I didn't find that hard to believe at all. Alfred reminded me of my grandfather in a way that ached a little every time he opened his mouth: the honest smile that didn't fully reach his eyes, the stories that kept spiraling outward instead of ever quite arriving anywhere. I was midway through one of them when another figure appeared in the tavern doorway.
"Jon?"
a voice said behind me, familiar enough to turn my whole body around before my mind had caught up to whose it was.
Luxy crossed the room and had both arms around me before I'd fully stood, holding on tight enough that I could barely draw a full breath, and over her shoulder I caught Alfred giving me a wink and a thumbs-up before he retreated tactfully behind his own counter.
"Where have you been?"
Luxy asked, pulling back just far enough to actually look at me.
"We rode to Hallowmere.
We found a crater where the town was supposed to be, Jon.
A massive one."
That was my doing, and there was no version of the sentence that made it sound like anything else. I had poured everything I had into a single strike from the Lanternwood Bow, knowing full well what it would cost, and done it anyway.
"That was on me," I said.
"I went too far with the bow."
"How in the world did you survive that?"
Savage asked, arms crossed, studying me the way you'd study a wound to see whether it needed stitches or a burial.
"Long story," I said.
"Well, we missed you," Luxy said.
"Are you coming back to the Wayfinders?"
"Also a long story," I said, and I saw Namey's face shift, just slightly, at that, like he already suspected which parts of the story I was going to leave out.
I had no real hesitation about rejoining them. What I hadn't worked out yet was how to explain that I needed to do something, eventually, about Corvin Ashe, one way or another, without dragging the rest of them into a fight none of us understood yet.
"Is it just me, or is this whole town half-empty?"
Namey asked, glancing around the near-silent room.
"I think I know why," I said.
"Tell us," Luxy said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from me.
Namey and Savage settled in on either side, and before I got two words in, Namey reached into his coat and set a folded, salt-stained square of paper on the table in front of me.
"This came for you," he said.
"Through some of my old contacts at Genesis.
Took two weeks to catch up with you, which should tell you something about how far you'd already gotten before I even had a lead on where to send it."
I recognized Abigail's hand on the fold before I'd even opened it, careful and slanted and far too neat for someone who claimed to hate letters.
Jon.
I made someone else write this down for me since my arm still won't cooperate, so if the handwriting looks wrong, that's why, and don't you dare say anything about it.
You're alive. I already knew that, the way I always know things about you that I have no business knowing, but hearing it confirmed still nearly put me on the floor.
I'm allowed to be sad about the farm. I am sad about it, more than I know how to say to a piece of paper someone else is writing for me. But I need you to hear this part clean, with no softening around it, because you have people around you now who I think might soften it for you if I don't say it myself: you don't get to let a big enough fire convince you that it fixed anything.
It didn't fix Hallowmere. It ended it. Those are different things, and I need you to keep telling the two of them apart, even when it would be easier not to.
Come back when whatever you're doing is done. Bring Hans's stupid grin back in one piece too, since apparently that's non-negotiable for me now.
Abi.
I read it twice before I trusted my voice enough to fold it and put it away, in the same inside pocket where my grandfather's letter had been riding this whole time, singed pale gold along one edge but otherwise whole, having survived the exact blast that had cost me everything else I'd been carrying that morning.
"Good news?"
Luxy asked gently.
"She's alive.
Hans too," I said.
"The rest of it's mine to sit with."
Namey watched me fold the letter away with an expression I couldn't quite place at the time. It took him another few minutes, once the talk had moved on to the monsters ringing Daenia, before he finally said what was actually on his mind.
"You don't flinch the way you used to," he said, quiet, almost clinical, the way he said most things that mattered to him.
"Back at the troll hunt, you looked like a man about to be sick after you took the shot.
You don't look like that anymore. I've watched you take three lives across this conversation alone, in the way you're sitting, in the way you're talking about a whole town being gone. I'm not saying it to wound you.
I'm saying it because I don't think anyone else here is going to, and somebody probably should."
"I noticed," I said, and it came out flatter than I meant it to.
"I've been noticing for a while now."
Namey didn't push it any further than that, and I was grateful for it, mostly because I didn't yet have anything better to say back.
"You worked at Genesis, four-eyes," Savage cut in, plainly done sitting inside a heavy silence for longer than she had patience for.
"What in the hell are these things?"
"Don't call me four-eyes," Namey said, automatic, the way you'd correct a habit you'd long since stopped expecting to actually change.
"And there's no monster class in the entire design document that converts NPCs into anything.
This isn't in the game.
Someone put it there."