They settle into gold as easily as breathing, the color rising and falling with my mood, my focus, my patience for nonsense. I keep them dimmed most of the time out here, letting the old pale shade hold while I move through town, but it takes less effort with each passing year. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I don’t bother.
Today, they glow faintly without my permission.
I let them.
A man nods to me as I pass. “Morning, Corin.”
“Morning.”
He doesn’t stare. Not anymore. People have a remarkable capacity for accepting the unusual if it arrives slowly enough and carries its own groceries. I’ve been coming here for years now, trading, talking, learning the rhythms of a place that once would have been just another stop on a road I didn’t expect to walk for very long.
Longevity changes your relationship with roads.
You start noticing where they lead.
You start wondering how long you’re willing to follow.
The contract saved me.
That’s the simplest version.
The truest version is messier.
It didn’t just save me. It rewrote me.
The Ardyn bloodline—our stubborn, human, very mortal lineage—no longer ends the way it used to. It bends now. It stretches. It lingers where it should have faded. I carry that in my veins the way I carry memory: not always visible, never absent.
Sometimes, when I stand still long enough, I can feel it distinctly.
Two pulses.
One mine.
One… other.
Not foreign anymore. Not invasive. Just there, steady and warm, like a second rhythm learned over time until it feels as natural as breathing. Rhazek calls it integration. Sable calls it “not dying, which I’m fond of.” I call it complicated.
I pick up a sack of flour from the miller’s stall and sling it over my shoulder. It weighs less than it should. Most things do now. Strength came quietly, the way all the worst changes do, slipping into muscle and bone without ceremony until one day you lift something and realize the world has become lighter than it used to be.
“Careful,” the miller says. “That’s fresh.”
“I’ll treat it with the respect it deserves.”
“Last time you said that, you dropped a crate of apples.”
“They were structurally unsound.”
“They were apples.”
“Exactly.”
He shakes his head, amused, and I move on.
The market hums around me—voices layered over voices, the clink of coin, the low murmur of negotiations, laughter, arguments, the occasional shouted insult that somehow still sounds friendly. It’s a symphony of ordinary life, and I have grown inordinately fond of it.
I should go.
I have everything we need.
