Solan woke with the gunfire still inside his skull. A thin, stubborn echo, as if the sound had decided sleep didn’t apply to it. It looped somewhere behind his eyes, refusing to fade.
Then the dorm intruded.
Boards creaked. Someone hummed with a kind of reckless brightness that did not belong to morning. It sounded like someone had stolen the sun and dropped it in their room.
“Breakfast?” Solan asked, because superficial domesticity was a decent charm against dread.
The shadow from the top bunk crashed down before the words finished leaving his mouth.
Matt landed cleanly, like he’d rehearsed it. His hair was chaos, his grin immaculate. There was something offensively fresh about him—like he’d stepped out of an advertisement for energy drinks instead of out of bed.
“Good morning!” he announced, raising a hand as if addressing a nation. “I got you a bargain.”
Solan pushed himself upright against the pillow. His eyelids still felt weighted; his voice came out rough, dragged up from somewhere deep. “You got… what?”
“First of all,” Matt said, tucking both hands behind his back, smiling with exaggerated innocence, “don’t look at me like you’re about to call the police.”
Solan narrowed his eyes.
“Guess what I picked last night.”
It took a second for his mind to turn over. Yesterday. Aurichen. The old man’s voice—smooth as velvet, edged like a blade.
Choose any one relic. Consider it compensation.
Too polite. Too easy. That kind of generosity always smelled like a trap—the sort of velvet-voiced promise printed on casino posters, leaning friendlier the closer you stepped, until the floor gave way.
He was suddenly more awake. “I said I wasn’t taking anything,” Solan replied, sharper now. “Anything from a place like that—”
“—has teeth. Keeps receipts. Crawls out at night and bites you. I know.” Matt nodded briskly, as if reciting lecture notes he’d memorized for an exam.
Then he brought his hands forward.
In his palm lay a ring.
Small. Unremarkable. Matte silver, no shine worth admiring. At first glance, nothing special—except for a hair-thin thread of red buried in the metal. It looked almost accidental, like a vein pressed beneath skin. It didn’t glow.
But it didn’t look entirely dead either.
“That’s it?” Solan frowned.
“That’s it.” Matt’s grin widened into certainty—the kind that assumed gratitude was imminent. “You stood there last night with your whole face screaming I owe no one anything. You wouldn’t pick. The old guy’s smile started freezing. The attendant kept looking at you like—what’s the word—like you were the kind of person who rewrites rules without warning.”
“I’m not that kind of person,” Solan said. It sounded like fact. It sounded like insurance.
“Right. Of course you’re not.” Matt waved that away instantly and plowed ahead, bright with momentum. “But they think you might be. And that’s the point. When someone refuses a gift in a place like that, people don’t relax. They start wondering what signal you’re sending.”
Solan said nothing.
Matt leaned closer, lowering his voice despite the empty room, as if they were negotiating state secrets. “So I accepted it for you. Smallest thing there. Least impressive. It says, ‘We appreciate the courtesy,’ and then we walk away like nothing happened.”
“That,” he added with satisfaction, “is what I call a strategic retreat.”
Solan’s gaze dropped to the ring again.
“And,” Matt continued, almost vibrating now, “I think I picked the one they didn’t want noticed.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know how sometimes they hide the real stuff in plain sight? Toss something valuable into the open market display, mix it in with junk so nobody looks twice?” Matt gestured vaguely. “I was digging around last night. The attendant looked like she was about to have a stroke.”
“When did that happen?”
Matt didn’t hesitate. “While you were busy tagging after Clara.”
Matt paused, as if remembering something more important. His tone brightened instantly.
“And you are fighting Herman, right? Didn’t you say you just didn’t want to lose too embarrassingly?” He spread his hands. “Well. Maybe we just picked up something that helps you lose… less catastrophically.”
Solan stared at him. “What does the ring do?”
Matt hesitated. “…Currently? Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“At least not visibly.” He rushed on before Solan could answer. “But we could sell it. Convert it into resources. Buy you better odds. Or maybe—” he shrugged, hopeful— “maybe it actually works for you. You do have Kamuy.”
