The house didn't so much fall apart as unspool. Panels liquefied into smoke; angles loosened and slid like someone had suddenly decided architecture should be a suggestion. I went through it screaming, because that was the natural reflex — the one part of me that still remembered how to react like a human being — and the air chewed at my throat until sound shredded itself into ragged hiss.
Then nothing. No crash. No echo. Just the soft, awful sucking of the world rearranging itself into a place that had no right to be contiguous with my memory.
I hit the ground, and the swamp took me like a mouth. Cold crawled up my legs, into the seam of my jeans, precise and mocking. Mud clung to my palms when I pushed myself up,all clotted, dense, smelling of iron and old machines. I spat clotted grit off my tongue and tasted something like regret.
Around me, people were lying like broken toys. Not cartoon toys — real people, or things that were very close to people....a man with scaled skin like a creature that'd learned to wear human clothes, a woman with feathers stuck to her shoulders like wind had frozen mid-sigh, children on their backs staring at a sky that refused to be a sky.
They didn't move like the living moved. They moved like things that still had enough pain left to keep pulses, and not enough reason to roll over.
I found myself doing a small survey by habit: who's alive, who's breathing, who's missing limbs, who's whispering names that sounded like prayers.
Kind of fucked how used to it I've gotten.
My head wanted to analyze and categorize the chaos the way the old me would, the neat notebook-brained me that made lists to feel safe. But the loop hollowed something out of me. The jokes had gone; the edges had gone. What remained was a dry, patient ache and a bat in my hand.
I gathered myself to stand fully. Bat across my palms, I took a few steps back to make distance — an instinctive buffer between me and people who might need help or might tear me down for it.
The others noticed the movement. They raised their heads a little as if they'd been waiting for permission to look me in the face. Their eyes tracked me like I was both the problem and an answer.
Movement. Faster than everything else.
A dog burst through the muck and the crowd parted like curtains. It wasn't the stray dog. It was a big, hawk-chested animal with scarred flanks, wet fur plastered down like armor. It moved like a soldier. Someone behind it moved with it, an arm raised, a ragged banner quick to follow.
Then I saw the figure who had been gathering them — not a child, not a traditional soldier, but a small, hard-set leader with a gaze that could flatten a plan.
He reached me first and then he was shouting — voice rough with fear and command — "Stay away from my people! Back away!"
For a second our faces unread each other. For a blink, we were two strangers who had the same haircut and an old debt and no shared memory of the first handshake that changed everything. The dog, the animal standing on two legs, scaled between him and me and lowered its head like a warding spear.
His hands closed into fists and then they opened into a blade. He moved like someone who had a kingdom to defend and nothing left to bargain with.
He lunged.
I reacted because the old reflexes still lived somewhere under the mud and the forgetting. We traded the first two moves in silence.
Sweep. Block. Step. Twist.
Hit. Thud. Burn.
His speed surprised me. He wasn't graceful; he was brutal, the way someone does violence for duty. Metal flashed — not a sword as such, but a bright green rod that hummed with a light that insisted it was older than the mud.
He threw everything he had...the desperation, training, the kind of violence born of watching your people stitched together under a weak sky.
I met him with the bat. The wood rang, dull and weary. My arms listened; muscle remembered.
I thought I would find myself using only the momentum of my body, the instinctual, middling fights I'd had with bullies back home.
I'd love to thank Gian for that.
But there was something else in me, raw and humming — like the dragon had left a ghost soldered to my marrow. Every strike I took healed back too fast. Cuts closed halfway before they'd registered as pain. Bruises shrank as if someone inside me refused to let injury claim residency.
"Stop!" someone cried. A voice that made the mud shiver — and for a split second both of us paused hard enough to hear the displaced heartbeat of the place.
We went again.
Lurch. Parry. Knees. Break.
Crash. Roll. Spin.
His aggression never let me see his fear until it did. In one thrust he knocked the bat from my hand. The wood skittered away. I expected to lunge for it. Instead the fight pivoted into something that wasn't physical: recognition uncoiling like a ribbon.
He froze mid-strike. The green rod hummed and stuttered. The dog backed up a hair and the leader's eyes, fierce, exhausted, tilted in a way that allowed confusion to leak in. A name opened in my chest with a slow, awful ache.
"Peko?" I heard myself say it before my heart could suggest otherwise.
The sound of my voice was a rusty bell in a cavern. The leader's shoulders lowered like someone undoing a knot.
The bat lay half-buried in the mud, useless and distant.
He stumbled back as if the name had unpicked something inside him. Then the green rod collapsed in his hands and a faint warbling sound came out,a throat-flag of grief and scandal and home. The dog at his side whined and then, impossibly in the middle of the muck and the blood and the warp of the place,a fold of light swallowed the leader and stretched out into the sky.
A green avatar unspooled. Not solid; not quite a construct. It towered, a silhouette the color of wet leaves and old glass, an emblem given mass. It roared at nothing and everything at once. The people around us flinched as if they'd been struck by memory. The avatar's eyes,huge, impossible, fixed on the place where I had been trying to remember anything other than surviving.
In that weird, charged silence, I could feel memory settle like dust. Old pictures flickered behind my sternum: a stray dog with eyes like a child's apology; afternoons at the park; a promise I'd made with a shy, small-eyed dog who had been more than a pet. The dragon's spark inside me hummed like a tuning fork and completed that circuit of memory.
I dropped the bat.
Names are small things until they aren't. "Peko," I said again, and this time it was an admission and a confession and a plea. The fight evaporated like breath.
I remembered him.
The leader, the prince, whatever crown he carried in his chest, moved as if gravity had become polite enough to let him bow. He had broken the world for his people and now his world had found me in the mud.
He reached out, and, like a child,he put his hand on my face.
Everything in me surged up: shame, relief, the tired kind of love that is nothing like the ones in cheerful books. He said my name, the way a man calls a brother out of a lifetime of rumors. I said his back, my voice a cracked instrument.
We both looked at the green avatar above us, listening to a song of home it sang in a language of light. It didn't explain the loop or the swamp. It didn't make the holes inside us stitch closed. But for a second the world was not only a thing that took; it was a place that returned.
I knelt in the mud, palms dirty, and let the recognition steady me. Peko put his hand in the stain of my hair like he was checking I was warm. He was not a king yet, but he had the gravity of one. The dog nudged at my thigh and then settled near my boot, which was still half-swallowed by the swamp. Around us, faces lifted.
The avatar folded its light back in. The green glow thinned like a tide and then vanished, leaving only the small, dog standing on his two legs, a leader with a scraped face and a shirt muddied into a color I couldn't name.
"Don't run," he whispered. Not a command.
I tried to stand. My knees were wet and my bones said they were tired of carrying the rest of creation. But the dragon's ghost in me had decided to be useful for something small, so I found strength enough to take a breath and reply, "I won't."
We didn't have to solve anything right there. We only had to be found. That, for now, was the only honest work I could do.