"A child who never does anything foolish has either excellent supervision or an alarming relationship with consequence."
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The first memory that vanished without warning was the one about the playbook.
Eirik noticed because he went looking for it.
He had been sitting on the garrison fence while Leif attempted to hold a serious conversation with a frog—the frog had climbed out of the water barrel of its own questionable judgment, and Leif had apparently decided this made it a willing participant—when Eirik reached, reflexively, for something that had lived in his head for years.
Third-and-long. Shotgun set. Inside zone read.
The drawer was empty.
Not blurry.
Not faded.
Just… gone.
He sat very still for a moment, turning the absence over carefully. The memory wasn’t hiding. It wasn’t slipping.
It had already left.
“Hm,” he said quietly.
Then the frog jumped directly into Leif’s face, which demanded immediate attention.
“—I am telling you,” Leif said with complete conviction, “that was clearly an attack.”
“Frogs don’t plan assaults.”
“This one did. You could see it in his eyes.”
“What were you saying to him?”
“I was explaining the training yard rotations.”
Eirik stared at him.
“Why.”
“He seemed interested.”
Leif had something green on his eyebrow. He had not noticed. He was also completely sincere, which somehow made it worse.
Despite himself, something in Eirik’s chest loosened.
“Did it work?” he asked.
“He left before I got to footwork.”
“Maybe he had prior commitments.”
Leif considered this gravely. “…that would explain some things.”
Eirik checked the memory again that night.
Carefully.
He had started doing quiet inventories over the past year, ever since he’d first noticed the slow erosion at the edges. Most memories were still there—but some had gone soft.
Now he took proper stock.
The football system—gone.
Most of his high school teachers—gone.
Ms. Hendricks from AP History—still there. (She had been formidable.)
The smell of rain on hot asphalt outside the university library—
He paused.
Gone.
He waited for the sharp sting of loss.
It didn’t come.
What he felt instead was… lighter.
Not empty. Not hollow. Just less crowded.
The memories that remained were the ones with weight. The ones he had lived in. The rest…
It was like someone had quietly cleared a room he didn’t use anymore.
He turned onto his side in the dark.
He was six. Almost seven.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Eirik Bj?rnsson of Járnvik.
And tomorrow he was apparently helping Leif with something that had the look of a bad idea.
“Knut left the smokehouse unattended,” Leif said the next morning.
He said it carefully. Too carefully.
“…and?” Eirik asked.
“…and I have a plan.”
Of course he did.
Knut’s smokehouse was sacred ground. Not officially—but spiritually.
Knut had Very Strong Opinions about fish. About wood selection. About hanging order. About airflow. And—most intensely—about something he called flavor-?nd, which was almost certainly not a real thing but which he believed in with steady, immovable confidence.
Today, unfortunately for Knut, the smokehouse was unattended.
Because the lock had broken two years ago.
And Knut kept forgetting to fix it.
Leif’s plan was extremely simple.
Which meant it was absolutely going to become complicated.
“We just… rearrange them,” Leif whispered.
“You are describing sabotage.”
“I am describing light organizational creativity.”
“He will absolutely notice.”
Leif shook his head with deep, misplaced certainty. “He’ll think he miscounted.”
“…he does sometimes do that.”
“Exactly.”
Eirik exhaled slowly.
There was a version of himself—the older, tighter version—who would have walked away right here.
That version felt… further away than it used to.
He glanced at the bright afternoon sky. Two free hours. No assigned drills.
Leif was watching him like this was the most important decision of the week.
“…fine,” Eirik said.
Leif beamed like he had just won a campaign.
The operation itself was, objectively, ridiculous.
Leif worked inside the smokehouse with the careful intensity of someone performing delicate surgery on fish.
Eirik stood lookout.
His Keen Eye and ?nd-sense made him extremely good at this, which was probably not the intended application.
Inside came the soft sounds of methodical fish relocation.
“Are you alphabetizing them?” Eirik called quietly.
“I am improving the system.”
“That is deeply concerning.”
They were back in position four minutes before Knut returned.
Perfectly innocent. Utterly unbothered.
Knut walked straight into the smokehouse.
Silence followed.
A long silence.
Then a longer one.
When he emerged, he wore the exact expression of a man whose reality had shifted half an inch sideways.
“…either of you been near the smokehouse today?” Knut asked.
“Earlier,” Eirik said truthfully. “Smelled good.”
Knut studied them.
Then the smokehouse.
Then them again.
He reached the wrong conclusion with visible effort and went back inside.
Reorganization noises resumed.
Leif did not look at Eirik.
Eirik did not look at Leif.
This required tremendous discipline.
The woods excursion happened because Leif said, “Come on,” and refused to elaborate.
This was, unfortunately, very effective.
The discovery turned out to be a tree that had grown completely around an old survey marker post, swallowing it whole and then apparently deciding this was the new normal.
“…how did you even find this,” Eirik said.
“I was chasing a beetle.”
“…of course you were.”
Astrid appeared fifteen minutes later like she had been summoned by mild trouble.
“I heard about the fish,” she announced.
“That was classified,” Leif said.
“You are terrible at classification.”
She immediately dragged them to what she declared was a better tree—a fallen pine forming a natural bridge.
Astrid crossed it instantly.
Leif followed.
Eirik paused.
“…you’re doing the face again,” Astrid called.
“I do not have a face.”
“You absolutely do. The blueprint face.”
“I hate that name.”
“Too late.”
He went up anyway.
The forest from the fallen tree was… nice.
Wind higher in the canopy. Light moving differently.
That small, quiet joy of being somewhere slightly unnecessary.
They sat there for a while.
Just being six.
Then Rí appeared below.
Because of course she did.
“Absolutely not,” Eirik said.
“Absolutely yes,” Rí replied.
There was never really a question how this would end.
He carried her up.
She accepted this as her natural right.
Reality reasserted itself in the afternoon.
The sword was still too big. His hands still too small.
And physics, unfortunately, did not care.
“Stop fighting it,” Bj?rn said.
“I’m not fighting it.”
“You are absolutely fighting it.”
Bj?rn adjusted his grip with calm, patient hands.
“The sword cares about angle. Not effort.”
Eirik exhaled slowly and tried again.
Wrong.
Again.
Closer.
Again—
There.
A small internal click.
Not graceful. Not smooth. But real.
Something inside him settled around it—not the sharp driven satisfaction he might have expected a year ago.
Just a quiet:
…okay. That works.
Later, lying in the dark, he took quiet stock of the day.
Fish sabotage.
Tree climbing.
Frog diplomacy.
Sword frustration.
He reached once more for the playbook memory.
Still gone.
The gap didn’t hurt.
Somewhere deep in his channels, something slow and patient was smoothing the edges between who he had been and who he was becoming.
Not erasing.
Not yet.
Just… evening out.
He yawned.
He was six. Almost seven.
And tomorrow he had sword drills at dawn and Leif was probably going to attempt diplomacy with another amphibian.
Honestly?
Things were going pretty well.
? Skill Level Up! ?
? Blade Sense (Grár) · Lv.1 → Lv.3 ?
Blade Sense (Lv. 3) [Grár]
The gap between what your hands can do and what your body understands is narrowing. Slowly.
You cannot rush this distance. You are, however, finally walking in the correct direction.
S?fnun gained.
Additional note: rearranging someone’s fish still generates no S?fnun.
The Wyrd remains firm on this point.
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