He woke up wrong.
Not the same wrong as yesterday — yesterday had been the fundamental wrongness of existing at all, of breathing in a body that wasn't his. This was more specific. His legs felt disconnected from the decision to move them, like a signal traveling through wet concrete. His hands were fine but his elbows weren't, which made no anatomical sense and yet here it was. The blood curse's drain was still there at his sternum, steady as ever, but now there was a second thing underneath it — the attribute flux, the System had warned him, forty-eight hours of his body arguing with the changes being made to it.
He lay still for a moment and assessed.
[ATTRIBUTE FLUX: DAY 1 OF 2. Endurance integration at 67%. Expect joint instability, intermittent coordination loss, elevated fatigue. Do not attempt combat or extended physical exertion.]
[You forged while already under blood curse drain. Integration is slower than baseline. This is noted for future reference.]
[Recommendation: eat something. You haven't, since yesterday morning.]
He hadn't noticed the hunger until the System mentioned it. Then he noticed it considerably.
The chair near the window was empty. The blanket he'd put over Lyra was folded and draped over the chair's arm — not abandoned, folded, the precise fold of someone who'd been taught to leave spaces the way they found them. She'd gone quietly, sometime before dawn. He found he wasn't surprised by that either.
He got up slowly, which was new. Joints cooperating about seventy percent. He dressed with more care than yesterday — the flux made fine motor work unreliable at the edges, and he'd rather not fumble with boot laces in a corridor where someone might see.
He needed to go back to the vault.
The keep was different at this hour.
Early enough that the household staff were starting their work but not yet finished starting it — fires being built up, the smell of bread from somewhere below, the distant sound of someone arguing with a cart in the outer yard. The corridors had a specific quality of not-quite-awake that Liam had always liked about early mornings: the feeling of a building before it became the day's version of itself.
He moved slowly. The flux made fast movement inadvisable and also somewhat ridiculous — he'd tested a brisk walk near his room and his right leg had briefly done something independent of his intentions. Better to be deliberate.
The east corridor. The re-plastered wall. He stopped at it again, pressed his fingers to the surface. Same slight give. He spent longer on it this time, working his way along the section — about four meters, he estimated, where the texture changed. Not a full passage. Narrower. A listening space, maybe, or a very tight access point to whatever ran behind the wall.
Someone had built it with the specific intention that it not be found. They'd been patient about it — the plaster had been applied in stages, feathered at the edges so there was no obvious seam from a distance. The kind of work that required either a skilled craftsman or someone with a lot of time and no oversight.
He moved on.
The vault door opened with the same slight resistance as yesterday — the bottom hinge wanted oil, which he'd add to the list. He lit the lamp and stood in the entrance and this time he looked at the room differently. Not what documents are here. What objects.
[CURSE FORGE — ACTIVE. Conducting relic survey.]
The gold text updated as he moved through the space, the System tagging items with quiet efficiency.
[Shelf 3, wrapped bundle — cloth. RELIC: Ancestral Voss seal-ring, silver. Curse type: [Binding Oath Curse] — suppresses attribute growth in anyone who wears it while under compelled service. Density: MODERATE. Forge yield: Will +18, Oath-Resistance passive. Forge cost: HIGH. Not recommended yet.]
He unwrapped the cloth carefully. A signet ring, heavy silver, the Voss crest worn smooth from use. He thought about a seal-ring that suppressed attribute growth in people under compelled service — thought about what kind of man put a curse like that on his own family's seal, and why, and what it meant that it had been sitting in this vault unworn for what looked like decades.
He wrapped it back and moved on.
[Crate, far corner — inside, behind the broken lamp. RELIC: Border-ward stone, frontier make. Curse type: [Fear Aura Curse] — radiates low-level unease in a five-meter radius. Density: LOW-MODERATE. Forge yield: Intimidation passive, Presence +11. Forge cost: MODERATE.]
He found it behind the lamp — a flat grey stone about the size of his palm, unremarkable, the kind of thing that could sit in a crate for years without anyone knowing what it was. He held it for a moment and felt nothing. The curse was dormant without a host; it needed to be forged to activate its effect.
[Third viable relic identified — see earlier: Iron Rot Sword. Already forged.]
