He changed nothing that could be seen.
The path remained the same. The pace remained efficient. The day still followed thresholds—water, food, rest, movement. If anyone had watched him, they would have seen continuity.
Only he would have noticed the difference.
He stopped washing his hands in the carved basin.
Not because the water was unsafe, but because the act had become a point of variance. Variance led to delay. Delay led to marks. Marks altered the world, and alteration invited attention.
Attention was risk.
So he chose a different stream farther down the route, one where the water ran faster and colder. He did not linger. He did not allow the motion to settle into repetition.
He washed quickly and left.
The Blood Sigil remained quiet, warm beneath his skin, its silence neither approval nor warning.
That was acceptable.
He began to recognize triggers—not as memories, but as patterns that preceded interference.
Metallic scent.
Clean fabric.
Diffused light through thin stone.
Warmth that wasn't heat.
The rhythm from the day before: two beats, a pause, another beat.
He did not chase these signals. He catalogued them. Not with emotion, but with utility. Anything that produced variance belonged in the same category as unstable ground.
Avoid.
He adjusted his route to minimize the environments where those signals appeared. He chose darker passageways over open ledges. He moved through windless cuts in the rock where scent would not linger. He rested in places that did not hold warmth.
His body complied.
It was good at compliance.
For several hours, the fragments did not return.
Efficiency improved.
His movements smoothed. His breath matched steps. The seal remained steady. The world returned to its familiar silence.
That silence should have been relief.
Instead, it became noticeable.
Like a room that had once held noise and now held only the awareness of its absence.
He ignored that too.
Late in the afternoon, he reached a narrow corridor where stone pressed close on both sides. The space was dim and dry, the air unchanged. It should have been safe—predictable, controllable.
Halfway through, a scent caught in his throat.
Not strong.
Barely there.
Clean fabric.
The same impossible cleanliness that had no place in stone and dust.
His body reacted first—fingers curling slightly, wrist turning away, posture aligning into a shape it should not have remembered.
He stopped it.
A sharp flex of the hand. A deliberate clench of the jaw. He forced his shoulders back into neutral.
The movement cost effort.
Not physical effort.
Control.
The fragment tried to surface.
Hands under water. Pressure of cloth. Warm presence at the edge of vision.
He cut it off.
He stepped forward with purpose, faster than necessary, as if speed could outrun what was forming inside him.
The corridor opened into a wider shelf.
Wind met him there, cold and abrupt, stripping scent from the air. The fragment thinned, lost cohesion, vanished.
He did not slow down until he was certain the trigger had been left behind.
Then he stopped.
Not to rest.
To evaluate.
His heart rate had risen slightly. Not panic. Not fear. Just the physiological cost of suppressing an intrusion.
The Blood Sigil had remained silent the entire time.
That consistency confirmed his approach.
The system did not require him to remember.
It required him to function.
Function could be protected.
The rest of the day passed cleanly. No fragments. No borrowed movements. No warmth that did not belong. He ate. Drank. Slept.
Night brought quiet.
And quiet, now, carried shape.
He lay awake longer than usual, listening to the wind outside the rock, to the distant drip that measured time without meaning. The rhythm from the day before did not return.
Good.
That was good.
Yet his body remained tense in a way it had not been before, as if it was waiting for something that was not allowed to arrive.
He understood the contradiction without naming it.
Avoidance worked.
That was the problem.
If avoidance worked too well, then nothing else would ever break through. No fragments. No variance. No risk of marks.
Also no chance—however small—that the missing structure behind the fragments would ever reconnect.
He did not allow that thought to develop.
He tightened his focus the way he tightened his grip.
Tomorrow would be cleaner.
More controlled.
More efficient.
He closed his eyes.
The Blood Sigil stayed warm and silent, holding him in place like a rule that did not need to speak.
And somewhere beneath that silence, a faint possibility remained—
not of memory,
but of the cost of never letting it surface.