The name hung heavy in the air as my body rebelled.
It was not a choice, not a dignified excuse to step away — no, this was primal, involuntary, the animalistic part of me deciding no, cutting straight past thought to sheer, physical rejection. The stool screeched under my legs as I shoved away from it, knees buckling, one hand gripping the edge of the bar for balance.
My stomach turned inside out, a hot, twisting knot snapping open, and the world tilted in on itself until the only thing I could see was the warped grain of the floorboards rushing toward me.
The sound came before I could stop it — that low, guttural heave — and then I was retching, hard, the force shuddering through my ribs, my palms pressing into my knees as if I could hold myself together.
The taste was a sharp, acidic bloom that coated my tongue and burned the back of my throat, the kind of heat that leaves its ghost behind even after you've spat it out. I felt a thread of it drip from my lips to the floor. Somewhere, distantly, the smell of sour bile began to cut through the heavier air of beer and smoke, blending into something uniquely foul.
I hated that it was loud. I hated that my body was shaking. And above all, I hated — hated — that when I looked up, he was still there.
Japeth hadn't moved. Not even an inch. He sat watching me, chin tilted just slightly, that small, impossibly gentle smile carved into his mouth. There was no judgment in it, no pity either — just… familiarity. Like a man watching the tide come in, inevitable and unsurprising.
When I straightened, my legs unsteady, he rose too. His motions were smooth, deliberate, and horribly unhurried. He was taller than I'd expected, enough that I had to tip my chin to keep my eyes on his face, and that smile… that damn smile… didn't so much as flicker.
"Back," I snapped, thrusting a hand out between us as if I could hold him at bay with the force of my palm alone. The word felt thin in my throat, like it had been scraped raw on the way out. "Stay the fuck back!"
Instead of retreating, his expression softened. He let out the smallest, almost theatrical sigh, and then — gods help me — his face morphed into an exaggerated pout, his lower lip jutting just enough to be absurd. One hand lifted to rest over his heart as though I'd just driven a knife through it.
"Aww," he said, the sound rolling off his tongue in a warm, lilting mockery, "is that any way to treat your old pops?"
For a heartbeat, my mind skidded over the word. Pops. It was ridiculous, childish — something said over burnt breakfast in a cabin kitchen, not here, not now. I almost laughed. Almost. But the sound caught, tangled in my chest like a fishhook, and refused to come free.
Then the flashes began.
They weren't cinematic, weren't even clean. They came jagged and disjointed, shards of something too deep to be remembered clearly. The sting of snow against my cheeks, so cold it numbed before it burned. The sharp groan of wood under boots as a door was opened into air that smelled of pine and smoke. A cabin roof bowed heavy with white, its edges dripping meltwater in slow, deliberate drops. And inside — gods, inside — were two figures on the floor. My parents. Pale, Still, wrong in a way my child's mind had understood without needing the word dead.
The breath that left me was unsteady, fractured. "You—" My voice caught, restarted, then stumbled again. "You're not my father. My father's dead. You...you killed my parents!"
I could hear the raggedness in my own tone, hated how it made me sound — not defiant, not commanding, just… breakable. The kind of voice that belonged to someone who didn't yet know whether they were at a fight or a funeral.
And all around us, the tavern didn't so much as blink.
A roar of laughter rose from the far side of the room. The fiddler's bow sawed across strings, hitting a sharp note that drew a cheer. A woman brushed past me carrying a tray of drinks, the hem of her skirt grazing my leg, and she didn't even see me. Not a glance. Not the faintest flicker of recognition that there were two men here, speaking in words that should have frozen the air.
Something inside me started to fray. I stepped toward him, heat rising in my chest, my words spilling before I could shape them. "Where have you been? Why now? What are you— how long have you—" The questions twisted midstream into something uglier, rawer. "You fucking, self-satisfied—"
"Cecil."
It was quiet. Not a bark, not a shout — but it cut through the room like the crack of a whip.
Then, still smiling, he said it. "Shut the fuck up, or every last person in this tavern will die."
The words didn't land all at once. They sank in slowly, shifting past the first, stunned beat of silence, past the quick hammer of my heart, past the instinctive he's bluffing that I wanted to believe. And then they found their place, deep and heavy, where my stomach had just been.
