It starts with absence, which is somehow worse than blood or alarms or the kind of violence you can point at and name, because absence forces your mind to fill in the gaps, and imagination is rarely kind when it’s given that much freedom. I notice it first in the dining hall, when one of the northern patrol tables sits half empty long after the shift change should have filled it, and the quiet around those chairs feels deliberate rather than accidental.
No one says anything at first.
Plates clink, voices murmur, someone laughs too loudly at a joke that isn’t funny, and the packhouse keeps pretending that routine still has authority here, but the bond hums faintly under my ribs, unsettled in a way that has nothing to do with proximity or restraint and everything to do with threat. I push
