silver knot. Her eyes didn’t match the rest of her—bright, sharp, like they’d missed the memo about getting old.

  Her gaze travelled over my face, my shoulders, the way one arm hugged my ribs between motions.

  “You hide the wince well.”

  “I’ve had practice.”

  “From Beasts?” Her eyes flicked to my armor stacked near the door, then to my hands. “Or from knives and long nights?”

  I stared at her.

  “Both,” slipped out.

  She nodded once, satisfied, as if I’d answered a test correctly.

  “I am Myriam. I keep the Sunstone Chapel. The boy with too many questions,” a tilt of her head toward Finn, “told me our new paladin staggered home on borrowed breath yesterday.”

  “Borrowed from a grumbleboar, technically. And a giant murder?bird.”

  “Useful friends.”

  Her hand rested on the table, brown skin webbed with fine scars, knuckles traced with faded ink symbols. Little suns. Lines of script I half?recognized from in?game tooltips, blown up and real.

  “How do you fare?” Her tone didn’t match the casual words. She weighed them.

  I flexed my fingers around the spoon.

  “Hurting. Functional.”

  “In that order?”

  “Depends whether I stand up.”

  A small huff from her, almost a laugh.

  “You fight in heavy plate with cracked ribs. You helped at the fence all day. You could at least lie to an old woman to ease her worry.”

  “I try not to make lying a habit.” I took another mouthful of stew. “Bad for rapport with villagers. Might cost me my discount.”

  Her eyes crinkled.

  “And yet, you do not heal.”

  The spoon paused halfway up.

  Around us, the room hummed—Kael explaining brush repairs at one table, the baker arguing yields at another—but the word snagged something under my breastbone.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You bear the mark.” Her gaze dropped to my chest, to where the armor usually lay. “You stand in the light’s pattern as clear as the morning tide. You walked into battle. You bled. Why not draw on the grace given you?”

  I set the spoon down carefully.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  My UI pinged in the back of my mind, that familiar, mocking red text:

  DIVINE CONNECTION: FAILURE TO CONNECT TO HOST.

  “I’ve… never been much good at that part.”

  “At healing?”

  “At the god part.”

  She watched me over the rim of her mug.

  “In what way?” Calm. Curious. Not accusing.

  “In the ‘no one answers when I call’ way.” I tried a crooked smile. “Back where I’m from, we have a word for people like me. Atheist. Not big on gods.”

  The word vanished in the air between us, useless as a disconnected phone number.

  Her brows rose, knitting together.

  “Not… big?” Her head tilted. “You mean you dislike them? You quarrel with their decrees?”

  “I mean we don’t… believe they exist.”

  The second I said it, I realised how stupid it sounded here.

  Myriam’s fingers stilled on the mug handle.

  “You do not… believe,” she repeated slowly, “in the beings who shape tides, temper storms, lift the blight from wheat, answer when called?”

  “In my world, no one did those things. Not directly. We had weather reports. Vaccines. Occasionally lousy luck.”

  Her stare deepened. Not offended. More like someone examining a very strange specimen that had washed up on shore.

  “In your world,” she murmured, “the sky stayed silent.”

  The words landed heavier than anything else that day.

  The game UI. The lore texts. Raid boss monologues. I’d filed all of it under story, code, clever writing. Backdrop for cooldowns and loot.

  But Myriam had not read patch notes. She had not memorized encounter scripts. She wore the sun on her chest like something she’d argued with and wept to and maybe cursed, but never once doubted was there.

  “Here,” she went on, “the Radiant Host answers. Not always as we wish. Not always swiftly. But they answer. You stood in their light on the road. You stand in it now, paladin, but you lean on bone and boiled herbs and pretend you are alone.”

  My throat felt tight all of a sudden.

  “Where I’m from, ‘gods’ were… myths. Old stories. Or… in this case, data on a server.” I caught myself, shifted. “Words. Not… people you could bump into on the way to the well.”

  Her lips twitched.

  “If you bump into the Sunlord on the way to the well, child, you have walked into the wrong well. The greater presences keep their distance. But their hands touch the world. Here.” She lifted her palm, fingers spread. “And here.” Her fingers brushed, very lightly, the air just above my chest. Heat prickled under my skin, phantom or not.

  I swallowed.

  “In the game—before—I picked paladin because my boyfriend needed a healer. I pushed a button, light came out, people’s health bars went up. That’s not… this. Whatever this is.”

  “You think your vows a set of levers.” Her gaze softened. “Pull for armor. Pull for blessing. Pull for healing.”

  “It would be convenient.”

  “Convenience.” She tasted the word like it might be poisonous. “That is not faith.”

  I stared into my stew. Grease shimmered on top, catching the hearthlight.

  “So if the gods are real here,” I said slowly, “and I’m walking around flagged as one of their… I don’t know, part?timers… and my connection still throws an error—”

  “Throws?”

