Rhys took a step forward, and the world tilted with him.
He hadn't decided to move. His body had simply done it, drawn by something coiled under his skin that hadn't existed an hour ago and now felt like it had always been there, waiting behind a locked door he'd never once suspected was in the house of him. It didn't feel like strength, not the way the tavern stories described power, all fire and certainty. It felt like standing too close to a held breath about to break.
The stranger took a second step back, and this time he didn't try to hide it.
"The report was wrong." He said it mostly to himself, gray coat snapping around his legs as he turned toward the road, all his earlier unhurried calm gone, replaced by something clipped and urgent. "Dormant. They told me the line was dormant, decades of margin before anyone needed to worry, and instead I find—"
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to. Rhys heard the fear in it anyway, buried under the clipped words, and something ugly and satisfied uncurled in his chest at the sound of it, right alongside the grief, wearing the same skin.
"Wait." His own voice came out wrong, cracked and unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone standing just behind him rather than in his own throat. "You don't get to just leave."
He didn't know what he meant to do about it. He didn't know what he could do, only that the air around him had gone strange and thin in a way that had nothing to do with breathing, the whole yard drawn tight like a held note about to snap.
The stranger reached the cart and swung up onto it without looking back, already gathering the reins. "Tell whoever finds you first that House Thane will want a full report before anyone lays a hand on him. Tell them the bloodline is active, not dormant. Tell them..."
Whatever he meant to say next, the horse never gave him the chance to finish, spooking hard at something in the air no ordinary animal should have been able to sense, and the cart lurched forward so violently the rest of the sentence was swallowed under hoofbeats and wheels grinding fast down Hollowmere's one real road.
Rhys stood alone in the yard and watched the gray coat disappear into the gathering dusk, and the fire under his skin did not go out with it.
If anything, it burned hotter.
The pressure came first behind his eyes, a swelling, feverish ache that made the edges of the world go soft and unreliable, the fence line bending where it shouldn't, the sky pulsing faintly at the corners of his vision like something breathing. Then his hands, already unsteady, began to shake harder, hard enough that he had to look down at them just to be sure they were still his own. Faint lines had risen along his forearms where none had been that morning, silver-white, branching thin as frost across glass, as though something had been written into his skin in a language older than him and then almost, but not quite, scrubbed away.
That's not normal. The thought arrived slow and distant, like it belonged to someone standing very far off, shouting across a widening gap. None of this is normal. None of today has been normal.
His knees hit the dirt before he decided to kneel, the choice made for him by a body that had simply run out of whatever had been holding it upright. The yard tilted once, gently, the way a boat tilts in the last second before you understand you're about to go into the water and there's nothing left to do about it. Somewhere behind him, distantly, he was aware of Ren's body, of blood already gone dark and tacky where it had pooled beneath him, of a silence in the house that had never once, in seventeen years, felt like this. Not peaceful. Not even sad, not yet. Just wrong, in a way that would take days to fully understand.
Get up. He told himself, the thought slurring at the edges even as he tried to hold onto it. Someone has to bury him. Someone has to send word. Someone has to...
The thought didn't finish. The world didn't wait for his permission before it went dark, simply folded itself away all at once like a hand closing over a candle, the very last thing he registered before it did being not fear, and not even grief, but a single, cold, absolutely certain line of thought cutting cleanly through everything else crowding in behind it.
Whatever I just did to that man. Whoever he answers to. They're going to send more of them. And next time, they won't send just one.
Then there was nothing at all. No dreams, no dark, no sense of time passing, only a long gray absence that could have lasted a minute or a year, until a voice he'd known his entire life was shouting his name from somewhere very far away, closer with every repetition, and hands that weren't Ren's, smaller and shaking and desperately careful all at once, were gripping his shoulders hard enough to hurt.
The first gray edge of morning was already climbing over Hollowmere's low stone roofs by the time Rhys opened his eyes.