The next few days stretched out like someone had hit slow motion on my life.

  No monsters. No emergency trips to the forest. No villagers pounding on the inn door because something had teeth and wanted in. Just… a village doing work.

  I slept past dawn more than once. My ribs complained less with each morning; bruises went from purple to that ugly yellow that meant the body had filed the incident under “handled.” I let Elspeth bully me into second helpings. I carried small loads instead of trying to haul half a tree by myself. Every time I reached for another task, my hands remembered call schedules and double shifts and just… stopped.

  “Walk,” I told myself one afternoon. “Observe. Do not interfere unless someone starts a grease fire.”

  Oakhaven had found its rhythm. At the fence, the kids had finished their campaign of destruction. The once-fuzzy palisade now showed long, clean grain where moss and rot had been. The wood looked almost naked. The children moved on to more glamorous jobs.

  A cluster of adults and older teens gathered around three iron pots near the square. Sap glistened thick inside one, fat in another, ash in a third. Mara stood by the glowgourds with a knife and a bowl, talking through steps I’d drilled into her.

  “Slow heat. If it smells scorched, you take it off.”

  She flicked a glance at me. I leaned against a post and kept my mouth shut.

  Gideon hovered over the sap pot with that familiar knotted brow.

  “Thicker than syrup. Thinner than tar,” he muttered.

  He tested a drip on a plank edge, poked it with his pinky, nodded once.

  They didn’t need prompts. They repeated my words to each other, corrected each other where someone rushed. When a youngster lobbed in a handful of ash too fast, half the group barked at him in chorus. They broke up the clumps, argued about ratios, adjusted. Like residents trading tips in the lounge, except the worst outcome here was a bum batch of resin, not a dead patient.

  By the third day, the first section of fence gleamed with its maiden coat.

  The smell hit me halfway down the lane: pine, smoke, hidden meatiness from the fat. Kael had built a set of rough sawhorses by the gate and laid out the test planks. The treated one wore a dull, soft sheen. When he rapped his knuckles against it, it sounded like real hardwood, not tired old pine.

  “Don’t you dare break it in half, Kael,” Elspeth called from the doorway.

  “Woman, I’m not stupid.” He hefted a mallet anyway.

  The mallet bounced. The plank shrugged off the hit with only a pale scuff.

  The villagers whooped. Someone clapped me on the back hard enough that my ribs flashed a brief protest.

  I grinned and rubbed the spot.

  They lined up along the new section and went at it with brushes and rags, faces intent. The resin soaked in, darkening the scraped wood to rich brown. Kids darted along the bottom, poking the mix into cracks and joints like they were feeding a hungry thing.

  It went… well. Too well.

  I skipped along the edge, looking for catastrophes. No one stuck their hand into boiling sap. No one tried to dump glowgourd into a pot still on the fire. My role shrank to answering a question here, straightening a brush stroke there. The machine ran without me.

  I’d built myself out of being needed. Great job, Easton.

  The rest of Oakhaven flowed around that project. Mara’s cottage hummed with the low murmur of patients. Elspeth’s kitchen banged and steamed. Kael’s forge clanged with some new idea he wouldn’t talk about yet. Everyone had a lane.

  Mine had blurred. No shift roster on the wall, no chief to assign cases, no quest log telling me “go here, kill ten boars, collect thirty units of existential satisfaction.”

  I parked myself on a low stone by the well and watched the sun crawl higher. Light caught the resin on the fence and threw back a soft, uneven glow.

  “If I had a therapist,” I muttered, “she’d be thrilled. Lots of rest, community, sunlight. Very healing.”

  The stone stayed a stone.

  “Too bad I don’t know what the hell to do with myself.”

  A pair of kids trotted past with empty buckets, solemn with the importance of water duty. They gave me identical gap-toothed grins and scurried on.

  Lost souls in the hospital found chaplains. Students who burned out found weird meditation apps or yoga or a new religion where the god was hustle. In AA meetings—not mine, but patients’—they talked about higher powers like universal tech support.

  When in doubt, consult Customer Service.

  I snorted.

  “Fine. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Find religion.”

  The thought felt half joke, half… not.

  If I couldn’t brute-force a plan into existence, maybe I could at least figure out how the system worked. Myriam had promised names for the hands on my shoulders. That sounded close enough to a help desk.

