"He who falls from one world does not land softly in the next. He lands the way all broken things do — with sound."
The first thing Luceo felt was cold.
Not the cold of winter, which carries a kind of honesty in it — clean and sharp, the world reminding you it has no obligation to keep you warm. This was a different cold. A wet, root-deep cold, as if the earth itself had decided to test how long a man could lie on its surface before it absorbed him entirely.
He opened his eyes.
Or tried to. One refused. The left eye swelled shut against his will, a silent protest from a body that had already filed too many complaints and received too few responses. The right eye offered him gray sky. A sky wrong in the precise, indefinable way that a painting of the sea is wrong — technically accurate, missing something alive.
Not my sky. Not any sky I know.
He lay in the hollow of a dead tree's roots, the earth around him soft with black moss and a peculiar kind of decay that smelled faintly of burnt copper and old rain. Somewhere above, crows argued. Or what he assumed were crows. The sound was almost right, the way everything here was almost right — the colors too saturated, the shadows too long, the silence between sounds too deliberate.
Luceo sat up. The world rewarded this decision by spinning pleasantly. He braced one hand against the roots and waited for the horizon to remember where it belonged.
Inventory. Basic. What do you have.
He had: two hands, both functional, one bleeding slowly from a gash across the palm that he did not recall earning. He had boots, still laced, which struck him as either a mercy or an insult, depending on how long he had been unconscious. He had clothes — dark, practical, torn in three places and singed in one — and a coat that had been expensive once, in a time he no longer had clean access to. He had a headache that felt personally motivated.
And he had the blade.
It lay beside him in the moss, which was strange in the way that miracles are always strange — too convenient to be coincidence, too familiar to be comfort. It was not a beautiful weapon. He had seen beautiful weapons. Beautiful weapons were objects of art hung on walls by men who wanted to be remembered for things they had never done. This blade was something else entirely.
It was long and narrow, with a crossguard of blackened iron shaped like two wings broken mid-flight. The steel was dark — not polished dark, but dark the way scar tissue is dark, as if the metal had been through something and carried the evidence. A fracture ran down the flat of the blade, a hairline crack that caught even the gray light and held it, refusing to release it back to the world. Along the fuller were inscriptions in a language he did not know and yet felt he nearly understood, the way you nearly understand a word heard through a wall.
He picked it up. It settled into his hand with the particular familiarity of things that have decided they belong to you, whether you like it or not.
Where did you come from.
No answer. The blade did not answer questions. That was, Luceo supposed, the most honest thing about it.
✦
He spent the next hour performing what he privately termed a controlled survey of his catastrophe.
The forest was ancient — the kind of ancient that does not advertise itself with grandeur but rather with a creeping, atmospheric density, as though the trees had been standing long enough to develop opinions about the people who walked beneath them. The bark was black-veined and rough. The leaves overhead held a color between red and bronze that had no precise name in any language he spoke, which was either a failure of language or of his education, and either way not his immediate concern.
He found a stream by following the sound of it, which was a more navigable decision than the dozen before it. The water ran clear and cold over stones that were faintly luminescent at their cores — nothing dramatic, merely the quiet suggestion of something not-quite-natural about the world. He drank. He washed the blood from his hand and found the gash shallower than it felt, the kind of wound that bleeds with ambition but heals without drama.
He looked at his reflection in the water.
Luceo was twenty-three years old, or had been, in the world he had left. In this one he had no particular confidence in arithmetic. He had the face of a man who had been young once and had decided against continuing the practice — sharp-featured, dark-eyed, with a jaw set in the particular way of people who have had to defend their own existence through conversation more often than was reasonable. A scar traced a white line from his left temple to the corner of his mouth, old enough to have become simply a feature rather than a story. There were others, less visible, everywhere else.
Still alive. Inexplicably. Tradition continues.
He straightened. The blade rested against his back in a makeshift harness fashioned from strips of his coat — a practical arrangement that cost him approximately a third of his already-reduced warmth. The morning, or what passed for morning in this gray-filtered world, offered him silence and a forest that appeared to extend indefinitely in every direction.
He picked the direction most likely to contain other people and walked.
✦
He found them three hours later, which was either very fast for this kind of situation or very slow for a man with his particular relationship with luck.
They were not welcoming.
There were four of them, and they were in the middle of doing something to a fifth person — a girl, young, perhaps fifteen, with silver hair cut unevenly and a face that had concluded that fear was not a useful emotion and was attempting to replace it with fury. The four men doing the doing were large and armored in a style Luceo categorized as feudal-adjacent, wearing the sigil of something he didn't recognize on their pauldrons: a serpent eating its own tail, except the serpent had two heads, both of which appeared to be losing the argument.
