The first thing Tarev noticed about his ceiling was that it was going to kill him.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. The beam running across the east corner had a crack he could trace from wall joint to mid-span, and the discoloration on either side told him there had been water damage — two incidents at minimum, possibly three. He didn't know how he knew this. He just did, the way you know the smell of rain before it arrives.
He lay still for a while, looking at it.
Outside, fog pressed against the window like it had something to ask. The marsh made no sound. That was the strange part. Marshes were supposed to be noisy, full of frogs and insects and the general complaints of things living in wet places. This one was quiet in the particular way a room gets quiet when someone is listening.
He decided not to think about that yet.
There was a man asleep in the corner. Aldric Morthis — his father — was folded into a chair with the boneless certainty of someone who had been sleeping in chairs for years. A ceramic jug listed against his knee. He breathed steadily, which was something.
Tarev sat up.
He was eight years old. He had, somewhere beneath the ordinary stuff of being eight, the memories of a man who had died of a heart defect on a Tuesday morning while reviewing survey reports for a flood management project in Osaka, which he had never finished. He thought about that sometimes. The project, not the dying. The dying had been quick and undramatic. The project had taken three years.
He had decided, sometime between waking and fully waking, not to make too much of the memories. They were simply there — part of how he thought, the way a scar is part of a hand. The man from Osaka had been patient and precise and professionally offended by things built wrong. Tarev was eight years old and currently lying in a room that might collapse on him within the decade.
He felt, on some level, right at home.
* * *
The manor was called Morthis House, which was either sentimental or unimaginative depending on how you looked at it. Tarev spent his first real morning walking every room.
Not exploring. Assessing.
The structure was solid in its bones and catastrophically neglected in its joints. Someone had cared for this building once. The original construction was competent, which made the subsequent decay more painful to look at. There were twelve rooms he could access and one he couldn't — at the far end of the east corridor, where the latch moved freely but the door held firm against any pressure.
He tried it three times. He noted it. He moved on.
The woman who appeared in the kitchen doorway watched him with the expression of someone who had seen many strange things and was provisionally adding him to the list.
"You're up early," she said.
"The ceiling woke me." He paused. "Not literally."
Her name was Veth. She was somewhere between sixty and ancient, with hands like knotted rope and the dry, economical manner of someone who had stopped volunteering information long before he was born. She made him breakfast without asking what he wanted, which turned out to be the right call.
"The east corner beam in my room," he said, between bites of hard bread and thin soup. "When did that crack?"
"Some years back."
"Has anyone looked at it?"
"Your father was going to."
He waited.
She said nothing more.
"Right," he said.
Veth watched him eat with an expression he couldn't quite classify. Not warmth exactly — more like recognition. The way you recognize a gait before you recognize the face. She had worked for this family long enough to know its echoes. He didn't ask about it, and she didn't explain, and they finished breakfast in companionable silence while the fog pressed against the kitchen window with its usual lack of hurry.
* * *
He found the library in the afternoon.
Most of it was ruined. Moisture had done what neglect started, and whole shelves had collapsed inward, pages fused into grey bricks that crumbled when touched. But the far wall had fared better — something about how the room sat, the angle of the worst damp — and there were documents still legible. Estate records. Maps. A handful of books with their spines intact.
He started with the maps.
There was one that made him stop.
Old — older than the others, edges soft with age, ink faded to a brown barely darker than the paper beneath. A survey of the Graymarsh dated before what the family records called the Hollow War. He didn't know the history yet; he was building a list of what he didn't know, which was currently extensive.
What made him stop was the symbol in the map's center.
Not a ruin marker. Not a terrain note. A settlement, marked as living, in the middle of what was now nothing but deep marsh and grey water. The symbol beside it was one he didn't recognize from any cartography notation he knew.
He knew quite a few cartography notations.
He was eight. He had not yet studied cartography.
He sat with this contradiction for a moment, then folded the map carefully and put it in his coat pocket. Behind him, footsteps stopped in the doorway. He turned.
His father stood at the threshold, looking at the map in his pocket. Or rather looking at where the map had been, now that it was tucked away. Aldric's face was a closed room at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.
He turned and walked away without a word.
Tarev noted this too.
* * *
The Skill came in the evening, which felt appropriate. Most clarity, in his experience, arrived at inconvenient hours.
He had been running his hand along the cracking plaster in the east corridor — following the line of damage back to where it started — when something shifted in his perception. Not dramatically. Not with light or sound. More like a lens settling into focus: the world the same shape, just suddenly precise.
The corridor became a report.
He could feel the load distribution in the floor beneath his feet. The point where the wall had been compromised by years of mild flooding from below. The three spots where the foundation had settled unevenly, each one pulling the structure in a slightly different direction. Numbers didn't appear exactly, but assessments did — immediate and confident, like asking his own hand how much weight it was holding and getting an accurate answer.
Then, at the edge of his vision, text.
Blurred at first. He blinked, and it sharpened.
[RUINWRIGHT — RANK 0: FOUNDATION]
You do not conquer. You construct. All territory you claim becomes an extension of your will. Structures raised under your direction carry weight beyond their materials. Resources within your domain orient toward optimal use. Those who stand beneath your Corthal are slowly, genuinely changed — not by compulsion, but by proximity to something that knows what it is building.
He stopped reading.
He sat down on the floor, back against the wall, and thought about the flood management project in Osaka. The eastern channel where the land ran wrong. The drainage that kept failing because nobody had mapped the underlying pressure correctly, and nobody had mapped it because fixing drainage channels was unglamorous work that did not appear on anyone's performance review.
He had cared about it anyway. He had always cared about things like that. Systems that were quietly failing. Infrastructure nobody looked at until it broke.
Here was a building failing quietly. A village at the end of a road nobody important traveled. A marsh that sat wrong and silent under a fog that didn't quite behave like fog.
He stood up.
He took out a scrap of paper — the back of an estate record he'd already memorized — and began writing a repair priority list for the manor. Twelve items, ordered by urgency rather than difficulty. The ceiling beam was first. It was always the thing that looked stable until it wasn't.
Outside, the fog thickened with the dark. Through the corridor's narrow window, the marsh sat patient and grey, the way something sits when it has been waiting long enough to have stopped counting.
Tarev finished his list.
"Alright," he said quietly — to the cracking wall, or the marsh, or no one in particular.
"Let's draw the first line."