[Fourth viable relic — document case, left wall, second shelf from the bottom. Remove the false back.]
He found the document case. Standard leather, reasonably preserved. He opened it — empty, which was wrong for a case this well-kept — and ran his fingers around the interior until he found the seam. The false back came out in two pieces, old wood carefully fitted. Behind it: a cloth-wrapped object about the length of his forearm.
He unwrapped it.
A compass. Brass, the old navigational kind, but the needle was wrong — it pointed slightly west of north and stayed there regardless of how he turned it, and the casing had been etched with markings he didn't recognize from the body's memories or his own.
[RELIC: Navigator's Compass, unknown origin. Curse type: [Wayward Curse] — compass has absorbed directional probability distortion. Whoever carries it is statistically more likely to find significant things, and less likely to find safe routes. Density: MODERATE-HIGH.]
[Forge yield: Perception +19, Pathfinding instinct passive — heightened awareness of significant objects/locations. Forge cost: HIGH. Pain classification: severe. Not recommended until Endurance integration improves.]
[This one is interesting,] the System added. [Keep it close regardless.]
He turned the compass over in his hands. The needle held its slightly-wrong direction with absolute conviction.
Wayward Curse. More likely to find significant things, less likely to find safe routes. He could think of a few people it had probably driven to bad ends before landing here. He wrapped it back and pocketed it.
[I said keep it close. I didn't say carry it in your coat pocket while in attribute flux. Your spatial awareness is currently degraded.]
"Noted," he said.
[That was sarcasm. Mildly. You're learning.]
He did a final circuit of the vault — the System flagged eleven more objects, nine of them not viable for forging yet, density too high for his current base stats. He catalogued all of them. Locations, approximate power levels, what they'd eventually yield. The vault was not a collection of junk. It was an armory that nobody had known how to use.
He left with the compass in his coat pocket anyway.
The letter was on his desk when he got back.
He almost missed it — it had been slid under the door, and the attribute flux was making him slightly less spatially reliable than usual, and he stepped over it before the off-white corner registered. He picked it up.
Formal paper. Good quality. The Selwyn seal on the back, pressed in deep blue wax — House Selwyn's colors, which he knew from Kael's memories: minor nobility, rising, attaching themselves strategically to houses with better bloodlines and managing the exit carefully when those houses stopped being useful.
He knew what was inside before he opened it. He opened it anyway.
Lord Kael Voss,
House Selwyn writes to formally notify you of the termination of the betrothal agreement between Lady Dara Selwyn and yourself, effective the date of this letter. The agreement is dissolved on the grounds of changed circumstance following the results of your Awakening assessment.
House Selwyn thanks House Voss for the prior years of cordial relations and wishes your house continued prosperity.
By order of Lord Edras Selwyn
He read it twice. Then he set it on the desk and looked at the date.
Four days after the awakening ceremony.
She'd sent it four days after. The awakening had gone badly — he knew that from the memories, the room's silence becoming laughter, the proctor's carefully neutral expression, the walk out of the assessment hall with people not quite meeting his eyes. Four days later, Dara Selwyn had written a formal letter of dissolution.
He thought about the phrase changed circumstance. The particular cowardice of legal language — changed circumstance for your value dropped below the threshold where this arrangement benefits us.
Kael's memories of her were thin. Not because the relationship had been thin — they'd known each other since childhood, the betrothal arranged when they were twelve, the kind of thing that became background architecture over time. The memories were thin because the original Kael had already been in retreat by the time it ended. He'd seen it coming for months. He'd stopped letting himself look directly at it.
That grief was in the body somewhere. Liam could feel it adjacent to him, the original owner's feelings about a girl who'd decided the math no longer worked out, and he handled it carefully — not his grief, but not nothing either.
He folded the letter and put it in the desk drawer. He'd need to respond at some point. Not today.
[Noted,] the System offered. [Lady Selwyn's family holds two properties adjacent to the eastern trade routes. Circumstantially relevant.]
"I know," Kael said. "Not today."
[Understood.]
The attribute flux peaked around midday and started easing by late afternoon.
He used the morning to eat — the kitchen staff gave him the specific careful attention of people around someone they'd been told to be careful around, which he ignored — and to read through the secondary vault documents Aldric had mentioned. The Ashfield contracts were there, original documents, forty years old. He read them twice and then sat with the legal language for a while, translating it from the formal Eldorian that Kael's education gave him.
