Chương 288: 60. Karma 2

Some time later, the outline of Thornhold finally appeared ahead. I had expected, when I first saw it, to feel something like nostalgia. I didn't. My first thought was: It's too quiet. Not completely silent. Just wrong-quiet. A front-line fortress in this kind of situation had no business being this settled.

Even if it wasn't churning in frantic chaos like Fort Louis, there should have been some visible tension—hauling, shouting, repairs, watch rotations, inspections, wounded men, horses being driven, runners, smoke. Something should have been moving. Thornhold had none of that. At least, not at first glance from altitude. Men stood on the walls. The banners flew. No towers had collapsed in any obvious way.

Scattered barricades and old fortification traces dotted the ground outside—but overall, the place looked, impossibly, tidier than Fort Louis had looked the night before. And that tidiness was exactly what made it suspicious. It looked like someone who knew visitors were coming had smoothed the tablecloth flat, straightened the cups, and swept everything ugly into a corner where it couldn't be seen. I stared at the fortress, my frown deepening by degrees. Lei Lian had clearly sensed the wrongness too.

She signaled the squad not to press straight for the center but to circle the perimeter first. The Yinglong Guard fanned out—half climbing higher to observe the towers and wall-walk, half sweeping the outer roads, supply yards, and side gates. The longer we looked, the stranger it got. It wasn't that nothing was moving inside the fortress. Things were. But the movement was too slow, too scattered, and looked far too much like people performing the act of being busy.

A few wagons sat in the inner yard, apparently unloading—but the supplies stacked beside them sat in the wrong defensive positions. The troops lined up behind the walls weren't exactly disorderly, but they didn't look like men truly prepared to receive an assault, either. Even the small squad that came out to greet us looked arranged for an audience rather than pulled fresh from active alert. The weight in my chest sank lower. This place didn't look like it was struggling to hold the line.

It looked like a place that had refused to admit it should have been struggling long ago, and was now working very hard to pretend everything remained under control. And worse— I knew this place. Not just the name. I knew the terrain, the tower positions, the road junctions, the layout of the inner and outer yards. I even still vaguely remembered which side of the wall's base tended to flood, and which uphill ramp made horses' hooves slip. The memories didn't rush back all at once.

They surfaced piece by piece, like things buried too long underground, the topsoil finally blown clear by the wind. That slope on the western outer ground—I used to run across it. The slightly shorter secondary tower at the north corner—I'd once spent an entire afternoon up there, letting the wind batter my face, genuinely believing that someday I'd stand there and see a world larger than this one.

The stone path on the east side leading down to the side gate—I even remembered how treacherously slick it got with winter frost, and how the servants would grumble the entire way up while hauling firewood. That path was still there now. There was just no firewood. No grumbling. Only armored guards, and a silence that felt terrified someone might ask too many questions. I noticed my throat had gone dry. Strange. I'd known, before coming, that this trip wasn't going to be comfortable.

But when the familiar places actually reappeared in front of me, the part of me that refused to acknowledge what they'd become still lifted its head on its own. It wasn't warmth. It was more like an old wound that had convinced itself it had finally scarred over, only to discover today that it had only ever been loosely bandaged. Ignicia spoke, low, beside me.

"That's Thornhold."

"I know."

"Your voice sounds off."

"That's because my mood is excellent right now," I said, deadpan.

"So excellent that if anyone tries to tell me everything here is perfectly normal, I might feel compelled to give them a live demonstration of what abnormal actually looks like." She let out a soft huff.

"Still capable of saying stupid things. That means you're holding together."

"I genuinely cannot tell if that's encouragement, or just how your species monitors the vital signs of fragile humans."

"As long as it works." Fair enough. At least her standards were consistent. Lei Lian signaled from ahead: the fortress had registered our approach, the main gate was initiating its reception procedure—but half the squad was to land, half to hold altitude. A sound decision. Because if even I—a man who'd been gone from this place for years—could see at a single glance that something was wrong, then it was wrong. This wasn't sentiment talking. We began our descent.

The guards on the gatehouse looked up at us, their expressions tangled. Some seemed to recognize something. Some were simply nervous. A few wore an expression that unsettled me deeply—not the look of men watching reinforcements arrive, but the look of men thinking: so it finally caught up with us. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. That wasn't a look of welcome. That was the look of waiting to be judged.

