The inn was quiet.
That was the first thing I noticed when I came back from Ravenholdt — not the noise of the place, but the absence of it. The common room empty. The fire burned low. A single candle on the counter, left for me by whoever closed up.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, letting the silence settle around me.
The day had been ordinary. Customers, orders, the usual rhythm. But underneath it, all the way up the mountain and back down again, I had been thinking about the shadow.
Not the way Willers talks about it — carefully, like a tool he's still learning to trust. I was thinking about the way it felt. That moment in the training yard when I pulled it around myself and the world went soft at the edges. The way my skin had tingled, like standing close to a fire.
I went up to my room.
It was a small room at the back of the inn. A bed, a washstand, a window that looked out over the rooftops toward the hills. I had rented it months ago, when I first arrived in Southshore, and it had never felt like mine. Just a place to sleep between shifts.
Tonight it felt smaller than usual.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands.
Then I tried the concealment again.
It came easier this time. Faster. The shadow answered like it had been waiting for me to reach for it. I felt it settle around my shoulders — cool, familiar, like a cloak I had worn a hundred times before.
I sat in the dark of my room, invisible to no one but myself, and let myself feel it.
My hands were tingling. That strange warmth just beneath the skin. My heartbeat had slowed. The room felt farther away than it should have, as if I was watching it from the end of a long tunnel.
I held it for a long time. When I finally let go, the room rushed back in — the creak of the floorboards, the distant sound of the wind, the faint smell of woodsmoke from the chimney. Everything was exactly as I had left it.
Nothing had changed.
I sat in the dark for a while longer, thinking about Willers and the way he had looked at me in the training yard. Not surprised. Not jealous. Just… watching. Like he was seeing something he didn't quite understand.
I didn't tell him how easy it was.
Not because I wanted to keep it from him. But because I didn't yet know what it meant. And I wanted to understand it myself before I tried to explain it to anyone else.
I blew out the candle and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark.
The shadow was still there, waiting at the edge of my thoughts. Patient. Quiet.
I did not reach for it again that night.
But I knew I would.