He flicked the ring into the air. It traced a small arc between them. Solan caught it without thinking.
Up close, the red thread in the metal looked thinner than before. A vein pressed beneath skin. Quiet. Almost innocent.
He should throw it away. He could end this entire thread of possibility right now—walk to the trash bin, drop it, close the lid.
Instead, another voice—quieter, less clean—spoke from somewhere he didn’t like acknowledging. What if it works?
Matt watched him the way people watched someone who had already been convinced but hadn’t admitted it yet. His smile sharpened. “Just try it. One time.”
Solan looked at the ring like it might slip into his bloodstream on its own.
“Just once,” Matt insisted, impossibly awake, glowing with optimism that bordered on criminal. “If nothing happens, we call it a hideous souvenir. We get breakfast. And in two weeks you get obliterated by Herman. Beautiful narrative symmetry.”
“Your commentary is harming the narrative,” Solan muttered.
He put the ring on anyway—left pinky, first try. It seated perfectly, as if it had been sized for him in advance. No twist. No resistance. Exact fit. The metal touched his skin. It wasn’t cold. That was the first wrong thing.
Instead there was a faint pressure, almost delicate, as if someone had pressed a fingertip against the smallest vein at the base of his finger. Not painful. Just enough to make him aware of it.
He waited.
One second.
Two.
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. He almost pulled it off.
Then his chest betrayed him.
His breath shifted—subtle, but wrong. Inhaling felt slightly obstructed, as if the air had thickened by a fraction. Exhaling didn’t quite empty him. It wasn’t panic. Not suffocation.
It felt like his body had started working harder than usual, and he hadn’t been informed why.
Heat followed, a slow warmth unfurling from somewhere deep in his sternum, spreading outward. Like the beginning of a fever. Or like muscle warming before strain. He touched his forehead.
“What are you doing?” Matt asked.
“Checking if I’m running a temperature,” Solan said flatly. “Did you spike the drinks last night?”
“I spiked them with ‘future,’” Matt replied solemnly. “The very supportive kind.”
Solan rolled his eyes and rotated the ring slightly against his skin, trying to dismiss the sensation as bad sleep or leftover adrenaline. The red thread did not glow. It didn’t move. But he had the unsettling impression that it was keeping count.
“See?” Matt declared triumphantly. “You’re alive. No explosions. No spontaneous incarceration. Excellent selection on my part.”
The tightness in Solan’s chest hadn’t gone anywhere. Not pain. Something else. He rolled his shoulders once, as if that might loosen it.
“You good?” Matt asked.
“Define good.”
Matt snorted and dropped back into his chair. He picked up his phone again, but not with his usual ease. His eyes flicked up once, twice—like he didn’t entirely trust the room anymore. “Since it doesn’t do anything,” he added, casual again, “I’ll ask my cousin. See if he knows anyone who’d buy this kind of stuff. Might as well turn it into grocery money.”
Solan looked at his hand. The ring felt light. Too light. He flexed his fingers once. Nothing happened.
He told himself that was reassuring. “Remind me to stab you next time,” he muttered.
Matt blinked. “Sure. Uh—can you move your sword first?”
The sentence landed lightly, like someone asking him to pass a pen. “What are you talking about?”
He turned his head.
The blade was in the air. Hovering. It hung there under visible strain, tip hunting for alignment. One inch from Matt’s throat. And Matt was still looking at his phone.
Solan’s voice went very quiet. “Don’t move.”
Matt was still scrolling. “What? Why are you suddenly talking like we’re in a horror movie—”
“Shut up,” Solan said quietly. “Don’t move.”
Matt looked up. The phone slipped from his hand and hit the carpet with a soft thud. They both froze. A fine jitter ran through the sword‘s edge, almost too small to see. The edge caught the light and turned it into a strip of dead black, swallowing brightness instead of reflecting it.
Solan’s stomach went cold. He looked down. The ring was faintly lit now, just a thin red pulse, like a capillary breathing under skin. It beat in perfect time with his heart. He lifted his hand. The blade twitched.
