Naera's eyes held his for a long moment after the door closed.
The small room felt tighter than it had a heartbeat before, the air denser, as if the walls themselves were listening.
"You're not just a crafter," she said quietly.
Trin watched her, saying nothing.
"The 'of sorts' matters," she went on. "Most people who mend straps and sew cloth don't pull arrows out of their chest and walk away without bleeding. Wounds don't close by themselves like that. Not on *anyone* I've ever treated."
Her voice didn't rise, but there was a hard, controlled edge under the calm.
Trin exhaled slowly. "You saw."
"I saw enough," Naera said. "I've tended soldiers on too many roads. I know what a real injury looks like. You should have been on the ground choking on your own blood. Instead, you looked…annoyed."
"Surprised," he corrected. "Annoyance came later."
Naera's fingers flexed around her staff. "So tell me, Trin. What are you? And don't say 'a crafter of sorts' again, or I will throw this staff at you just on principle."
He studied her face—the tightness around her eyes, the way she held herself very still, as if one wrong word would either shatter her composure or make her swing first and ask questions later.
Instead of answering directly, he asked, "How much do you know of your world's goddess?"
Naera blinked. "What?"
"Althera," he said softly. "How much do you know of her?"
Naera's throat worked. "Depends on who you ask," she said. "In the capital, they talk about her in temple hymns. 'Lady of Paths, Keeper of Ways, She Who Guides the Lost'—" She waved a hand. "In the Arcanum, they argue if she was ever real or just a metaphor for change and chance. Out here…"
She hesitated, gaze drifting to the window for a heartbeat before returning to him.
"Out here," she said more quietly, "people pray to her when they have to choose a road. Or when they're afraid of losing themselves. Or when they've gone so far into the wilds they're not sure the way back exists anymore."
Her eyes sharpened. "Why?"
Trin's gaze dropped briefly to his hands, then rose again.
"She was real," he said. "Is, in a sense. But not in the way the stories have…simplified."
Naera's lips parted, but no sound came out.
"We were friends," Trin said. "Long before she became the goddess your people speak of. Before anyone called her that, she was Althera—stubborn, curious, forever stepping where even I hesitated to go."
Naera stared at him. "You talk like you…knew her," she said slowly. "Not as a distant figure. As someone you sat beside."
"Yes," he said simply.
"How long ago?" she whispered.
"A very long time," Trin answered. "Longer than this kingdom's line of kings. Longer than the stones under your roads have held their shapes."
The staff in Naera's hand dipped slightly as if it had become heavier. "You're serious."
"I am," he said.
She swallowed. "And when we found you…?"
"I had just watched her die," Trin said. The words were flat, gentle, carrying no embellishment. "To a terrible foe. One that should never have been allowed to grow as it did."
Naera's fingers tightened again. "What kind of foe?"
He shook his head. "The details are…not for now. Not until you are somewhere far safer than an inn above a common room, in a town whose walls would mean nothing to him."
"Him," she echoed. "So he's…still out there."
"Yes," Trin said. "He is not of this world. But he is…persistent. And cruel. And very likely searching for any sign that I still exist."
Naera's breath caught. "You think he could find you here? Now?"
"I think," Trin said slowly, "that as long as I keep my head down, mend my leather, and walk lightly, this world has time. Althera's failsafe brought me here for a reason—to protect what she started, not to drag her killer to its door."
She stared at him as if trying to reconcile the man who stitched straps by their campfire with the being who spoke of goddesses and cosmic foes as memory rather than myth.
"Naera," he said gently, "you asked what I am. The closest truthful answer I can give without inviting more danger than your town deserves is this: I am…older than I look. I have seen more endings than I wanted to. And I am not easy to kill with mortal steel."
"That's…an understatement," she murmured.
"I don't expect you to believe all of it," he said. "But I cannot pretend to be only what I appear to you. Not after what you saw."
Naera laughed once, a broken little sound that had no humor in it. "You know what makes this worse?" she said. "Part of me does believe you. The part that's spent years studying half-buried texts and fragmentary prayers, trying to decide whether the gods are just stories we tell ourselves to make sense of chaos."
She lifted her free hand, fingers trembling slightly.
"And then a man falls out of a forest," she said, "and his wounds close like time decided to apologize."
"I am sorry," Trin said quietly.
"For what?" she snapped, then winced, the sharpness more about herself than him.
"For the weight," he replied. "For putting this on you. For making your world suddenly larger and more fragile than it was yesterday."
Naera closed her eyes briefly.
When she opened them again, there was a sheen of moisture there she hadn't permitted earlier, not in front of Garran or Lysa.
"You said she died," she whispered. "Althera. The goddess. The one my village prayed to when we sent our dead into the river. The one the Arcanum turns into philosophy debates." Her voice grew tight. "How do you say that so calmly?"
Trin's own gaze turned distant for a moment. "Because if I don't," he said, "I will stop being useful to the people she left behind."
Silence settled between them like a thick cloth.
Naera took a half-step back.
"I need…" she began, then broke off, shaking her head. "I need to think. To breathe. To decide if I've gone completely mad or if my world has always been this wide and I just refused to see it."
"That is fair," Trin said.
She turned toward the door, then paused with her hand on the latch.
"This foe," she said without looking back. "If he's searching for you—and if he finds you here—what happens to us?"
Trin's jaw tightened, just enough to be noticeable.
"That," he said softly, "is one of the questions I'm trying very hard to make sure we never have to answer."
Her shoulders rose and fell with a shaky breath.
"That's not reassuring," she whispered.
"It's honest," he replied.
Naera stood there another heartbeat, caught between questions and an instinct for survival that suddenly felt very loud.
"I have to go," she said.
"I understand," Trin answered.
She opened the door and stepped out.
The hallway felt colder when she crossed it, the lamp at the far end flickering slightly in a stray draft. Her boots made almost no sound on the worn boards, but inside her chest everything felt too loud—her heartbeat, her thoughts, the echo of words she never expected to hear spoken in a small rented room.
At the first turn in the hall, where the light from the stairwell spilled faintly upward, she stopped.
Her hand went to her collar, fumbling for a moment at the edge of her tunic before finding the thin chain she wore beneath.
She drew out a small pendant.
It was simple: a narrow, elongated oval of worn silver, etched with a symbol so old it had faded on most copies—a stylized path twisting into a circle, with three tiny lines radiating outward like branches. The mark of Althera, as her village had known it. As Naera had known it.
She stared at it, the metal catching the dim light.
Her lips moved, barely more than a breath.
"Goddess Althera," she whispered.
The words trembled in the air, half prayer, half plea.
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, hot and sudden. She blinked hard, but one escaped, tracking down along the inked line at her jaw, cutting through it for a moment like a broken path.
"If you're gone…" she murmured hoarsely, "if he's right…"
She couldn't finish the thought.
Naera closed her fingers around the pendant, the metal pressing into her palm, and drew in a shaky breath.
"Then at least," she said under her breath, "you left someone who remembers you."
She tucked the pendant back under her tunic, wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand, and straightened.
Downstairs, the inn's common room buzzed with low conversation and the clink of cups. To the other side of town, the barracks lamps burned steadily, promising routine, noise, and the illusion of normalcy.
Naera turned away from both.
She descended the stairs and stepped out into the night, but instead of heading toward the garrison, she walked the other way—down side streets and narrower lanes, away from the familiar pattern of her Freewarden duties.
Her staff tapped softly against the cobbles as she went, the sound fading into the darkness behind her.