Morning found him anyway.
Light pushed through the warped shutters of Orin's small room above the Drills Inn, turning dust into slow, drifting specks. The ceiling beam overhead had a notch he'd stared at as a child when he couldn't sleep. He found it again without trying.
Sonny's letter lay folded on his chest, right over his heart.
He'd fallen asleep like that, fingers locked around the paper until his hands cramped. At some point, his grip had loosened, but the letter hadn't moved.
For a while he just breathed and listened.
Voices rose and fell below—chairs scraping, mugs clinking, Sarah's familiar steps across the floorboards. Someone laughed, short and sharp. A pan hissed in the kitchen. The inn sounded the same as it always had.
He didn't.
Orin sat up slowly. The motion pulled at the healing lines across his ribs, but the pain was dull now, distant. His body had almost finished stitching itself back together. The unfairness of that lodged under his ribs like a stone.
He swung his feet to the floor. The boards were cool. He reached for his pack, still slumped against the wall where he'd dropped it on that first shattered night, and pulled it closer.
Rope. Bedroll. Flint kit. Waterskin. A small bone-handled knife Vince had given him "for peeling fruit, not for stabbing people, don't be weird." A folded spare shirt—Lisa's, shoved at him before the mission with a muttered, You'll ruin the one you're wearing, you always do.
He smoothed that shirt out before placing it on top.
From the small shelf by the bed, he took the flat leather sleeve Sarah had pressed into his hands last night—the mission report pages and recommendation Sonny had written, bound together for him to present at Hachi Academy. He slid those carefully into an inner compartment of the pack.
The letter stayed where it was. He touched it once, then buttoned his vest over it.
His dual cleavers leaned against the wall, blades wrapped in cloth. The hatchet-blade short swords, their edges somewhere between butcher's tools and compact war-axes, rested beside them. He strapped the back harness on by feel, settling the cleavers across his lower spine, then buckled the hatchets at his hips.
The weight anchored him.
He crossed the room one last time, fingers brushing the little things he wasn't taking: the chipped mug on the shelf, the carved wooden beast Vince had once claimed was a "monkey-wolf" and then refused to explain; a scrap of Monari hide tacked to the wall from Orin's first practice cut. All of it stayed.
"Goodbye," he murmured, almost under his breath.
He wasn't sure if he meant the room or the boy who lived there.
Then he picked up his pack and went downstairs.The common room was already breathing.
Customers hunched over morning stew at the corner tables—merchants with travel cloaks draped over chairs, caravan runners in scuffed boots, a pair of younger city guards who definitely should have been back on duty already. Talk drifted in low currents: routes, rates, rumors from further north, a whispered mention of "that Vrexus job" quickly shushed.
The conversations thinned when Orin reached the bottom of the stairs.
It wasn't silence, but something close. A few people stole quick looks at the scars on his throat, at the new hardness in his jaw, at the weapons sitting too comfortably on his body. Others glanced away fast, as if meeting his eyes might pull them into something they didn't want to see.
Behind the counter, Miss Sarah broke the spell.
She pointed at an empty table near the bar. "Sit."
"I'm not—"
"Hungry?" she finished for him. "That's nice. Sit anyway."
He sat.
She moved with that same brisk, stubborn efficiency she used on rowdy mercenaries and broken chairs. A bowl of thick stew, still steaming, landed in front of him. Then a wedge of bread. Then a cup of tea, mint and something bitter curling together in the steam.
"Eat," she said. "Even if it tastes like dirt. Your body doesn't care what your head is doing. It just needs fuel."
He picked up the spoon mainly because it was easier than arguing. The first mouthful fought him all the way down, lodging halfway before his throat finally gave in and accepted it. The second went better. By the fourth, he remembered what warm food did to cold insides.
He didn't finish, but he ate enough Sarah's shoulders eased a fraction.
When he set the spoon down, she wiped her hands on her apron and sat across from him. Up close, he could see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes were deeper. She looked like she'd aged a month in the last few days.
"So," she said. "Hachi Academy."
He nodded.
"You sure?"
"No," he admitted.
She let out a breath through her nose that was almost a laugh. "Good. People who are too sure usually do something idiotic before noon."
His fingers drifted to his chest, feeling the faint crackle of folded paper under his vest.
"You read it again?" she asked.
He nodded once. "Twice."
Her gaze softened. "That man had a way with terrible handwriting and big hopes."
The corner of Orin's mouth twitched, almost a smile. "He talked about me like… like I was already something. Before anything happened."
Sarah's eyes dropped for a heartbeat. "He wasn't the only one, you know."
He swallowed. The weight in his throat thickened. "I don't feel like—"
"Good," she cut in. "You're not supposed to 'feel like' what you're going to be yet. That's why you're going to train."
He didn't have an answer for that, so he stayed quiet.
Sarah sighed, then reached into her apron and pulled something out—something small threaded on a leather cord. She set it between them.
It was a round metal charm, edges worn smooth from years of handling. A sunburst symbol had been etched into its surface once; now it was faint, but still visible if you tilted it toward the light.
