Morning in Swine Village started with the sound of a bucket splitting.

  Seal heard the crack from halfway up the hill and winced before the water even hit the dirt. A woman shouted, sharp and tired, and a child immediately blamed a goat that hadn’t been anywhere near the well. The argument carried in pieces up the slope, breaking apart in the dry air until it was nothing but rhythm—voices, the slap of bare feet, the thin protest of wood being dragged where it didn’t want to go.

  He liked mornings. For a little while nobody expected anything from him.

  The hill overlooked everything—thirty crooked homes huddled like they’d been shoved together for warmth, roofs patched with whatever could be nailed down, stones on top to keep the wind from stealing them. Smoke crawled sideways from clay chimneys and didn’t rise so much as it searched for a place to disappear. From up here, the village looked like it could be defended. From the road below, it looked like it could be erased.

  He sat with his knees up, arms looped over them, watching the square. A man was already awake and already angry at a wheel that didn’t fit right. The screech of wood against stone made Seal’s teeth itch.

  Rocky sat beside him chewing on a twig, kicking his heels against the rock like he was trying to knock it loose from the earth. He’d skinned his knuckles on something before breakfast; a faint smear of dried red was still caught in the creases. Seal hadn’t asked what. Rocky always found something.

  Kyu stood a few steps away, hands buried in his pockets, watching the road instead of the village. He looked like he’d been placed there and forgotten—still, narrow in the shoulders but solid where it mattered, hair dark against the bright morning. Even in silence there was something in him that held back, as if the air itself might do something wrong if he let it get too close.

  “You’re doing it again,” Rocky said around the twig.

  “Doing what,” Seal said without looking at him.

  “Staring like the road owes you money.”

  Kyu didn’t glance over. His gaze stayed fixed on the pale ribbon of dirt that cut through the fields and ran north. “Just thinking.”

  Rocky made a sound like a laugh that didn’t get all the way there. “Thinking’s dangerous.”

  “Only for you,” Seal said.

  Rocky’s grin widened and he leaned closer, like he was about to tell a secret, then flicked the twig at Seal’s shoulder. It bounced off and fell into the grass.

  Seal sighed like it annoyed him more than it did. He brought his right hand up anyway.

  His fingers flexed once, twice. The skin across his knuckles was smudged with ash from last night’s cookfire, and when he rubbed his thumb against his palm, grit came away under the nail.

  A faint shimmer gathered at his fingertips, barely visible in the sunlight, like heat rising off stone. It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t light. It was something in between—something that didn’t want to be seen.

  He narrowed his eyes. He breathed out slowly through his nose the way his father had told him to when he was trying too hard. The shimmer steadied, hovering just above his skin.

  For a heartbeat, a quick streak of lightning skated around his hand—thin, pale, gone so fast it could’ve been imagined. It wrapped his knuckles, kissed the edge of his thumb, then vanished like it had been embarrassed to show itself.

  Seal froze.

  His pulse jumped, not with fear exactly, but with the sudden dizzy thrill of seeing proof.

  Rocky sat up. “You saw it.”

  Seal let his hand drop too fast, as if someone had caught him stealing. “It was nothing.”

  “It was something,” Rocky said immediately. “That was—”

  “Shh,” Seal snapped, and the sharpness surprised him. He glanced down the hill out of habit, as if the village itself might have ears. Nobody was watching. Nobody ever watched when it mattered.

  Kyu’s head tilted slightly. He hadn’t moved closer, but the air around him felt like it shifted. “Lightning,” he said, quiet.

  Seal swallowed. He forced his shoulders to loosen. “Not lightning,” he said, because if he said the word too cleanly it would become real.

  Rocky grinned like he couldn’t help it. “Look at you.”

  “Don’t,” Seal warned, but it came out weaker this time. His hand still tingled, as if a thread had been pulled through his skin and left heat behind.

  Kyu’s coin flashed between his fingers. He flipped it without looking at it, caught it, flipped it again. The metal clicked soft against his knuckle. “Greator’s past that road,” he said, like he hadn’t just seen something change.

  Rocky leaned back on his elbows, squinting up at the sun. “Greator’s past three days of walking, two days of hunger, and one of us getting stabbed.”

  “You assume it’d be you,” Seal said.

  “It would be you,” Rocky replied immediately. “You talk too much.”

  Seal smirked. It didn’t last. “People become something there.”

  “People die there,” Kyu said.

  Wind moved across the hilltop, carrying cooking smoke and the smell of boiled grain. Someone down below was burning onion skins; the sweetness was thin and painful. A dog barked once, like it remembered it had a job. Then quiet again.