Tears rose before I could stop them — hot, blurring, spilling fast enough that I could feel the salt sting at the corners of my mouth. I tried to will them back, tried to remember how to breathe evenly, but my chest felt locked, my lungs too small.
Where was Salem? Why wasn't Rodrick here, flinging himself down the stairs with that infuriatingly perfect timing he had? Why could no one see us?
Japeth took a single step forward. Just one.
It shouldn't have been enough to move me, but it was. The floor seemed to tilt toward him, or maybe I was leaning without realizing it — either way, my knees collapsed and I was down. The boards were cold under my palms, the grit biting against my skin, the faint stick of old ale under my fingertips.
Japeth crouched, bringing himself level with me. The smile was still there — soft, patient, almost proud. "Haha. Cheer up, son! " he said lightly, like I'd just dropped a card in a friendly game.
I wanted to tell him to go to hell. I wanted to hit him, scream at him, something. But the words wouldn't shape themselves, and my throat was too tight for air, let alone cleverness.
He didn't seem to mind. He stood up and leaned one elbow against the bar, the picture of ease, and began talking. Not about the threat he'd just made, not about the name he'd dropped, not about the blood pounding in my ears — but about the trip so far. About the quality of the local ale. About my boots, of all things, and how he thought they'd look better in a darker leather. His voice was warm and conversational, as if this were just another chat between old acquaintances.
I sat there and listened, every word stretching longer than it should, my mind folding in on itself.
At some point, I heard my own voice — distant, hoarse — saying, "This isn't real."
Japeth's tilted his head, considered that for a beat, and then turned, very casually, toward the bartender.
The man had been polishing the same glass for the past five minutes, his motions smooth, mechanical, eyes half-lidded. Japeth tapped him on the shoulder. The bartender turned, his expression as blank and unconcerned as everyone else's. Japeth's smile curved just slightly sharper.
Then his hand moved. It wasn't a strike — it was too clean for that. A simple flick of his fingers, as though brushing away a stray thread.
And then the bartender's head… was simply gone.
There was no build-up, no warning. No roar of effort or ripple of motion to betray the moment. One second there was a man behind the counter, blinking at us, the faint shine of lamplight caught in the wetness of his eyes — and in the next, there was nothing above his collar but a ragged, steaming mess.
His body swayed on its feet for an awful second, as if it hadn't yet been told it was dead, then collapsed in a boneless sprawl behind the bar, arms folding unnaturally beneath him.
I didn't scream. I couldn't. My throat had locked the moment reality buckled, sealing the sound behind a wall of frozen muscle. I could feel it trying to push up, a thin, desperate keen clawing against the inside of my ribcage, but it went nowhere.
And the worst part — the absolute worst part — was that no one reacted.
Not a single head turned. The crowd's laughter rolled on, tankards clinked, dice hit tabletops. The fiddler didn't miss a note. I could hear them breathing, shuffling, living — all of it utterly untouched by the fact that a man had been here, and now he wasn't. It was as if the act had slipped between the cracks of reality, visible only to me, leaving the rest of the world's rhythm unbroken.
Japeth looked back at me, eyes bright. "Real enough for you?"
Just then, movement stirred behind the counter — a figure in a dark cloak, rising from the shadow where there had been nothing before. Its hands were pale, long-fingered, methodical as they gathered what was left of the bartender, tucking him into folds of space I couldn't see into.
The sight wrenched the words out of me. "Who the hell is that?!"
His smile didn't falter when I asked the question — if anything, it deepened, as though the very act of my asking was something he had been waiting for, something he'd been gently nudging me toward since the moment he sat down.
The sound that came out of me next wasn't even a proper demand at first; it was too small, too raw, the syllable wobbling out like it wasn't quite ready to stand on its own legs.
"Why?"
The word hung there, far too soft for the weight it carried. It wasn't just why are you here, or why did you say that, or even why are you smiling like you own me. It was why are you doing this to me now, in this place, when I thought I had another day or two before my life folded in on itself again.
I felt like the question should have knocked something over but nothing moved except for his eyes, slow and steady, meeting mine with a calmness that felt like a trap.