  The Sunstone Chapel sat near the eastern edge of the village, a squat rectangle of stone and timber with its door facing the morning. It wasn’t grand. No stained glass, no flying buttresses, just a modest building that caught light in a narrow, focused beam through a polished rock set over the doorway.

  As I approached, a shaft of sun slipped through that stone and cut across the packed dirt floor inside, a neat stripe that fell right over the central slab. Dust motes turned in it like lazy comets.

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  Myriam stood near the front with a rag and a handful of small mirrors, polishing each one in slow, firm strokes before hanging it back on its hook. Reflected splinters of daylight spotted the walls.

  I leaned against the doorframe and cleared my throat.

  “So,” I announced, “I’m here to learn more about our lord and savior Jesus Christ, or whatever he’s called on this server.”

  Myriam paused mid-wipe. Her head turned. One white eyebrow went up.

  “Who is… Jeesuscrest?”

  Her mouth worked around the unfamiliar sounds.

  “Close enough.”

  I stepped inside. The air felt cool and dry, faintly herbal from whatever she kept in the side alcove.

  “In my world he’s… it’s complicated. Main god for a lot of people. Sacrifice, forgiveness, that whole package. Also a punchline when someone starts searching for meaning.” I shrugged. “Point is, I’m the lost soul and you’re the nearest holy person, so I am officially in the market for enlightenment.”

  “Ah.” Understanding flickered in her eyes. “You come not for that name, but for any name that fits your empty space.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She set the mirror back on its nail and cocked her head toward the front.

  “Sit, then. The stone is warm this time of day.”

  The central slab served as altar, bench, table, whatever she needed. I hopped up onto its edge. Heat soaked through the fabric of my borrowed dress. The sunbeam brushed my knees.

  Myriam stood in the light so that it haloed her shoulders.

  “You already know the broad strokes. Architects. Stewards. The world built, then tended.” She folded her hands. “You wish to know Solaire.”

  “That’s the one my spellbook keeps bouncing off, yeah.”

  Her eyes sharpened at that.

  “You still feel for him.”

  “Feel a failure message, mostly.” I tapped two fingers lightly against my chest. “When I reach, I get… I don’t know. Like trying to call a phone that’s out of range. Not dead, just… no bars.”

  Myriam’s mouth twitched.

  “A useful image. Yes. The line is disturbed, not severed.”

  She moved aside, gestured at the sunstone high in the wall.

  “Solaire is not a man with a beard who lives in the sky. Remember this first. He is a manner in which light behaves. A… rule, if you like.”

  “Protocol,” I murmured. “Subroutine.”

  “Those are your words.” She didn’t argue. “Where his rule flows freely, light does three things. It heals. It grows. It reveals.”

  She held up three knotted fingers.

  “You have seen the first two, even in your other life. The dawn that helps crops rise. The lamp in your cutting room.”

  “OR lights,” I corrected. “Operating theatre. Yeah. Strong, bright, focused. You can’t fix what you can’t see.”

  Her gaze flicked to my face.

  “Exactly. Solaire is that choice. Not just light, but light put to use to mend. When a healer uncovers a wound instead of covering it. When a farmer clears his field so the stalks do not choke each other. When a teacher opens a child’s eyes to the world. This is his domain.”

  “And the third thing. Reveal.”

  “One can heal a wound that is known.” Her voice thinned, no less firm. “One cannot mend what people refuse to look at. So Solaire makes lies hard to hold. In ages past, with the connection clean, his servants could look at a thing and see where the rot began. In a body. In a story. In a soul.”

  She stepped closer, peered up at me.

  “You, with your knives and your books, already know some of this. Triage. Yes?”

  The word landed like a thrown pebble.

  “You line people up,” I answered. “Decide who needs what, who can wait, who won’t make it no matter what you do. It sucks.”

  “You do it with open eyes.”

  “That’s the job.”

  “It is also his work.”

  I shifted on the stone. The idea settled over my shoulders like a cloak I hadn’t agreed to put on.

  “In the game,” I went on, “Solaire’s spells were healing, mostly. Shields. A couple big smite-the-undead things. Nothing about… truth.”

