Chapter 246
The quiet does not arrive all at once.
It seeps in.
The first thing I notice is what does not happen. No alert buzzing my tablet at dawn. No layered messages waiting to be sorted by urgency. No courier requests marked immediate, no council updates phrased like favors. I wake up to light instead of obligation, the pale morning stretching across the cabin walls without asking anything of me.
For a few seconds, my body does not understand it. My eyes open and my breath catches, waiting for the familiar rush of responsibility to slam into my chest. It does not. The silence presses in instead, wide and patient.
I lie there longer than usual, listening.
Wind in the trees. A bird landing on the roof. The faint creak of wood as the cabin warms. Nothing presses back.
It is unsettling. My body stays coiled, ready to move, ready to respond. I keep waiting for the pull in my chest that means someone else’s crisis has just become mine. That sharp internal click that says get up now. Move. Decide. Fix.
It never comes.
After a while, my heart slows anyway, like it is confused but willing to try. I breathe deeper without meaning to. My shoulders ease a fraction, then stiffen again when nothing happens to punish me for it.
I make coffee and drink it at the table instead of standing. That alone feels indulgent. The mug warms my hands. I wrap my fingers around it and notice the heat instead of scanning the room for what comes next. The silence hums, not empty exactly, just unused. I keep expecting to feel relief and instead feel disoriented, like I stepped off a moving platform and the ground is still adjusting under my feet.
The days stretch out in unfamiliar ways.
No constant calls. No emergencies routed directly to me. My name does not travel ahead of me anymore, opening doors or raising hackles. No one pauses when I walk into a space to see what I will decide. I am not late for anything. I am not early either. Time feels loose, untethered from consequence.
I wake up hungry one morning and realize I have not felt that in years.
I eat anyway.
I do not know what to do with myself.
So I clean.
Not the quick surface cleaning I used to do between meetings, the kind meant to erase evidence of living before leaving again. The
thorough kind. I empty cabinet
and
lay everything out on the table. I Scrubs shelves until my hands ache I sort through items I packed years ago and never unpacked because I was always leaving again.
I find things I forgot I owned. A spare jacket folded too carefully. Old notebooks filled with cramped handwriting and half-finished plans. A cracked compass that still points north if you tap it twice, stubborn and reliable in its own way.
I sit on the floor surrounded by these small remnants of myself and feel something
unfamiliar twist in my chest.
The cabin starts to feel less like a stopover and more like a place.
I repair the loose hinge on the back door that has been creaking since winter. I take it apart properly this
time instead of tightening it just get
enough to last another week. patch the roof where water pooled during the last storm, climbing up with steady hands and no sense of urgency fix the broken fence along the east line, replacing two rotted posts and stringing wire with hands that remember this kind of work better than they remember rest.
The fence is not strategic. It is not defensive. It just keeps things where they belong. The work grounds me.
It leaves my muscles pleasantly sore instead of hollow. It leaves dirt under my nails and sweat along my spine. It leaves visible results. I step back at the end of the day and see something whole where there was something broken.
That matters more than I expected.
When younger wolves start showing up in the afternoons, I am surprised.
The first one stands at the edge of the clearing for a long time before approaching, shifting his weight like he might bolt. He is barely past adolescence, all elbows and
nerves.
“I heard you train,” he says finally.
“I do,” I reply. I am sanding a piece of wood and do not stop.
He waits. Then, “Would you watch my footwork?”
Not a request framed as duty. Not an appeal to rank. Just a question.
“Yes,” I say.
Word spreads quietly after that. They come in pairs or alone, awkward and uncertain, asking questions that are not framed as commands or pleas. Can you show us footwork? Can you watch my form? Can you help me stop telegraphing my strikes?