  Rocky spat into the grass. “We stay here, we fix roofs. Carry water. Fight goats. That it?”

  Seal didn’t answer right away.

  Down below, his mother stepped outside their house with a basket under one arm. She paused on the threshold and looked toward the hill. She couldn’t see him at this distance. She didn’t need to. She always looked there first, like she was checking the sky for weather.

  She was smaller than he remembered her being when he was younger. Not frail. Just… used up in places. Her hair was tied back, and loose strands clung to her forehead from sweat. Her hands were red from washing. She stood there for a moment with the basket, as if she’d forgotten what she was supposed to do next, then forced her feet forward.

  Seal’s throat tightened.

  “I don’t want to be another man who almost did something,” he said quietly, more to himself than them. The sentence tasted like his father’s voice, like words he’d heard in the dark when he was supposed to be asleep.

  Kyu finally looked at him.

  There was no expression on Kyu’s face, not the kind that told you what he felt. But his eyes did something small—acknowledged, measured, accepted. Like a nod without the movement.

  Rocky watched Seal’s face, then pushed himself to his feet. “Then we go,” he said, and he made it sound simple on purpose, like if it was simple it could be true.

  Seal stared at the road a moment longer. A hawk cut across the sky far above, quiet as a thought. He didn’t look away until it was gone.

  They walked down the hill together.

  The village met them with its usual things: dust that coated the inside of your mouth, the smell of old soup, laughter that ran thin at the edges. A boy chased a chicken that had escaped a yard; the chicken dodged him easily and went straight for a pile of scraps. Two women argued over a woven mat. A man slept on a doorstep despite the sun, his shirt open, ribs showing like he’d been carved.

  Seal’s house was at the edge of the square, where the ground sloped just enough that rainwater always pooled. Their door stuck in the winter. In the summer it warped. Nothing in Swine Village behaved the way it was supposed to.

  His father was inside, repairing a strap on a sack. He looked up when they entered and his gaze went immediately to their faces. Not to see if they were smiling. To see if they were decided.

  His mother was by the cooking pot. She had a knife in her hand, but there wasn’t much on the board—half an onion, a root vegetable cut into thin coins like she could make it more if she made it smaller. When she saw all three of them together in the doorway, she set the knife down carefully, as if she was afraid it might slip.

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  “You’re early,” she said, though it wasn’t a question.

  “We’re leaving,” Rocky said.

  Seal shot him a look—not like that—but his father didn’t flinch. He just leaned back on his heels, strap in his hands, and let the silence sit for a moment.

  Kyu stood behind Seal and Rocky, hands still in his pockets. He looked at nothing in particular, but he was listening in a way that made the air feel thinner.

  Seal’s mother made a sound that wasn’t words. Her eyes went to Seal first, then to Rocky, then to Kyu, like she was counting.

  “It’s Greator,” Seal said.

  The pot gave off steam, thin and watery. The room smelled like boiled roots and old smoke. In the corner a small sack of grain sat tied shut; it didn’t look like much. It never did. Seal had grown used to pretending he didn’t see it shrinking.

  His father nodded once, slow. “I thought so.”

  His mother’s voice sharpened. “No.”

  Seal braced for it, for the argument, for the kind of fear that came out as anger. But his father lifted a hand—not demanding silence, just asking for it—and his mother stopped as if she had hit a wall.

  His father stood. He was not a tall man, but he filled the doorway when he moved into it, the way men did when they were used to carrying things. His hands were rough, the nails split from work. There was grease under the creases of his fingers that never came out no matter how much he scrubbed.

  He looked at Seal for a long moment.

  “You’ve been sitting on that hill like it’s a throne,” he said.

  Seal’s cheeks warmed. “I—”

  “No,” his father said gently. “Not an insult. Just… I’ve been watching you think. You think with your whole face. Same as your mother.”

  Seal’s mother made a sharp sound of disagreement, but it came out soft. She turned away and began pulling down sacks from a shelf, too quickly, like movement could keep something from happening.

  His father’s eyes went to Rocky next. “And you,” he said, and there was the smallest smile at the corner of his mouth. “You’ve been trying to break the world in half since you could walk.”

  Rocky’s grin flickered, proud and defensive at the same time. “World’s asking for it.”

  His father’s gaze settled on Kyu. It always changed with Kyu. It always grew careful, not because Kyu was fragile, but because he carried something the village didn’t know how to hold.

  “You’ve been quiet,” his father said.