The Ashfield territory was Voss land. Unambiguously. The survey documents, the imperial land grants, the border markers — all of it was clean. House Voss owned roughly twelve square kilometers of what the rest of the empire considered worthless cursed territory. The previous operations had pulled iron ore and something the contracts called attribute-dense mineral deposits, which the current empire's mining industry would presumably pay extremely well for, if the operation could be made viable.
If.
Attribute poisoning was real. The body's memories supplied: people who'd worked the Ashfield came back wrong. Degraded Focus, erratic Perception, in bad cases the poisoning attacked Will and left people unable to make consecutive decisions. The deeper you went and the longer you stayed, the worse it got.
Kael looked at the compass in his pocket. Then at the System text hovering patiently at the edge of his vision.
You start with what's underground, he'd told himself last night.
The Ashfield was literally underground. Eventually.
He put the thought away — too far ahead, too many steps between here and there — and went to find Mira.
He didn't find her. She found him.
He was in the south corridor on his way back from the secondary vault when she appeared at the far end, and even from thirty feet away he could see the quality of her stillness. Mira Voss was not a still person — the memories showed her in constant motion, asking questions, moving through rooms like she was gathering information about all of them simultaneously. This stillness was different. The kind that happened when a person was holding something they didn't know how to put down.
She waited for him to reach her.
Sixteen years old. Dark hair like Kael's but kept neater, a sharper jaw, their father's eyes in a face that hadn't decided yet what it was becoming. She looked at him with the direct assessment she'd apparently always used with the original Kael — not deferential, not careful. Just looking.
"You're walking strangely," she said.
"Slept badly."
"You always sleep badly." She fell into step beside him. "Father said you read the Harven ledgers."
"I did."
"He seemed..." She paused, choosing. "Less tired than usual after dinner. Which was strange."
"What does he seem like usually after dinner?"
"Like a man sitting in a room where all the furniture is broken and he's trying to remember what the room was for." She said it simply, without drama. An observation, not a complaint.
He looked at her sideways.
Mid-tier Perception, the memories had mentioned, and that was doing significant work in that one sentence. She'd read her father with more accuracy in a single line than Aldric probably knew was happening.
"That's a good way of describing it," Kael said.
"I have a lot of time to observe things." No self-pity in it, just fact. "No one particularly notices that I'm doing it."
They walked in silence for a moment. The south corridor connected to the inner yard, where the afternoon light was coming in low and grey through the arch, the kind of light that made the keep's worn stone look like it was considering its age.
"Kael." She stopped.
He stopped with her.
She was looking at the wall. Her arms were crossed — not in the defensive way, the way people crossed their arms when they were cold, except the corridor wasn't cold enough for it. He waited.
"Can I show you something?"
"Yes."
She uncrossed her arms slowly. Pushed the right sleeve of her dress up to the elbow.
The bruise was four days old, yellowing at the edges but still dark at the center — and the shape was wrong for a fall or a knock against furniture. It was a grip. Four fingers on the inside of her forearm, one thumb on the outside, the pattern of someone who'd grabbed her with intention and held on.
He looked at it without speaking for a moment.
"Who." Not a question.
"I don't know." Her voice was even. Too even — the flatness of someone who'd been practicing even. "I was in the lower corridor near the east wing. At night. I couldn't sleep and I was going to the library." She paused. "Someone came from behind. Didn't say anything. Just — held my arm like that. For about ten seconds. Then let go and left."
"You couldn't see them."
"Dark corridor. They came from behind." She pulled the sleeve down. "They were bigger than me. That's all I have."
"You waited four days to tell anyone."
"I told you."
He looked at her. "Not Aldric. Not the steward."
"Father would worry about the wrong things," she said, which landed with the precision of something she'd thought through. "He'd put guards on me and ask Roran to investigate and nothing would come of it and everyone would be more afraid and less safe." A beat. "I wanted to tell someone who would think about it differently."
The particular thing she wasn't saying was loud in the space between them: she was telling him because he was the only person in this keep she thought might actually do something useful. Kael. The failed son. The cursed one who won't survive the winter.
