Nessa Rootmark's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

Nessa stood in the clearing as her rival walked back to the table, leaving the shed door open behind him. Inside, his bow hung on the wall, dark wood polished smooth from years of use. But the space felt wrong—too empty for someone who had lived here so long. She waited until he sat, then stepped closer to the doorway. The walls stopped her breath. Every surface bore tally marks—not just hundreds, but thousands, carved in groups of five that climbed from floor to ceiling. Some marks were fresh, pale cuts in dark wood. Others had weathered gray with age. They weren't practice counts. They were losses. Each one a shot that missed, a day he failed, a moment he didn't speak about to anyone. A journal rested on a small shelf near the bow, its cover worn at the edges. She reached for it without thinking, then froze. Her rival's voice came from behind her, quiet and certain: "Read it or don't. But if you stay, you carry your losses the way I carry mine." Nessa opened the journal. The first page held one line in careful script: "A loss I hide becomes a weight. A loss I mark becomes a step." She turned through pages of dates, descriptions of failed shots, reasons analyzed in detail. He had written every loss down, studied it, kept it visible. She closed the journal and looked back at the walls. He hadn't hidden his failures—he had built a map of them, and lived inside it every day. She understood now why he demanded silence. Words could lie about losing. The marks could not.