"This is older than you," she said. "Got it when I was young and thought the world was just taverns and travel and pretty swords. It's Solara's mark. Old style. Doesn't glow, doesn't bless. But it reminded me that there's light even when things go absolutely, horribly wrong."
She nudged it toward him.
"Take it," she said. "You're going to have days where you want to lie down and stop being. On those days, hold that thing and remember that people fought and bled and burned to raise those two goddesses, and they didn't do all that just for you to give up halfway through your story."
He picked up the charm. It was warm from her hand, heavier than its size deserved. The etching felt shallow under his thumb, a ghost of a sun.
He slipped the cord over his head. The disc settled against his chest, resting over Sonny's letter.
"It suits you," Sarah said. "You're stubborn enough to argue with a sun."
A guard's laugh barked across the room from the bar. Someone dropped a spoon. Life went on around them, unimpressed with his world ending.
Sarah took a breath, steadying herself. "There's a second thing."
She drew a folded slip of paper from her apron, stamped with Drill City's seal—the stylized drill-tower and the circle of protective runes surrounding it.
"Travel paper," she said. "Southern gate. Name, purpose, direction. Captain owes me a favor or three. You wave this at the guard and they'll at least pretend to be polite."
"I could've—"
"Begged and argued your way through the gate hauling all this guilt?" she snorted. "I'm sure that'd go beautifully."
He took the paper and tucked it into a pocket at his belt.
For a few moments they simply sat there.
"I keep thinking I… don't deserve to go," he said quietly. "To train. To get stronger. After what I did."
She didn't look away. "You didn't wake up one morning and decide to tear them apart. Something inside you snapped open and you were standing in the middle of it. Sonny knew there were pieces of you that none of you understood. That's why he wrote those pages. That's why he sent you to Hachi."
Her gaze sharpened, voice dropping.
"Listen to me, Orin Slain," she said. "If you run from this, if you decide you're too monstrous to be anything but alone, then what happened in that forest will be the only story you ever have. If you go, if you learn, if you fight to be better, then that day becomes the beginning of something instead of the end."
His throat burned. "I don't know if I can see it that way yet."
"Did I ask you to see it that way?" she said. "I asked you to walk anyway."
He let out a rough breath that was almost a laugh, almost a sob.
"Finish your tea," she said more gently. "Then I'm walking you to the gate. I don't trust you not to get lost from here to the wall."Drill City was awake.
Orin and Sarah stepped into streets already clogged with carts and feet. The air carried the smells of spice, hot metal, and the faint sharp tang of powered crystal. A line of tech-crystals pulsed a slow, steady light along the main thoroughfare overhead, feeding power into the ward-lines carved into the stone and the squat streetlamps that would glow after sundown.
A cargo tram stone sat on its platform at a crossroads—an oval block etched with dense runes. A handler in a leather vest was arguing with a merchant about rates, gesturing sharply at a slate board: numbers, destinations, times. Orin had watched those stones pulse to life before, saw entire carts vanish in a shimmer of light only to reappear hours later in another city.
Today, it looked very far away from him.
"You've been staring at that thing like it insulted your mother," Sarah muttered.
"It looks… easy," he said.
"Travelling in pieces through a screaming tunnel of light isn't easy," she snorted. "It's expensive. That's different."
He huffed quietly, surprised by how normal the moment felt.
They walked on.
He noticed things he'd never truly stopped to see in all his years here. The way the ward-lines in the walls brightened whenever a Monari-shadow moved beyond the city boundaries. The clatter of a small messenger drone—a beetle-shaped construct of crystal and metal—skittering along a rail overhead. A smithy with both a traditional forge and a crystal pillar humming beside it, heat rippling off both.
It struck him that the world was wider and stranger than the four walls of the inn and the edges of the Beastland hunts.
And he was walking out into it alone.
The closer they got to the southern gate, the quieter the city noise felt. Not because there were fewer people—there were more—but because his thoughts crowded out their voices.
The gate itself loomed ahead, built thick and layered with overlapping sigils. Runed metal plates reinforced stone. A faint shimmer marked where the city's outer barrier met the physical wall, rising in a curve so high it was hard to see where it ended.
Guards manned the entryway, spears resting in crooks of arms, blades at hips. Some wore crystal-linked devices on their wrists, sending faint lines of energy to the gatehouse—status signals, checks, the quiet heartbeat of a city that didn't plan to be surprised.
One of the guards—a broad woman with braided hair and a scar across her jaw—straightened when she saw Sarah.
"Sarah. Brought the boy, huh?"
"I brought my business," Sarah said briskly. "You planning to let him walk or give me trouble about his face?"
The guard's gaze lingered on Orin, on the healed cuts, the weapons, the haunted look in his eyes. Then she held out a hand.
"Paper?"
He passed her the stamped slip.
Her eyes flicked over it, then over him again. "Headed to Hachi, huh?"
He nodded.
"Good," she said simply. "Place like that exists for a reason."
The answer surprised him enough that he blinked.
She handed the paper back. "Road's clear this side. You keep your head down near the Beastland fringe and don't go hero against anything with more teeth than sense."
