The cold was the first thing he knew—stone against his cheek, damp air in Jacob's lungs, a deep ache in his ribs that suggested he'd been lying here a while. He opened his eyes to darkness shot through with pale grey light, the shape of a collapsed ceiling overhead, and dust motes drifting through the beam like slow snow. His body felt foreign, heavy, every joint protesting as he pushed himself upright, the rough wall scraping against his palm. A thin iron ring circled his index finger. But something was off. There was no weight to it.

*Well, I'm on the floor already, so let's see...* Jacob thought tentatively as he crossed his legs beneath him. He shifted his weight experimentally, and the world *lurched* — a smooth, frictionless glide that carried him three feet across the stone floor before he could stop himself. His heart hammered. He hadn't pushed. He'd barely *thought* about moving, and his body had obeyed with a speed that felt borrowed, not earned. The surprise sat in his chest like a held breath, and he couldn't find the reason for it. He just sat there, breathing through the wrongness of it, and let his eyes trace the room properly for the first time.

A pale light came from a single source—a crooked gap high on the far wall where stone and packed earth had given way, leaving a slit no wider than his shoulders. Dust hung in that beam, circling in currents he couldn't feel, and the floor beneath him was fitted stone worn smooth by feet that hadn't walked here in a long time. The room itself was small, maybe ten feet across, with a ceiling that sloped low on one side and vanished into shadow on the other. A shelf had once been carved into the wall to his left, but whatever it held was gone now, nothing left but a rectangle of darker stone where dust hadn't settled. He was in a space that had been *used* once. He didn't know how he knew that—just that the shape of it felt intentional, not accidental, like a room that had been built for a purpose he couldn't name.

He looked up at the fallen stones and understood, with a quiet certainty that didn't need memory to support it, that the someone who made this path hadn't been pacing for comfort. Something had been *watching* and then made their way inside—but...Jacob looked around the room, studying, searching. No blood, not many signs of a struggle either. How odd.

He pushed himself to his feet, the ache in his ribs flaring as his full weight settled onto legs that felt both familiar and strange. The slit of pale light was higher than he'd thought — chest-level on a tall man, which meant the ground outside this room was higher than the floor he stood on. He crossed to it, his footsteps loud in the stillness, and pressed his eye to the gap. Beyond the stone and packed earth, a village lay in ruin — roofs collapsed into their centers, walls slumped like sleeping things, and everything coated in the same pale grey dust that drifted through the beam behind him. Not a single thread of smoke rose from the chimneys.

He pulled back from the gap and looked down at himself — a faded grey t-shirt that had been soft so long the fabric hung loose at the collar, cotton pants that stopped mid-shin, sandals with straps worn thin at the big toe where his foot had pushed against them a thousand times. He was dressed for a life of ease he couldn't remember living. The clothes said *indoor*, said *casual*, said someone who didn't expect to be seen much — and yet the sandals had molded to his feet so perfectly that they'd become a map of his habits, written in worn leather and deepened grooves. He flexed his toes and watched the straps pull taut, then slack, and felt the strangest pang — not of loss, but of recognition. A subconscious shadow of memory that wouldn't bloom.

Jacob lifted his gaze from his feet to the crooked gap in the wall, and the decision to move through it felt less like choice and more like gravity — his body already shifting weight, his hands finding purchase on the rubble before his mind had finished the thought. He hauled himself up, the ache in his ribs flaring as he squeezed through the gap, stone scraping against his shoulder blade. The light outside was brighter, paler, and he blinked against it, one hand braced on the outer edge. Jacob's fingers landed on something that wasn't stone. Cool. Smooth. The texture of old paper left too long in the sun — dry, thin, with no give at all. He looked down. A hand. Grey. Palm-up, fingers slightly curled, as if it had been reaching for something it never quite grasped. Dust had settled in the creases of its knuckles, and was still warm from the morning light and only the morning light.

He followed the line of the arm to a shoulder, to a chest that didn't rise, to a face turned partly toward the rubble — eyes closed, mouth slack, the same grey pallor painted across every visible inch of skin. No breath fogged the air. No tension held the jaw. He knelt there, one hand still resting on the stone beside the body, and felt the shape of the word before he could name it. *Dead.* Not sleeping. Not sick. *Dead.* When he finally stood, his knees cracked in the silence, and he turned in a slow circle. They were everywhere — slumped in doorways, half-buried under collapsed roofs, curled against walls and wells and wagon wheels, all of them the same shade of grey, all of them still as the dust that had settled over them. Dozens.

He took a step. Then another. The bodies didn't move, didn't stir, didn't acknowledge his passing — and that was worse than if they had. He wove between them like a ghost at his own funeral, his sandals scraping against stone in the terrible quiet. A hundred feet from the collapsed room, tucked into a recessed doorway half-hidden by a fallen timber, something caught his eye. Not grey skin — skin like his, warm, alive. And what's more, a glint, no, he stepped closer. It was...a buckle, catching the pale light at an angle that didn't match the stillness around it.

Jacob stood at the threshold of the doorway, the fallen timber casting a shadow that had hidden the man well. Alive — chest rising, shallow but steady, the skin of his face still holding color where everyone else had gone grey. A diagonal gash ran across his chest, the fabric of his shirt dark and wet around it, and Jacob felt his own ribs throb in sympathy. Then he saw the patch. Small, embroidered onto the shoulder of the man's coat, and the moment Jacob's eyes found it, the knowledge arrived without effort — a name, an occupation, settling into his mind the same way the cold settled into his bones. *William. Woodbarren.*

He knelt beside the man, no, William, a Woodbarren—whatever that means. First, knowing the name of his ring and its...function. Now the patch. How? Why? *What is this place? Why am I here?* William coughed, blood trickling out of his mouth, rousing Jacob's attention. The gash across the man's chest was worse up close, a deep diagonal tear that had gone through cloth and skin and muscle beneath, the edges of the wound dark and ragged. Not a clean cut. Something that had *torn* its way across him. Jacob's hand moved before he'd decided to lift it — reached out and hovered over the wound, palm down, as if waiting for something he couldn't name. Then he felt it, the same quiet certainty that had come with the patch: a door opening somewhere inside his chest, and behind it, a reserve of warmth he hadn't known he was carrying. The question wasn't *could* he give it, but *would* he — and he'd already begun before the thought finished forming.