The girl was on her knees, wrists bound. One of the men held her by the hair.
None of your business. Absolutely. Not your world, not your conflict, not your—
He stopped walking directly in front of them.
The four soldiers looked at him with the expression of people who had not expected interruptions and were uncertain how to categorize one.
"Gentlemen," Luceo said pleasantly. "Is this your girl, or did you just find her? I'm asking for the sake of conversation, not morality."
One of the soldiers — the largest, which was rarely an accident — stepped forward. He was built like architecture that had gotten ideas above its station. His hand rested on the pommel of a sword.
"Move along, vagrant. This is Order business."
Order business. So they have an Order. Everyone has an Order. Organizations that name themselves after virtue are never a good sign.
"Order business," Luceo repeated thoughtfully. "And does the Order's business typically involve holding children by the hair? I'm genuinely curious about their operational standards."
The soldier's jaw tightened. "Your last warning."
Luceo looked at the girl. She was looking back at him — not with hope, exactly. Something colder than hope. Calculation.
She's measuring whether you're useful. Smart child.
He looked at the blade at his back. He looked at the four soldiers. He looked at the sky.
This is going to hurt. It always does.
"I'm going to have to decline the warning," he said. "I find warnings are more useful when I have a stake in the outcome. As it happens, I've recently lost most of my reasons not to do inadvisable things, which puts us in an awkward position."
The soldier drew his sword.
Luceo drew his.
And the crack in the blade caught the light and held it, and for one breath-long moment, the air between them was very, very still.
✦
He was, he reflected afterward, genuinely not certain how he survived it.
The first soldier went down quickly — the fracture along the blade seemed to, when applied with the right angle and force, generate a pulse of something he could only describe as pressure, a concussive wave that struck the man in the chest and sat him down without ceremony. The second came in from the left, and Luceo's body moved before his mind caught up, a sidestep that was too clean to be instinct alone, as if something in his muscles remembered techniques he had not been taught in this life.
The third was harder. He caught Luceo across the ribs — not with the blade, but with an armored forearm, and the ribs that had perhaps been cracked already registered their opinion loudly. He went down to one knee, and then, through a combination of stubbornness and what his former teachers had called "an unreasonable refusal to acknowledge structural defeat," he got back up.
The fourth dropped his sword before Luceo reached him, which was, honestly, the most sensible decision anyone had made all morning.
He pointed the blade at the man.
"The Order," he said. "Tell me who they are."
The soldier told him. It was, as expositions go, brief and not entirely useful, but it established that there was a city called Varenith two days' walk north, that the Order of the Sunken Chain was the ruling enforcement arm of a regional governor, and that the girl was either a criminal or a heretic depending on who you asked.
"Thank you," Luceo said. He let the man run.
He turned to the girl. She had, at some point during the proceedings, freed her own wrists. She was watching him with the particular expression of someone who has decided to be impressed but will not say so.
"You're not from here," she said.
"Astute."
"Where from?"
Good question. Sincere congratulations to the universe for that one.
"Somewhere that no longer matters much," he said. "Are you going to be all right?"
The girl stood. She was taller than he had estimated, and there was something in her stillness that did not belong to her age — a quality of compression, as if she had learned to make herself smaller than she was and had not yet decided to stop. Silver hair, dark eyes, a mark on her collarbone that was not a bruise — he glimpsed it briefly before she pulled her collar up: a spiral of something that might have been a scar, might have been a brand.
"My name is Seris," she said, which was not an answer to his question and was clearly intended not to be.
"Luceo," he offered.
She looked at his blade. At the crack. At the inscriptions he couldn't read.
"That weapon is Voidtouched," she said quietly. "Where did you get a Voidtouched blade?"
So that's what it is. Helpful. Completely unexplained, but at least it has a name now.
"It followed me home," he said. "Are you going to explain what that means?"
Seris studied him for a moment longer with those calculating eyes, and then, very slowly, something shifted in her expression — not warmth, precisely, but something adjacent to it, the kind of reassessment that people perform when they realize a stranger is more complicated than they appeared.
"If you're heading toward Varenith," she said finally, "I'll walk with you. There are things in these woods worse than the Order."
Luceo considered this.
A mysterious girl with a brand and silver hair who identifies cursed weapons on sight. In any reasonable estimation of probability, this is the beginning of something terrible.
He looked at the forest. He looked at her.
"After you," he said.