  “Fails. Refuses.” My fingers tapped my sternum. “Then either they cut me off, or something else did, or I never had them in the first place.”

  Around us, laughter rose in a brief swell, then dropped again. Somewhere, Beakly rustled his wings and settled near the door, one giant eye half?closed.

  Myriam watched my face, not blinking.

  “You built your life without them once,” she said. “You know how to stand in a world where no one answers when you speak into the dark. But you are no longer in that world.”

  I met her gaze.

  “No. I’m not.”

  The admission tasted stranger than the stew.

  Silence stretched between us, not quite comfortable, not hostile. She sipped her drink. I tore off a chunk of bread and used it to herd vegetables onto my spoon, more motion than hunger.

  My voice came out quieter.

  “If I… wanted to understand how it works here. The gods. The Radiant Host. The… connection.” My mouth quirked. “Would you teach me? Before I commit any more spectacular blasphemies by accident.”

  Her eyes brightened, a quick flare behind the wrinkles.

  “You ask as a scholar,” she observed. “Not as a supplicant.”

  “I’m better at textbooks than prayer.”

  “Then we will start with what you know.” She tapped the table twice, as if marking a point in an invisible ledger. “Come to the chapel after breakfast. Bring that sharp tongue and whatever questions your silent sky taught you to carry.”

  “And my cracked ribs?”

  “If the Host wills, those too.” A small, fierce smile. “We will see what remains stubborn: your bones, or your disbelief.”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed holding.

  “Deal.”

  Her hand closed briefly over mine—dry, steady, surprisingly strong.

  “Rest tonight, Emily. Tomorrow, we trouble the heavens.”

  Blightcrest the Eternal King jolted upright, wings half-flared, beak open on a sound that never left his throat.

  Dark. The inn yard lay in a wash of moonlight and old ash. Coals in the cookpit glowed and cracked. The humans slept.

  His feathers stood out from his body, each quill braced as if against impact. Talons carved shallow furrows in the packed earth beneath his perch. His heart hammered in his chest, a war-drum with no battle to answer.

  He listened.

  Crickets. A cow shifting in its stall. Somewhere, a drunk snoring through a clogged nose.

  No threat.

  Yet every muscle burned for one. For tearing. For the hot give of flesh.

  He drew his wings in slow, forced the air through his lungs. The scent of the yard pressed in: old blood from the grumbleboars, smoke, stale ale, human sweat, Emily’s faint metal-and-herb tang drifting from the open loft window.

  He searched inside himself for the dream and found only broken edges. Red spray. A weight slamming against him.

  Nothing more. The shapes slid away when he reached for them.

  Curious.

  He did not dream. He knew this as he knew the angle of his own beak. For years—no, for… he paused. How long, exactly? How many raids, how many wipes, how many times had he fallen and risen again in that stone hall?

  The memories clouded at the edges, as if someone had dragged dirty water over a painting.

  He ruffled, uneasy.

  Since awakening in this forest with his Ward broken on his back, the world had grown sharp, solid, different to the flickering dungeon he recalled. Pain lasted here. Wounds lingered. Meat stayed eaten. Dreams, apparently, came and went and left claws inside his chest.

  A board creaked on the porch.

  Finn’s small head eased round the post, hair a sleep-tangled halo.

  “Count Chocobo? You awake?”

  Blightcrest's head snapped toward him. The boy stopped mid-step. Bare toes curled against the cold plank.

  “I heard… thought you were fighting something.”

  Talons clenched. In his mind the dream-echo flared. He clicked his beak, sharp and deliberate.

  “Alright, alright. Grumpy bird.” Finn backed up, hands lifted. “Mam says not to bother you when you look like that anyway.”

  “Finn, bed. Now.” Elspeth’s voice drifted from inside, roughened by sleep.

  “Was just checking on him, Mam.”

  Footsteps retreated. The door closed. The yard belonged to Blightcrest again.

  He watched the doorway a heartbeat longer, then lowered his head to his breastbone. His feathers still itched with wrongness. The boy’s thin wrists, the soft swell of his throat—prey shapes, all of them, outlined too clearly in his hunter’s eye.

  Unacceptable.

  The village reeked of softness. Of trust. Little bodies darted past his talons each day without fear. They patted his flanks, tugged at his feathers, waved scraps of bread at his beak as if that could tempt him.

  Tonight, with the dream’s taste still thick behind his tongue, the illusion of safety felt fragile.

  Violence belonged in the trees where trunks could splinter under his weight and the things he broke wore fangs.

  He stepped down from the rail. Wood groaned under him. Earth received his weight with a dull thud. He rolled his shoulders, shook himself from neck to tail, and the dust of the yard rose around him in a pale cloud.

  The gate at the back of the inn yard hung half-latched. He eased it open with the curve of his beak. Iron squealed; he froze, listening. No lights flared. No voices called.

  Beyond the fence, the forest waited. Damp loam. Running water. The clean, honest fear of creatures that knew their place in the food chain.

  A better place for hunting.