Rohan settled in, spear across his knees, and let himself breathe properly for the first time since the drainage cut.
The first hour passed in near total silence, broken only by the occasional distant clang of cargo being resorted somewhere above him and the low, steady thrum of the ship itself, a sound so constant it began to feel less like noise and more like the pulse of some enormous sleeping animal he’d folded himself inside the ribs of.
He used the time to take stock, because Maerin’s voice lived permanently in the back of his skull at this point, dry and unimpressed, reminding him that idle waiting is not the same as rest, and rest is not the same as safety, and confusing any of the three will get you killed.
His supplies amounted to very little. The sealed packet Bren had pressed into his hands — his condensed reserve record, whatever exactly that meant in practice, folded tight against his ribs beneath the ash-cloth. Liora’s charm, warm from his own body heat, its edges worn smooth by years of a hand that wasn’t his. Jorren’s shield token, small and unassuming, tucked into the same inner pocket. Iri’s medical roll, strapped along his belt, containing supplies that suddenly felt woefully inadequate against whatever a merchant vessel’s security forces might be equipped with.
And the spear. Always the spear.
Rohan ran one thumb along its shaft in the dark, feeling out the small nicks and wear patterns his hands had put there across four months of practice and desperation, and thought — not for the first time — that it had become less an object he carried and more something closer to a limb he’d grown to replace one he hadn’t realised was missing.
Focus. Not sentiment. Focus.
He forced himself through a mental inventory of everything Tavin’s sketches had described about a merchant vessel’s general layout — cargo bays toward the lower decks, crew quarters and common spaces in the middle sections, command and navigation somewhere toward the fore, engineering and drive systems typically situated aft or central depending on hull design, close enough to the core systems that damage control could reach them quickly.
None of it was specific to the Gilded Heron. All of it was better than nothing.
Footsteps passed twice during that first hour, unhurried, conversational, the mundane sound of people going about work that had nothing to do with him. Each time, Rohan went utterly still, breath shallow, Molten Assimilation held ready but unused, and each time the footsteps continued on without pause.
They don’t know I’m here. Not yet. Small mercies.
Somewhere in the second hour, exhaustion began to win the argument his body had been having with his mind since long before he’d ever climbed inside a stabiliser casing. His eyes grew heavy despite every effort to keep them open, his thoughts sliding sideways into half-formed fragments of memory — Pell’s face when Rohan first showed him the spear’s grip, Veska’s dry commentary during patrol, the particular silence of the Ashen Marches at dawn, broken only by wind dragging ash across bone-white slabs.
He caught himself twice, jerking upright with his heart hammering, certain in the fog of half-sleep that someone stood over him, only to find the gap between the coolant housing and the hull plating exactly as empty as he’d left it.
Sleep is how you die out here. Sleep is how you die everywhere, apparently.
He did not sleep, in the end. He existed, instead, in that narrow, aching territory between rest and readiness, and told himself it would be enough.
[Status]
[Name: Rohan Roy]
[Titles: Rabid Wolf Slayer I, Hestia’s Acknowledgement, Veyrhold Trusted Helper, Skarn Hunter I]
[Rank: 35]
[Class: Evolution Gene]
[Attributes: Molten]
[Standing: Veyrhold - Trusted Helper]
[Active Quest Chain: Ashbound World → Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron]
[Condition: Fatigued (Minor)]
Minor. Sure. Let’s call it that.
He closed the status panel and allowed himself, for exactly as long as it took to count to sixty, to think about Veyrhold. About Liora’s charm, still tucked beneath his ash-cloth, its edges worn smooth by a hand that had carried it through years he’d never asked about. About Iri’s voice telling him to make it worth the fear. About Maerin’s warning that hope had teeth.
It does. I’m finding that out right now.
Then he put the thoughts away, because thinking about the people he’d left behind wouldn’t get him any closer to becoming someone who could go back to them — or forward, to whatever waited on the other side of this ship’s departure from a system he never wanted to see again.
He didn’t sleep, exactly. He existed in the narrow space between exhaustion and vigilance, drifting close to unconsciousness and snapping back from it every time a set of footsteps passed near enough to worry about, for what his internal sense of time insisted was several hours.
The ship’s low ambient hum changed pitch sometime during that stretch — a deeper thrum building beneath the deck plating, a subtle shift in the pull of gravity that made his stomach fold in on itself for a disorienting half-second.
[Notification: Vessel Departure Detected]
[Objective Updated: Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron]
[New Objective: Remain concealed for the duration of transit. Await stable window to disembark or seek passage resolution.]
Rohan felt something in his chest loosen that he hadn’t realised was clenched.
We’re moving. We’re actually moving. Cael Athis is behind us.
For one entire minute, folded into a gap between machinery on a ship belonging to people who would have him killed or worse if they found him, Rohan Roy allowed himself to feel something dangerously close to relief.
It lasted exactly as long as it took for a maintenance drone, running its scheduled thermal sweep of the lower decks, to round the corner of the coolant housing and register a heat signature where none should exist.
He should have anticipated it. He had anticipated it, in the abstract, distant way a person anticipates rain during a drought — aware of the possibility, unprepared for the actual, sudden reality of it.
Four months of hunting glassmaws and skarn across the Ashen Marches had taught him to watch for eyes, for footsteps, for the particular stillness that preceded an ambush. Nothing had taught him to watch for a floating, palm-sized sensor array with no eyes at all, sweeping methodically along a maintenance corridor on a schedule no one had thought to mention to him.