Ethan Skydor's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Ethan heard the knock first — three sharp raps that cut through the silence he'd built around himself like a wall. He didn't move from his chair. Visitors meant questions, and questions meant letting someone close enough to ask them. The second knock came harder, urgent. Then a thud, heavy and wrong, like a body hitting wood. He was on his feet before he decided to be. His hand went to the door handle, hesitated, then pulled it open. A woman lay crumpled across the stone platform beneath the carved family crest that marked his threshold — the one he'd inherited from people who'd believed in legacy and belonging and other things he'd stopped trusting. Blood soaked through her tunic. Her fingers clutched a letter, his name scrawled across it in ink that ran red at the edges. A dagger with shifting engravings lay beside her, the markings moving like water across dark steel. The woman's eyes opened. She tried to speak, failed, and pressed the letter into his palm instead. Her grip was already weakening. Ethan knelt without thinking, his walls cracking like ice under weight. This wasn't a stranger asking him to open up slowly, carefully, on his terms. This was someone bleeding on his doorstep with his name in her hand, and he didn't have the luxury of pulling back. He carried her inside the small domed house he'd chosen for its single room and single door — a place built to keep the world at a manageable distance. The letter fell to the floor as he laid her on his bed, her blood staining the blanket he'd wrapped himself in a thousand lonely nights. The careful life he'd constructed was already gone. Someone real had found him, and whether she'd come to break through his guard or break him entirely, it was too late to close the door.