  Kyu nodded once. “Yes, sir.”

  Seal’s mother’s hands trembled as she stuffed dried bread into a cloth. She pressed it down hard, like she could make it last longer if she packed it tight enough.

  His father exhaled through his nose. “You’re hungry.”

  Rocky opened his mouth, ready with something, but Seal kicked his ankle under the table. Rocky shut up, rubbing his ankle like he was offended by the betrayal.

  His father didn’t look at the food. He didn’t point at the pot. He didn’t accuse anyone of failing. He just said it, and the honesty in it was heavier than blame.

  “We can’t keep up,” his father went on. “Not with you three growing like weeds. Not with the work drying up, and the taxes the way they are, and winter coming early every year like it’s in a hurry to kill us.”

  Seal’s mother’s shoulders rose and fell. “Don’t,” she whispered, but she kept packing.

  His father stepped closer to Seal, and when he spoke again his voice dropped, like it was only meant for them. “You’ve outgrown the nest,” he said. “That’s not shame. That’s… what it’s supposed to be.”

  Seal stared at his father’s hands. He’d watched those hands mend roofs, set broken bones, haul water until the muscles in his forearms trembled. Those hands had held Seal’s shoulders when he’d been too angry to breathe, had turned him away from fights he’d wanted, had pushed him toward others he hadn’t.

  “You think I haven’t heard you three?” his father said. “On the hill. At night. Whispering like the walls aren’t thin.”

  Rocky glanced away, caught.

  Kyu’s expression didn’t change, but the coin in his pocket stopped clicking.

  His father reached up to the shelf above the door and pulled down a wrapped bundle Seal hadn’t seen before. It was cloth, tied with a cord. The way it was wrapped made Seal’s stomach flip. Things that were wrapped in this house were either rare or painful.

  His father held it for a moment before giving it to him. “I want you to be the best captain you can be,” he said, the word captain landing on Seal like a responsibility and a promise at the same time. “Not loud. Not proud. The best.”

  Seal’s fingers closed around the bundle. He didn’t unwrap it yet. He couldn’t. “I will,” he said, because anything else would have been a lie.

  His father turned slightly, addressing the other two without raising his voice. “And you,” he said to Rocky, then to Kyu. “You protect your captain. You don’t let him run ahead just because his head is full of bright ideas.”

  Rocky bristled. “He does run ahead.”

  Seal shot him a look.

  Rocky shrugged like he couldn’t help being correct.

  Kyu’s eyes went to Seal and stayed there for a second too long, like he was measuring what protection would cost. Then he nodded once. “Yes,” he said. It wasn’t enthusiastic. It was absolute.

  Seal’s mother turned then, wiping her hands on her skirt. Her eyes were red already, and it made Seal’s chest ache in a way he didn’t know how to fix.

  “You’re children,” she said, and it wasn’t a speech. It was just… the truth she couldn’t swallow.

  Rocky took a step toward her as if to make a joke, to lighten it, then stopped. Even he didn’t know what to do with her face like that.

  Kyu stood still. He didn’t look away, but he didn’t step forward either. He was good at not making things worse.

  Seal finally untied the cord around the bundle. The cloth fell open in his hands.

  Red fingerless gloves. Worn at the seams, stained faintly at the knuckles. Gloves Seal had seen his father use when he worked at the old factory on the edge of the village before the machines went quiet for good. And beneath them, the goggles—thick glass, leather strap, scratched like they’d survived a life.

  Seal stared at them until the room blurred.

  “Dad…” His voice broke on the word. He hated that it did. He hated crying. It always felt like losing control.

  His father’s hand came down on the back of his neck, firm. “Don’t make me regret being sentimental,” he muttered, and Seal heard the strain beneath it. The pride. The fear. The tiredness.

  “These were mine,” his father said, not like he was giving away belongings, but like he was handing down a name. “They kept me safe when I had no business being safe. Maybe they’ll do the same for you.”

  Seal swallowed hard. He slid the gloves on. They fit a little loose, but the leather warmed quickly against his skin, and when he flexed his hands, he felt steadier. More real.

  His mother made a quiet sound and turned away fast, wiping at her face like she was angry at it. “I don’t care about gloves,” she snapped, but her voice wobbled. “I care about you coming home with hands still attached.”

  Rocky tried a grin. “I can grow mine back.”

  Seal glared at him.

  Rocky’s grin softened. “Sorry.”

  His mother crossed the room and cupped Rocky’s cheek with one hand, then Kyu’s with the other, as if she could claim them both with touch. Rocky leaned into it without thinking. Kyu went rigid, then—after a pause so small it might’ve been imagined—leaned forward a fraction, enough to accept it.

