Legionnaire

The barracks was one of the long buildings I had seen from the yard. Plain stone walls. Narrow windows. A heavy door. No decoration except a small Legion mark burned into the wood above the entrance.

Inside, it smelled like wool blankets, oiled leather, old sweat, and floor soap.

So, barracks.

Rows of beds ran down both sides of the room with footlockers at the end of each one. Some were already claimed. Blankets folded different ways. Boots tucked underneath. A few packs stacked against the wall. Most were still empty.

Men and women moved through the space without paying much attention to each other. Some were changing shirts. Some were cleaning gear. One woman sat on her bunk wrapping her hands while a man across from her stitched a tear in his trousers.

Nobody acted like it was strange.

So I didn’t either.

Vale stopped near the far end and pointed to two empty bunks.

“These are yours for now.”

Joryn looked at the bed like he expected someone to take it away if he moved too fast.

“For now?” he asked.

“Until the instructors decide otherwise,” Vale said. “Do not make that decision easy for them.”

Joryn nodded.

“Yes, Senior Vale.”

Vale turned to me.

“I will return this evening for language and Binding. Until then, eat, wash if you can, learn where the mess hall and latrines are, and keep out of trouble.”

“Yes, Senior Vale.”

He gave us both one final look, then left.

For a few seconds, Joryn and I just stood there with our bundles.

Then I set mine on the bed.

The mattress was thin. The blanket was rough. The pillow looked like it had lost a fight years ago and never recovered.

Still better than the ground.

Joryn sat on his bunk slowly, one hand pressed near his side.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. Then, after a second, “Mostly.”

“Mostly counts.”

He looked around the barracks, then down at the bundle in his lap.

“I keep waiting for someone to tell me there has been a mistake.”

“Maybe don’t give them the idea.”

That almost got a smile out of him.

Almost.

We unpacked what little there was to unpack. Candidate clothes. Boots. Socks. Cloak. Nothing personal. Nothing that felt like mine.

The clothes were plain, but clean. The boots looked like they needed a month of walking before they stopped trying to murder feet.

Joryn ran his fingers over the candidate mark stitched into the shoulder of his tunic.

“I have not said it properly yet,” he said.

I looked over.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For speaking for me,” he said. “After the gnoll. With Dain. With Sella. With Senior Vale. You did not have to.”

“You grabbed that thing when it was about to kill me.”

“I know.”

“Then I kind of did have to.”

He shook his head.

“No. You did not. Most men would have said thank you and let me go back in the cart.”

I did not have a good answer for that, because he was probably right.

He looked down at the tunic again.

“My daughter is alive because I broke the law,” he said quietly. “I do not regret that. I regret the guard. I regret hurting him. But not saving her.”

“I wouldn’t either.”

He looked at me then.

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The word felt strange in my mouth. Their language still did that sometimes. Some words came smooth. Others felt like I was stepping wrong.

Joryn seemed to understand me well enough.

He let out a breath.

“Her name is Lysa,” he said. “She is six. Stubborn. Loud. Always hungry. She steals apples from my brother’s tree and lies badly about it.”

That hurt more than I expected.

Not because of his daughter.

Because for half a second, I saw my own life somewhere else. A house. A phone. Mike probably wondering why I never came back from the mountains. People deciding when to stop looking.

I sat on the edge of my bunk.

“She sounds like trouble.”

“She is,” Joryn said. “The best kind.”

He smiled then, small and tired.

“I do not know if I will ever see her again.”

I did not lie to him.

“I don’t know either.”

He nodded like he appreciated that more than comfort.

For a while, we sat there listening to the barracks around us. Boots on wood. Someone laughing softly near the door. A locker shutting. Outside, the yard kept shouting and striking and running like the whole place had a heartbeat made of misery.

Joryn looked at me.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you have family?”

I looked down at my hands.

That question hit harder than I wanted it to.

Mike. My truck. The trail. The life I had walked away from without knowing it.

But I could not say any of that.

Not here.

Not with the story Vale had helped me keep alive.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Joryn went quiet.

After a moment, he nodded.

“Because of your memory.”

“Yeah.”

The lie sat badly in my mouth.

It was not completely a lie. There were plenty of things I did not know. Where I was. How I got here. Whether home still existed for me in any useful way.

But I remembered enough to hurt.

“I get pieces sometimes,” I said. “Nothing useful.”

That part was safe.

Joryn watched me like he wanted to ask more, then thought better of it.

“I am sorry.”

I nodded.

“Yeah.”

For a while, neither of us said anything.

The barracks filled the silence. Boots on wood. Someone laughing softly near the door. A locker shutting. Outside, the yard kept shouting and striking and running like the whole place had a heartbeat made of misery.

Joryn leaned back against the wall carefully.