He thought about the voice through the wall last night. The careful, flat voice. Won't survive the winter anyway.
"Lower east corridor," he said. "What time?"
"Three hours past midnight, roughly."
Three hours past midnight, lower east corridor. He thought about the geography of the keep. About the re-plastered wall in the east passage upstairs, and where a hidden access point behind it might connect to if it ran downward.
"Did they move quickly when they left? Or carefully?"
Mira blinked. "Carefully. Like someone who knew exactly where they were going in the dark."
"Okay." He kept his voice level. "Don't change your routines. Don't tell Aldric. Don't tell Roran."
Something shifted in her face. "You think it was—"
"I don't know what it was yet." Which was true. "I need to look at the east corridor properly before I have a theory worth sharing." He met her eyes. "Can you remember anything else? Smell, sound, the way they breathed. Anything."
She thought about it. Seriously, with the focus of someone who'd been cultivating their own Perception for years without anyone teaching her how. "Wool," she said finally. "Their sleeve, when they grabbed me. Heavy wool. Not a servant's grade. And—" She stopped.
"What?"
"This is going to sound strange."
"Tell me anyway."
"They smelled like cold air. Not outside-cold — the kind of cold you smell when a door's been left open to somewhere without fire." She looked at him. "Does that make sense?"
He thought about a passage behind a re-plastered wall that ran down to the lower east corridor.
"Yes," he said. "That makes sense."
She searched his face. "Do you know something?"
"I have a shape," he said. "Not a name yet." He held her gaze. "Mira. If it happens again — any version of it, anyone in a corridor who shouldn't be there — you come to me first. Before you go anywhere else. Understood?"
She looked at him for a long moment with those sharp Aldric eyes. Then something in her expression shifted — not relief exactly, more like a tension she'd been carrying for four days setting down by about twenty percent.
"You really are different," she said.
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"Everyone's right." She considered him. "Is it a bad different or a good different?"
"I'm working on it being useful."
She almost smiled. Not quite — she was still carrying the grip-shaped bruise and everything it implied. But almost. "That would be a first," she said, which was Kael's history in four words, and she said it without cruelty.
She walked away down the south corridor and he watched her go and thought about four things simultaneously:
A passage behind the east wall. A grip strong enough to leave a bruise through a dress sleeve. Cold air that smelled like a door open to somewhere without fire. A voice saying won't survive the winter anyway.
These were not separate problems.
He turned and went to find the vault survey he'd made that morning. He had a compass in his coat pocket with a needle that pointed slightly wrong, and a System that had told him it made the carrier more likely to find significant things.
He was beginning to understand why the previous owner had found that quality inconvenient.
That night, before he slept, he added three things to the map he'd been building in his head:
The east passage — access point, dimensions approximate, constructed within the last decade.
The lower east corridor, 3AM — one person, heavy wool, inside access, knowledge of dark navigation.
Mira's arm — intention unclear. Warning? Threat? Demonstration of reach?
He lay in the dark and worked through the possible readings.
A warning made sense if someone wanted him to stand down from whatever he was visibly doing. But he'd only started visibly doing anything yesterday. The grab happened four days ago. Three days before he'd woken up in this body.
So it wasn't about him.
It was about Kael. The original Kael, who'd been retreating inward, who everyone in this keep had apparently decided was a foregone conclusion. Someone had reached through a wall at midnight and put their hand on his little sister's arm, and they'd done it before the original Kael had shown any signs of becoming a problem.
That changed the shape of it.
This isn't a response, he thought. This is maintenance. Someone maintaining a situation they thought was already settled.
He thought about that for a while. Then he thought about the seal-ring in the vault — the Binding Oath Curse, suppresses attribute growth in those under compelled service. He thought about which lord of House Voss had put that on the family seal, and when, and why, and whether the same philosophy was still operating in this keep through different mechanisms.
The System was quiet. It had learned, in approximately twenty-four hours, that he didn't need it to narrate what he was already working through.
Eight months, he thought. A hidden passage. Someone maintaining a situation. Twenty-two relics and a compass that finds significant things.
Outside, the wind picked up. He heard it move through the gap in the north wall — that low sound, almost a moan, the sound of air finding places it shouldn't be able to reach.
He'd need to look at that wall tomorrow.