"I'll try," he said.
"Try less and survive more," she replied, then stepped aside. "Gate's open."
Sarah moved closer, hand resting briefly on his arm. Up close, he could see her eyes were shinier than before, but dry.
"This is where I stop," she said.
He turned to face her fully. For a second, he was ten again, muddy and exhausted from chasing after the Fangs, expecting her to scold him for tracking dirt. Instead, she reached up and cupped his face, thumb resting just under his eye.
"You were mine too," she said quietly. "Don't you let anyone out there tell you different. Not the world. Not your power. Not even your own head."
His throat clenched.
"I'm sorry," he started. "For—"
"Don't," she warned, the word soft but sharp. "You try to apologize for surviving one more time and I will lay you out in front of this gate and tell every guard here you slipped on a pebble."
Despite everything, a broken edge of a smile tugged at his mouth.
She smiled back, briefly, fiercely. Then she pulled him into a hug that felt like every night she'd told him to sleep and every morning she'd told him to get up.
"You come back," she murmured into his hair. "Not the same. Not untouched. Just… back. That's all I ask."
"I'll try," he said into her shoulder.
She squeezed once more, hard enough to make his ribs protest, then pushed him back at arm's length.
"Go," she said. "Before I decide to keep you scrubbing tables until you're forty."
He nodded.
Turned.
And walked through the gate.The world outside felt bigger with every step.
The southern road cut through low hills and scattered trees, dirt packed hard by wagon wheels and boots. Behind him, Drill City shrank with each pace—tower tops dipping, walls sagging into the line of the horizon. Ahead, the sky opened wide, clouds drifting lazy and indifferent.
He walked until the city was a gray smudge behind him.
Only then did he stop on a rise and look back.
From here, the wall was a curve of stone and faint light. Somewhere inside that ring were four graves outside the forest, an inn that had been his whole world, and a woman who had just handed him away to his future like it hurt and like it mattered.
"Goodbye," he said softly.
The wind tugged at his hair and didn't answer.
He shifted his pack higher on his shoulders and faced the road again.By the time the sun slid toward the upper edge of the hills, his legs ached in that deep, steady way that said he'd gone far enough for one day. The land had changed gradually—fewer farms, more patches of untamed growth. Clusters of trees thickened into small copses. Somewhere to his left, something large called out across the grasslands, voice low and carrying.
He stepped off the main road and climbed a short slope toward a crooked tree clinging stubbornly to a cluster of rocks. The spot gave him a view of the road and enough cover to not feel completely exposed.
Old training from the Fangs guided him as he checked for signs of other use. No fresh claw marks on the bark. No droppings from anything too big. Just hoofprints from some kind of herd beast days old and the faint imprint of a previous campfire long gone cold.
Good enough.
He laid out his bedroll with practiced motions, gathered a handful of dry scrub and thin fallen branches, and coaxed a small fire to life. The flames licked up, steady and contained. He warmed the last of Sarah's stew in a dented tin pot, thinning it with water, stirring until it bubbled.
He ate slow.
Not because he wanted to savor it—every bite rubbed against raw places inside him—but because he knew what it was. The last meal from the inn. From her. From before.
When the bowl was empty, he cleaned it with a scrap of bread and a little water, then set it aside. The sky above deepened into a dark blue. One of New Altera's moons slid into view, pale and watchful. The second was still below the horizon.
Crickets chirped somewhere in the tall grass. Something rustled and then fled at the edge of his hearing when he shifted.
Orin sat with his back against the crooked tree and pulled out Sonny's letter.
He didn't need to read all of it again. The words were already burned into his memory. Still, his eyes found the same lines.
You've got more in you than this city, more than our little crew could ever pull out alone.You don't owe us a quiet life, kid.You owe yourself the chance to learn what you really are—and how to stop it from eating you.
His fingers tightened on the paper.
"I'm trying," he whispered. The fire popped softly. "I don't know if I can, but… I'm trying."
The charm of Solara's old sun lay warm against his chest, metal catching the heat from the fire and his skin both. The weight of his cleavers pressed steady against his back.
He folded the letter with careful hands and slipped it back into its place.
Night settled fully. The fire guttered down to coals, a dim orange eye in the darkness. Out beyond the reach of its light, the world rustled with life—small scurries, distant roars, the shifting breath of New Altera's wild places.
Orin lay down on his side, facing the embers, one hand resting near the hilts at his back.
Tomorrow, he'd walk closer to the Beastland fringe. After that, toward Hachi Academy's high walls and everything that waited there—answers, maybe. Or just more questions wrapped in training and orders.
For now, there was only the rhythm of his own breathing, the faint thud of his heart, and the promise he'd made in front of four rough stones:
I'll live. I'll learn control. I won't let what happened be all that I am.
Sleep came in pieces. Haunted, but real enough.
By the time first light brushed the horizon in pale blue and gold, Orin was already sitting up, tightening his pack straps, stamping out the last ember of his fire.
He took one more look at the empty rise, then at the road stretching ahead.
Then he set his shoulders, adjusted the weight of his weapons, and kept walking toward Hachi.