I pushed the rest of it out before I could lose my nerve. "Why are you doing this? Why the tournament? Why drag me into it?!" The words came faster now, heavier with each one, until my voice was somewhere between accusation and plea.
It was strange — I could feel the tension in my jaw, the way my teeth were just shy of grinding, but at the same time there was a hollowness in my chest, like I was speaking from a distance inside my own body.
He didn't answer right away.
His hand toyed with the rim of his mug, one finger tapping in a slow rhythm against the wood — not impatient, not bored, just there, like background music to his thoughts. And then, finally, his attention returned to me. The softening in his eyes was almost imperceptible, an echo of something warm that made my stomach twist.
"It's only natural," he said, his tone smooth and maddeningly gentle, "for a father to see how far his son has progressed."
That word — father — hit me harder than I wanted it to. My first instinct was to spit it back at him, to fling the denial across the table so hard it might actually stick, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I hated how that one syllable could slip under my skin like a hook.
His voice shifted then, the warmth cooling into something quieter, something that didn't need to be loud to be final.
"However, that's not the only reason. In truth...this tournament cuts deeper into politics than you could ever imagine. Behind the spectacle, behind the cheers, there's a war being waged. A secret war."
The words dropped into me like stones into deep water. The ripples were all questions I couldn't quite form, and I clung to the first one that broke the surface. "Against who?"
I thought that would pin him — force him to commit to something, anything — but instead it just slid right off him like I'd asked the weather to confess its plans.
He gave me a look that wasn't quite a smile, but close enough to feel like one if you wanted it to be. And then, with a maddening casualness, he reached into his cloak, pulled out a small stack of gold coins, and placed them neatly on the bar's counter.
The coins caught the light in a way that felt wrong — too bright, too clean against the dark wood. For a second I couldn't stop looking at them, and it was only when I glanced back up that I realized the bartender's body — his headless body — was completely gone now.
Japeth turned to go, his voice floating back to me like the end of a song. "I'll be watching you at the tournament."
Something in me broke through the shock, the panic rising fast enough to shake it loose. "Wait!" I was already on my feet, my stool scraping loud against the floorboards. My eyes stung, the heat at their edges threatening to spill over. "You can't just—"
And then he moved.
No — that's not right. Moving implies something I could track, a blur, a trace of motion. This wasn't that. This was the absence of the world itself, a single beat where all the sound and light dropped out. My mind didn't register speed — it registered a hole, an unnatural blank, and in that blank came the shape of something too dark to have edges.
It hit the side of my neck. Not pain — worse. A phantom, deep-cut sensation my nerves didn't know how to name, as though the memory of a wound had been shoved into me without any inflicted damage.
Then I blinked.
I was staring at the floor. The smell hit me first — sour, acidic, clinging to the back of my throat. Vomit. A generous puddle of it, still pooling faintly in the candlelight. I didn't even feel disgust at first, just confusion — who the hell had been drinking so hard they lost it right here, in the middle of the tavern?
I laughed. A deep, unrestrained laugh that bubbled up from somewhere warm in my chest. People really didn't know their limits. Poor bastard.
I pushed myself up, brushing at my coat, smoothing down my shirt as if the fabric could erase whatever had just happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement — a man in a dark cloak, a long ponytail catching the lamplight, stepping casually toward the door. He glanced back once before slipping outside, and without thinking, I lifted my hand in a small wave.
He waved back. Nice enough gesture. Probably just some passerby.
"Up late?"
I jumped at the voice, half turning to see Salem standing there, his silhouette blocking the light from the bar's hearth. His expression was unreadable, but his brow was lifted in that way that meant he was filing this moment away for later dissection.
"Ah," I said, forcing my shoulders to loosen, "just drinking away my sorrows, as usual."
He gave a short, low chuckle and tilted his head toward the stairs. "Come on. Let's get to bed. You'll want your head clear for the tournament."
I let out a long sigh, nodding as I fell into step beside him. "Right. Thanks for… you know. Looking out for me."
He didn't reply, and that was fine. The tavern noise softened behind us as we climbed, and for reasons I didn't entirely understand, I felt lighter. Easier in my own skin. Like the night had gone well — like I'd done exactly what I'd set out to do.
It was a night well spent.