“Oh my God,” Matt breathed, voice splitting at the edges. “It’s reacting to you.”
“That is not helpful.”
Solan pushed himself upright slowly. Every movement felt deliberate, careful, as if the air itself had become fragile. “Okay,” he murmured. “Nobody panics. Nobody breathes loudly. We’re going to act like this is completely normal.”
He stepped off the bed.
One step.
Another.
Each footfall felt like pressing down a switch he couldn’t unpress.
“Too late,” Matt rasped. “Tell my mom I love her.”
The blade drifted forward—barely an inch. Solan’s pulse hammered in his ears.
He was close enough now.
He raised his hands slowly, palms open, the way you approached something that might bite.
“Easy,” he said under his breath. To the blade. To himself. “We’re fine. Everyone’s fine.”
He closed his fingers around the hilt. The metal was warm. Not body-warm. Warmer. Alive, almost.
Matt collapsed back into the chair with a violent exhale. “Jesus— I thought I was about to get skewered.”
Solan stared at the weapon in his hand. It looked unchanged. Dull black steel. The small crack near the guard. Familiar weight. But the echo of movement still ran through it, faint tremors climbing into his palm. He glanced at the ring. The red light dimmed gradually, cooling into a tense quiet.
Matt let out a shaky laugh. “Do you understand what just happened? You moved it. Without touching it. You’re basically some telekinetic weirdo.”
Solan didn’t smile. He watched the ring instead. The red thread flickered once more, syncing itself neatly with his heartbeat.
“Gon on, try again. If it moves twice, that’s not an accident. That’s proof. You’ve got something nobody else has. And we didn’t even pay for it.”
Solan hesitated. The ring had warmed again against his skin. Not aggressively. Just… expectant. He didn’t move his hand. He just thought it. Up. The blade lifted from the carpet in a controlled rise, then wavered before finding line.
Matt let out a short, stunned laugh. “Roomate, that’s insane.”
The sword hung between them, micro-corrections rippling along its spine. A faint vibration threaded the air. He could feel it.
Solan caught it midair and set it back on the floor. He then slid the ring off. The metal cooled instantly in his palm. Up. Nothing.
Matt leaned back in his chair, grinning in a way that was both insufferable and sincere. “I’m just saying—if that thing lets you use your Kamuy without wrecking yourself, you don’t have to make it ugly this time.”
Solan didn’t look up. “It’s still cheating.”
“Cheating?” Matt scoffed. “Cheating is just another word for surviving. Cheating is pretending you’re noble because you refuse the one thing that keeps you from collapsing.”
He tilted his head, studying the ring like it had personally offended him. “You don’t need to prove you can lose gracefully anymore. You just need to not get flattened.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Exactly,” Matt said. “So stop acting like it is.”
He stood, stretching as if they were discussing breakfast options instead of survival. “I’m not telling you to marry it. Use it so you don’t end up coughing blood on concrete. After that? Give it back to Aurichen. Toss it into the ocean. Write a thank-you card. I don’t care.”
He clapped Solan’s shoulder on the way past. “Just don’t go in there trying to ‘maintain dignity.’ Dignity is overrated. Functionality is better.”
He paused at the door, tone softening just a fraction. “And please don’t test it while I’m showering. I would like to survive the semester.”
The door shut. Silence settled. It felt heavier than the panic had.
Morning light slipped through the gap in the curtains and landed directly on the desk, illuminating the ring where he’d set it down. The light was painfully clean. It showed everything—the dust in the air, the uneven scratches in the wood.
The red thread inside the metal pulsed faintly. Too evenly. He stared at it longer than he meant to.
If his draconic factor were stronger. If his Kamuy came easier. If—
He stopped.
And slowly, something in him settled into place. Not clarity. Recognition.
If there were no ring, he already knew how it would go. He would stand there and accept the shape of things. He knew that version of himself too well. He was tired of knowing.
Even if it was pointless, he still didn’t want to arrive exactly where he was already headed. He picked up the ring. The metal was almost biting. He closed his fingers around it.
“…just once.”
The ring’s red vein flickered once—soft, like a breath drawn in.