  “Games flatten gods,” Myriam muttered. “They trim away what is hard to explain. But those gifts grew from what he is. His light knits flesh because it knows what belongs where. It burns corruption because decay runs against his pattern. It reveals lies because they tangle growth.”

  I sighed. "This all sounds great, but Solaire's not answering the phone when I call."

  “You once held a clearer channel.” Her eyes went distant for a heartbeat. “Before your long absence. Before the silence. You walked as one of his edges, cutting against rot.”

  “I was a raid healer with shiny armor and a hotbar full of miracles.”

  “You reduced yourself.”

  “That’s my thing.”

  I picked at a groove in the stone with my thumbnail.

  “Okay,” I went on. “So. Solaire equals light plus healing plus truth. He’s currently… unresponsive.” I grimaced. “You’re going to tell me the answer is prayer, aren’t you.”

  “Do you speak to your tools?”

  I blinked.

  “What?”

  “Before you cut. Do you whisper to your knife, to your needle?”

  “No.”

  “Yet your hands move with care. You align your own intent with the cut you wish to make. You clear the field. You wash, you plan, you breathe. Why, if the metal cannot hear?”

  “Because if I don’t, people die.”

  “Faith is like that.” She tapped the side of her head. “You turn your mind and heart toward a pattern until your actions match it. Words help some. Silence helps others. Solaire does not ask for flattery. He asks that you keep your eyes open while you work.”

  I thought of all the times I had watched a family cling to denial, of the quiet rage that sparked in me when someone refused to acknowledge the obvious injury on a CT.

  “Not great at comforting lies,” I admitted.

  “Good.” She sounded pleased. “Then his frequency already hums in you. The trouble is not that you have none of him, Emily Easton. It is that the world makes a storm around your shared line.”

  “And storms pass,” I started.

  She lifted a hand.

  “We do not know what this one will do.” Her gaze cooled any easy optimism. “What we know is this: you are here. Your hands remember both steel and light. While you rest, you may choose how you will cut.”

  Her words hung there, heavy as a lead apron. While you rest, you may choose how you will cut.

  My lungs did that weird shallow thing they did when someone thanked me too hard after a surgery. Too much weight on the word you. Too much on choose.

  “Right,” I went. “Well. Before I go all enlightened, important follow?up question.”

  Myriam watched me with that patient, crow?eyed focus that meant she saw exactly what I was doing.

  “Who does Solaire have beef with?”

  The lines around her mouth shifted.

  “Beef,” she repeated. “You mean cattle?”

  “Uh. No. Not menu choices.” I flapped a hand. “I mean, who does he hate? Enemies list. Mortal sins. Does he hate women, gays, shellfish—”

  “Shell… fish.” She tasted the words like they were a spell component. “Small river creatures? Why would a god hate those?”

  “Excellent question.” I spread my hands. “You’d get on with half the priests back home. They never really explained it either.”

  Her bafflement deepened. A faint frown pulled at her brow, more confused than offended.

  “He does not hate women,” she started slow, like checking for a trick. “He does not hate those who love as they are made to love. Why would he? Light falls on flesh as it finds it.”

  “So no gender clauses in the indenture contract.”

  I let my shoulders sink a little. The joke came out lighter than I felt.

  “He burns rot,” she went on. “Cruelty that hides itself. Those who know another suffers and turn away. Those who cover wounds with pretty cloth instead of cleaning them.” Her gaze flicked to the sunbeam. “If he hates, it is that. Willful blindness.”

  “Okay, that tracks.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Just checking there wasn’t some surprise clause about the wrong haircut on a Tuesday.”

  She shook her head, still staring.

  “Your world must have been a very strange place.”

  I barked out a laugh that bounced off the stone.

  “Oh, you have no idea. We stacked rules on rules and then fought each other about which invisible man in the sky approved of pork.”

  Her mouth opened, closed. She looked like she wanted to ask, then thought better of it.

  “And you lived there,” she murmured.

  “Lived, worked, took out student loans.” I grinned at her, sharp, a little too wide. “Honestly, I thought that would’ve been obvious the moment I walked in. You’ve met me. Exhibit A in Strange World Syndrome.”

  Her eyes softened, just a fraction.

  “I thought you were merely… young.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Capable,” she added. “And very far from home.”

  I sobered a bit at that. Home. Would I ever find it again?