  “You,” she whispered to Kyu, and there was something in her tone that wasn’t just instruction. It was a plea dressed up as expectation. “You watch them.”

  Kyu’s eyes flicked to Seal’s gloves. “Yes,” he said. Again, no flourish. Just truth.

  She pressed her forehead briefly to Seal’s—something she hadn’t done since he was little—and Seal smelled flour and smoke and salt on her hair.

  “Don’t let fear stop you,” his father said, as if he’d been holding the sentence back until now. He looked past them, toward the open doorway, toward the road none of them could see from here. “But don’t let pride drive you either. Pride is loud. It gets you killed.”

  Seal nodded. He couldn’t speak again. The gloves creaked when he clenched his fists.

  His mother thrust a rolled map into his hands so abruptly he almost dropped it. “If you get lost,” she said, “you follow the river north until you hit the old stone marker. If you miss it, you’ve gone too far and you’ll end up in the marshlands and I will—”

  “Mom,” Seal managed.

  She stopped. Her chin trembled, then she smoothed her expression like she could iron it flat. “Just… look at the map,” she said, quieter. “At least pretend you know where you’re going.”

  They ate before they left. Not a feast. Not even close. A bowl each, thin stew that tasted like water with memories of vegetables. Seal watched his mother scrape the pot afterward with a spoon, getting every last bit like it mattered.

  It did.

  When they stepped outside, the sun was bright enough to make the dust look almost golden. The village sounded the same as it always did. Children laughed. Someone shouted. A chicken darted between legs. Life stubbornly continued, unaware it was being changed.

  At the edge of the square, Seal’s father stopped them one last time.

  He didn’t hug. Not the way mothers hugged, like they could pull you back inside their ribs. He just rested a hand on each of their shoulders, one at a time, heavy and steady.

  “Gem Heroes,” he said, like he was testing the name out loud.

  Rocky’s eyes lit up. Seal felt his spine straighten. Even Kyu’s mouth twitched, the smallest sign of amusement.

  “You’re not gems yet,” his father added. “So don’t go shining where everyone can see you.”

  Rocky rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  Seal tucked the map into his bag. The goggles hung around his neck by the strap, bumping against his chest when he moved. The gloves felt strange on his hands, like he’d put on someone else’s life and had to grow into it.

  They started down the road as a group, then, inevitably, as a fight.

  Rocky bumped Seal’s shoulder hard enough to shove him off balance. Seal caught himself and swung a quick punch at Rocky’s arm, more playful than angry, but Rocky yelped like it was mortal.

  “You hit like a baby,” Rocky declared loudly, and then shoved him again.

  Seal’s grin broke through without permission. He swung again—this time a clean punch to Rocky’s shoulder, sharp enough to sting. Rocky blinked, then grinned like he’d been gifted.

  “Oh, you want that kind of day?”

  Seal turned and ran.

  Rocky went after him immediately, laughter ripping out of him, loud enough to startle a crow off a fence post. His boots hit the dirt hard, and when Seal glanced back, Rocky’s face was bright and hungry—not for food, not for fighting, but for forward.

  Kyu walked behind them at first, hands still in his pockets, watching them like they were a weather pattern. Then Rocky lunged, missed Seal, and almost collided with Kyu. Kyu shifted one foot, barely moving, and Rocky stumbled past like he’d been redirected by the wind.

  “You did that,” Rocky accused.

  Kyu didn’t look at him. “You did that.”

  Seal laughed again, breathless. The sound felt strange coming from him so easily.

  They left Swine Village behind without meaning to. One minute the last roof was still visible over the rise, the next it wasn’t. The world opened out into fields and low hills and the long, pale road.

  Seal slowed at the crest, turning like he had before, a habit he couldn’t break.

  Smoke rose from the chimneys, thin and stubborn. Somewhere down there, someone was shouting at the same goat.

  His mother stood in the doorway of their house, one hand lifted—not waving exactly, not wanting to make a spectacle, just… holding herself in place.

  Seal raised his gloved hand.

  For a second, just for him, he thought he saw it again—a quick pale streak around his fingers, gone before it could be called lightning.

  He faced forward.

  “Captain,” Rocky called, already running ahead as if the road really did owe him something.

  Seal’s mouth twitched. He adjusted the goggles on his head and jogged to catch up.

  The sun was warm. The sky was clear. The three of them moved like the world was wide enough to take them.

  And for now, it was.