Watching the gate, the towers, the yard, and the wall-walk grow larger beneath us, I had only one thought, crystal clear. I was back. But this wasn't coming home. It was more like returning to the graveyard that had raised me, and being forced to dig up with my own two hands whatever hadn't finished rotting inside it. And what made it truly nauseating was this— I could very likely still remember exactly what those things had looked like, before they became what they were now.

I vaulted down from Ignicia's back, and the moment my boots hit the training ground of Thornhold, my landing was, unexpectedly, very steady. Steady enough to startle even me. Probably because I knew this place too well. Well enough that my feet still remembered which paving stones were loose, which patches of sand turned to mud after rain. Humans really are gluttons for punishment sometimes. I'd spent the entire flight telling myself this wasn't a homecoming—this was coming to collect the dead.

And yet the moment I actually stood on this ground, my body recognized it a full step ahead of my brain. The training ground was still the training ground. Just older than I remembered, and emptier. The row of practice frames along the western side was still there, the wood weathered gray by years of wind and rain. Two of them leaned visibly sideways, like a pair of old veterans who should have been relieved of duty long ago but stubbornly refused to fall.

The stone corridor along the north side, leading to the inner residence, was also still there—including, at the base of one column, the chip I'd carved into it the day my practice sword slipped and took a piece of the stone with it. I stared at that chip for a moment, and something bumped, quietly, against the inside of my chest. I'd caught a thorough scolding that year. Not from my father. Not from either of my brothers.

From the old groundskeeper who managed the training yard—jabbing a broom handle at my nose while cleaning up the wreckage, telling the young master that if he was so eager to hack at pillars, he'd be better off putting a hole through his own rice bowl first, so at least he'd get some practice in before growing up unable to hit anything real.... Looking back, the old bastard had a genuinely vicious tongue. And the truly ironic part was that I still remembered every word of it, all these years later.

I lifted my eyes and swept them across the yard. The soldiers of Thornhold had all stopped moving to stare at us. Their expressions were fascinating. Some had clearly recognized me, the color draining from their faces. Others hadn't fully placed me yet, but one look at how I'd landed without a single word of greeting, Yinglong Guard at my back, and they understood immediately: this was not a reception. This was the silence before bloodletting.

A few of the sharper ones had already let their hands drift, half an inch closer to their weapons. I looked at them and spoke, without raising my voice.

"Don't do anything stupid." The training ground went dead silent.

"You were only following orders. That doesn't carry a death sentence." At those words, several sets of shoulders visibly loosened. Good. That was exactly the effect I wanted. I hadn't come to Thornhold to slaughter the garrison. That would accomplish nothing except turning an already ugly situation catastrophic. What I needed was to dig the truly responsible parties out of the crowd—like tearing a rotten root out of the soil, dirt and blood included.

Ignicia landed behind me and didn't shift back to human form right away. She simply held her draconic posture at the edge of the training ground, her crimson scales pressing the last of the morning chill flat, like a living wall of calamity. She didn't snarl. She didn't posture. She simply swept those gold-and-red eyes once across the assembled soldiers, and the hands that had been edging toward hilts quietly withdrew. This was the single most unreasonable thing about the Fire Dragon Princess.

Other people needed to shout to command a room. She didn't. She only needed to exist in it, and everyone present would spontaneously recall exactly how the word death was spelled. We crossed the training ground toward the inner buildings. No one moved to stop us. Not just because they didn't dare—more because they genuinely didn't know whether they were supposed to.

The scene was simply too strange: the disowned youngest son of House Rosa, walking back in through the main gate years later with the Fire Dragon Princess and the Yinglong Guard at his back. Call it a homecoming, and it looked far too much like a purge. Call it a purge, and it was still wearing the thin, awkward skin of "technically, we're still family." Whatever was about to happen at House Rosa today was going to significantly outrank any ancestral rite in this estate's history.

"Checking the ledgers?" Ignicia asked casually from beside me. She'd shifted back to human form by now, her steps unhurried, her voice low—yet the soldiers near the edge of the yard still visibly pricked up their ears. I shook my head.

"We will. Just not yet."

