Light pressed against my eyelids and dragged me out of sleep. I surfaced slow, every joint thick and swollen, skin hot where the blanket stuck to it. When I finally cracked my eyes open, the room swam, then settled into the familiar crooked beams of Elspeth’s guest room, the faint line of soot at the ceiling, the single square of light slanting across the floorboards at an angle that meant I’d missed half the day. My back ached from the too-soft mattress, my neck had a knot like a clenched fist, and somehow I still felt hollowed out, the way I did after a seventy-two-hour call when the adrenaline bled off and left nothing useful behind.

  I rolled onto my side and the bruise over my ribs woke like it had just been waiting. Not the sharp tear from before, more a deep, resentful burn, the kind that said, You pushed me and I held, but we are not friends. My body floated between worlds: strong enough now that the armor didn’t feel like the only thing keeping me upright, weak enough that even the idea of pulling it on made me want to stay horizontal forever. I stared at the dust drifting in the sunlight, each mote turning lazily, and tried to remember what shift I was on next, which attending I had to impress, which patient I’d promised to check on before rounds. The names didn’t come. The pager on my hip didn’t buzz. My hip didn’t even have a pager anymore, just a belt with a borrowed knife and a pouch of herbs.

  The quiet pressed harder than any alarm ever had. Under it, faint sounds from below: the clink of plates, a murmur of voices, someone laughing at something that didn’t involve me. Life moved along downstairs on its little village rails. No one here expected me at morning sign-out, or in clinic, or scrubbed at a table. They expected… what? More trips to the forest. Stand in front when teeth showed in the dark. I lay there and realized I didn’t know which of those roles belonged to me, or if any of them did, because the part of my life that came with a laminated ID and a hospital cafeteria already felt like a story I’d read once and then misplaced.

  In the game, logging off had been stupid simple. Escape, exit, confirm. Close the window, open your notes for the next day’s surgery, drink coffee until your hands shook. Here, I had jabbed at invisible menus, tried every mental shortcut my muscle memory knew. No logout screen slid into view, no character select, no cheerful “Are you sure you want to quit?” The only message the world gave me was the same quiet failure whenever I reached for my supposed god. Connection refused. I stared at the rough plaster wall and let the thought slide all the way in for the first time: there might not be a way back. Not “I haven’t found it yet,” not “there’s a quest chain for this somewhere,” but nothing. Full stop.

  My chest tightened as if someone had cinched a retractor too far. The air still went in and out, steady enough, but each breath felt shallow around a weight sitting under my sternum. I pictured the rest of my life measured in harvests instead of academic years, in fence repairs instead of rotations. No board exams, no chief year, no grey hair under fluorescent lights, just Eloria’s sky and Eloria’s monsters and Eloria’s villagers who thought I’d fallen out of the gods’ pockets. Grow old here, if I lived long enough. Die here, probably with a sword in my hand instead of a scalpel. The idea crawled under my skin, hot and itchy, and for a second I wanted my old call room back with its stained ceiling and humming vent, wanted the beeping monitors and the sour coffee and the sheer, awful predictability of it all.

  “What am I even doing,” I muttered at the ceiling, voice raw from disuse. No white coat. No attendings. No parents waiting at home, no boyfriend, not even a dog. Nothing to aim at except keeping a hamlet of NPCs alive in a world that refused to admit it was a game. I lifted my hand into the light, flexed my fingers, watched the familiar knuckles move like they belonged to someone else. If this was it, if this was all there was now, then I needed a plan. A goal. A… something. The emptiness where that should sit scared me more than the warg’s teeth ever had.

  I lay there a few breaths longer, then swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

  “Enough,” I told the floorboards. They didn’t argue.

  Sitting up hurt, but it hurt in a familiar way: muscles stiff, ribs tight, nothing new tearing loose. I could work with that. I pulled on the plain dress Elspeth had left, bound my chest as best I could, laced my boots. Each small task clicked into place like steps in a procedure. Wash. Eat. Move. Don’t think beyond that.

  A chipped basin waited by the window with a folded cloth. The water had gone cool, but it took the grease from my face and the sweat from my neck. I scrubbed until my skin flushed, until the woman in the wavering reflection on the water looked less like a corpse in borrowed clothes.

  Downstairs, the inn buzzed. Elspeth moved between tables with a loaf under one arm, arguing with Gideon about the price of nails. She spotted me and thrust a trencher into my hands before I could dodge.

  “Eat. You look like a breeze could carry you off.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The bread and thick slice of pork vanished faster than I wanted to admit. Salt, fat, something green chopped fine. My body woke up halfway through, realized fuel had arrived, and filed no further complaints.

  “What’s going on?” I nodded toward the door. The noise outside pressed through the walls: hammering, shouted names, a rhythm like a busy OR.

  “Ask them.” Elspeth jerked her chin. “Whole village’s out.”