“I hope you remember them,” he said.

I stared at the bronze ring on my finger.

“Me too,” I said.

And that one was not a lie.

Joryn did not ask anything else.

That made me like him more.

After a while, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He did not fall asleep right away. His jaw stayed tight, and one hand rested near his side like he still expected the wound to open if he forgot about it.

But he was done talking.

So was I.

I sat on the edge of my bunk with the folded candidate uniform beside me and the bronze ring on my finger.

For the first time since the mountain, nothing needed me.

No road to walk.

No cart to guard.

No Tovan waiting with a practice blade.

No Vale correcting my words.

No gnolls coming out of the trees.

No one bleeding.

No one asking questions I could not answer.

Just a bunk, a footlocker, a rough blanket, and too much room inside my own head.

Quiet used to be dangerous.

That was when the old thoughts came. The ugly ones. The familiar ones. The ones that waited until the world stopped making noise and then crawled up from wherever they hid.

You’re useless.

You’re broken.

You ruin everything.

You’ll fuck this up too.

I waited for them.

I actually sat there and waited.

They did not come the same way.

The memories came.

Mike came first.

Not the man himself. Just pieces. His place near the mountains. Gear spread out. His voice telling me to check the weather. The look he had given me before I left, like he wanted to say something serious and hated that he had to.

Then my truck.

That old blue Silverado sitting somewhere near the trailhead. Maybe covered in dust. Maybe already found. Maybe with a note under the wiper or tape across the door. Maybe towed down the mountain road while someone wrote my name on a report.

Missing.

Possible fall.

Search suspended.

Presumed dead.

I shut my eyes.

Because Mike would have looked.

He would have called first. Then called again. Then driven. Then gotten pissed when no one had answers fast enough. He would have stood near that truck and stared up toward the mountains and known something was wrong before anyone else was ready to say it.

I could see it too clearly.

The search teams. The questions. The empty trail. The weather report. People deciding when hope became paperwork.

And I was here.

Alive.

Wearing another world’s clothes. Sitting in another world’s fortress. Lying about my memory because the truth would sound like madness or treason or both.

A laugh tried to come up.

It did not make it.

Because the worst part was not that I missed home.

I did.

God help me, I did.

The worst part was that some small, ugly part of me felt better here.

Not happy.

Not safe.

Better.

Here, the problems had shape. A sword. A monster. A road. A language. A number burned into my skin. A man telling me what I had to learn before I could move forward.

Back home, everything had been fog.

Appointments. Pain. Waiting. Anger with nowhere useful to go. Waking up tired before the day had even done anything to me. Fighting my own head in rooms where nothing was actually happening.

Here, something was always happening.

That should not have helped.

It did.

And I hated that too.

I opened my eyes and looked down at my covered forearm.

I pulled the sleeve back.

51 | 52 | 36 | 46 | 84 | 7

The numbers sat there in clean black marks like they had always belonged under my skin.

Physical. Constitution. Endurance. Reflex. Mental Resistance. Mana.

Eighty-four.

Mental Resistance.

When Vale first read it, I had not understood what to do with it. A high number. A strange look. Another thing this world knew about me before I did.

Now I wondered if it meant exactly what it said.

Resistance.

Not peace.

Not a cure.

Not some magical hand reaching into my skull and fixing what was broken.

Just resistance.

The ability to take the hit and stay upright.

I had been doing that for years without a brand to name it. Every bad morning. Every panic spike. Every time my own brain turned on me and I told it to go fuck itself and kept moving anyway.

Maybe that counted here.

Maybe all of it had counted.

I did not know how to feel about that.

Proud seemed wrong.

Sad seemed too simple.

Mostly, I was tired.

I covered the brand again.

Across from me, Joryn’s breathing finally evened out. He slept sitting half upright, head tilted back against the wall, one hand still near his side.

He had a daughter somewhere.

I had people somewhere.

Both of us were here instead.

The barracks moved around us. Low voices. Boots on floorboards. A footlocker closing. Someone laughing quietly near the door until another candidate told them to shut up and sleep while they could.

Outside, Rifthold kept going.

Commands. Whistles. Wood striking wood. The distant rhythm of people being broken down on purpose.

Two days.

I had two days before selection officially started. Two days before the translation ring came off during training. Two days before this place stopped being something I watched and became something trying to grind me down.

I could sit there and drown in everything I could not fix.

Or I could do the only thing that had ever worked.

Move.

Not far. Not dramatically.

Just the next thing.

I reached into my bundle and pulled out the children’s book Vale had given me. Then the dictionary. Then the little slate and chalk.

The first page had a crude drawing of a boy, a dog, and a red ball.

I stared at the words underneath.

I knew three of them.

Three more than I had known a few weeks ago.

That was enough to start.

So I did.