"Then what now?" I looked at the stone corridor ahead—one I knew better than any road I'd traveled since—and said, calmly:"First, we take people." I raised a hand. The Yinglong Guard behind me dispersed almost instantly. No shouting. No scrambling. No theatrical display of menace. They simply flowed through Thornhold's corridors like water—pairs and trios sealing hallways, securing doorways, cutting into the inner and outer residential wings and the military administration rooms. This wasn't a search.

It was a takeover. I didn't even need to watch to know that, before long, everyone in this fortress hoping to keep sleeping through today would be very politely and very firmly woken up. I turned to the nearest Yinglong Guard squad leader.

"Bring everyone in this household who makes decisions, carries messages, or touches the accounts to the main reception hall." I paused, letting the corner of my mouth curl slightly.

"Politely." The rider bowed her head.

"Yes, my lord." I added one more line.

"After all… we're still family. More or less." Even as it left my mouth, I found the line faintly absurd. Family. Such a pleasant word. Pleasant enough to wrap around the ugliest things imaginable. Once the Yinglong Guard had gone to carry out the order, I turned into the northern stone corridor. At the second corner, my steps slowed, half a beat, without my meaning them to. There was an old bench there. The wood had aged smooth, its edges polished by years of use.

Along the wall-facing side, a shallow knife mark still scored the grain—one I'd carved myself as a boy, sitting there copying out the family code as punishment, bored past reason, taking it out on the furniture with a pocket knife. I'd been caught. Scolded all over again. But the bench was still there. I stood and looked at it, and something strange moved through me. Like someone had gathered up all my worthless old days, packed them back into my hands exactly as they'd been, and said: See?

The place didn't forget you. You're the one who got thrown out first.

"What is it?" Ignicia stopped beside me. I tilted my chin toward the bench.

"I used to sit there and get yelled at." She glanced at it.

"I can see that."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It looks like exactly the sort of place you'd belong."

"... Half of that sounds like understanding me. The other half sounds like an insult."

"Both." Unsurprising. We were about to move on when hurried footsteps sounded from a side door ahead. A moment later, a white-haired, slightly stooped old servant was brought out by a Yinglong Guard rider. He'd been walking with his head bowed, clearly spending the whole way debating whether he could convincingly play dead. But the moment he looked up and saw me, his entire body locked rigid. I stopped too. I recognized him. He'd managed the northern wing's gate and interior corridors.

In winter, he always complained the firewood wasn't dry enough; in summer, he complained about the mud the young masters tracked in. He muttered from dawn to dusk without pause—yet if anyone ran a fever in the night or took a bad fall, he was always the first one running for the physician. He looked at me, his lips moving twice, as if he no longer knew what to call me. Young master didn't fit anymore. My lord didn't feel right either. In the end, he managed only four trembling words:"... You've come back."

The words weren't heavy. But for reasons I couldn't quite explain, they hit harder than the bench had. I looked at him, held the silence for one breath, and answered evenly:"Yes. I'm back." Then I glanced at the rider beside him.

"He doesn't need to go to the reception hall." The old man blinked, clearly startled. I turned my gaze back to him, keeping my tone level.

"Find somewhere to sit. Don't wander. Don't carry any messages for anyone. Stay quiet today, and nothing will happen to you." He nodded, slowly, his throat working as if he wanted to say more—but in the end, didn't dare. I didn't wait to hear it. Not out of coldness. Simply because this wasn't the time. Everything in Thornhold today that carried even a trace of the old life was a distraction. And the one thing I couldn't afford right now was distraction. I turned and kept walking.

The corridor, the bench, the old servant, the faded family crest on the wall, worn nearly past legibility—they fell away behind me, one by one. With each thing that receded, the feeling of this was the place I grew up grew a little sharper. And the sharper it grew, the more nauseating the thing I was about to do felt. Sometimes, going back to an old place isn't about recovering anything. It's about proving, with your own hands, that some things have rotted past the point of being allowed to remain.

I stepped out of the corridor. The doors to the main reception hall stood directly ahead. Morning light cut through the half-open shutters, spilling across the stone steps—and I recognized even that light. At this hour, there used to be people inside already arguing about accounts, about horses, about which branch of the family had skimmed an extra cart of winter grain. Looking back on it now, those petty, ridiculous disputes seemed almost charming compared to what was waiting on the other side of this door.

I stood in front of it, looked up at the familiar, tiresome plaque overhead, and let out a slow breath. Very soon. House Rosa of Thornhold was about to get genuinely lively.