  The air outside held the damp chill of early spring and the sharp tang of resin. Oakhaven had transformed. Men hauled rough-hewn stakes to gaps in the barricade. Women stirred cauldrons near the square, brush handles sticking out like a forest of wooden spears. Kael hammered a band of metal around a post, curses flying as sparks jumped.

  I drifted along the packed dirt path until the organized chaos at the main fence came into view.

  Finn stood on an upturned crate like a pocket-sized foreman.

  “You three on this run. No chunks left, or it won’t drink the resin right.”

  He pointed with a dull knife at a section of old fence. The bigger kids—gangly arms, serious faces—scraped off moss and splinters, every stroke exact. A smaller crew followed with blocks of cloth wrapped around lumps of sand, rubbing until the wood smoothed under their hands. Behind them, tiny ones with willow-thin arms swept shavings into baskets, tongues caught between their teeth in concentration.

  No one fooled around. No one dragged their feet. Finn moved along the line with the same frown I’d seen on senior residents checking instrument trays.

  “That edge is rough. See?” He ran a thumb over a missed patch and looked up at the girl holding the sand block. “Do it again. We want Kael to be proud when he hits it.”

  She nodded once and went back over the spot, slower, more deliberate. The broom crew watched her, then attacked a stubborn pile of curls as if it had personally insulted them.

  They weren’t playing at work. They owned it. Each task fit into the next, each small hand part of something larger than itself. I rested a palm against the cool, scraped wood and followed their assembly line with my eyes, from knife to cloth to broom, from old fence to future wall.

  In med school, half the class had chased prestige like it came in a syringe. Here, a boy on a crate and his army of children treated a fence like a patient that needed saving.

  “Looks good,” I called.

  Finn’s face lit, then settled back into its stern mask as he snapped his attention to a crooked stake.

  They didn’t need a paladin for this. They had purpose already. I watched them work and felt something under my breastbone shift, a slow, steadying weight where panic had sat before.

  “Fine work for such scrawny arms.”

  Sister Myriam’s voice came from my elbow. I hadn’t heard her walk up. She stood with hands tucked into her sleeves, eyes on the children, mouth creased in something that hovered between pride and worry.

  “They’re taking it serious,” I watched a boy lean full weight into his scraper. “Feels… good. Seeing everyone know what they’re doing.”

  Her gaze slid to me, sharp under the softness.

  “And what are you doing, child?”

  “Watching.” I huffed a breath. “Thinking how nice it is to have a purpose.”

  Her head tilted. She heard the empty space under the word.

  “Whose purpose?” She let the question hang. “And where are your people, Emily Easton? Who waits for you to come home from your work?”

  I almost snorted.

  “No one.” I kept my eyes on Finn’s little production line. “Only child. Parents died when I was a kid. There wasn’t a big clan to begin with.”

  My shoulder rose and fell. Old story.

  “Work was… the thing. Hospital, study, game, sleep in a call room, repeat. That was the whole loop.” I rubbed my thumb along a crack in the fence rail. “I don’t have that anymore.”

  “So you stand here and pretend you are untethered.” Her fingers tapped once against her sleeve. “As if this village is not real work. As if these fences do not count because they are not your hospital with its steel tools.”

  Heat crawled up my neck.

  “It’s not that it doesn’t count. It’s just—this wasn’t the plan.” I grimaced. “I spent years carving myself into a specific shape for a specific hole, and now the hole is gone. The shape’s still here.”

  She watched Finn correct a crooked stroke, then looked back at me.

  “Oakhaven has more holes than pegs.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “You mistake your problem. You are not without purpose. You only think your purpose must live somewhere else than where your feet stand.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it again.

  She went on.

  “And you do not let people shape themselves around you. You give and you do, but you do not permit doing to be done for you.”

  I frowned.

  “I’m pretty sure Elspeth would argue I’ve let her feed me within an inch of my life.”

  “Elspeth feeds everyone.” Myriam’s eyes glinted. “I mean this: Kael stares at your armor whenever you pass his forge. The dents itch his hands. He wishes to mend it. He has not found the courage to tell the hero her shell is cracked.”

  I pictured Kael’s narrowed eyes on my breastplate, the way he’d run his thumb along a crease and then pretend he hadn’t.

  “I don’t… mind if he fixes it,” I said. “Honestly, I’d prefer not to get stabbed through the weak points.”

  “Then you must allow it.” Her tone gentled. “Let a man do his craft for you. Let a village lean toward you, not only on you. A beam takes weight better when it is braced on both ends.”

  “That’s a lot to chew on before lunch.”

  “You already ate,” she reminded me.

  I huffed again, but my chest felt looser.

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about.” I scraped wood dust off my fingertip with a nail, then looked at her. “Can I come by later? Learn more about the gods. How they fit into all of this.”

  “My door stays open.” Her eyes crinkled. “Come when you are ready. We will put names to the hands already on your shoulders.”

  She turned back toward the chapel, robes brushing the dust, and I watched the steady, small figure walk away while the children’s scrapers rasped in a rough, determined rhythm behind me.