Lacy stood at the edge of the clearing where the trading post would rise, if she could finish it. The frame was half-built. The walls were still just hope and timber. She came here every morning to measure progress, but today she came looking for Lewis. He was kneeling near the foundation, brushing dirt from something she hadn't seen before. A wooden chest sat in the ground where the main support beam should go. The carvings on its surface were old and deliberate. Lewis looked up at her with an expression she'd never seen on him before—guilt and fear twisted together. "It was here when I started digging yesterday," he said. "The Greypeak clan uses these to mark their territory. They've had a claim on this land for three generations." Lacy felt the ground shift beneath her feet, though nothing had moved. Every board she'd raised, every plan she'd made for Eddi's future, had been built on someone else's wound. The chest sat between them like a door closing. Lewis pointed past the trees to a shape she'd mistaken for rocks. A ship rested there, half-hidden in the brush. The carved wood matched the chest perfectly. "I moved it there two weeks ago," he said. "It was moored right where you wanted the east wall." She walked toward it without speaking. The ship's hull bore the same markings as the chest—proof that someone had lived here, worked here, claimed here long before she'd imagined her son trading goods with neighbors instead of silence. Lewis had known. He'd seen the ship and the chest and let her keep building anyway. She turned back to the trading post frame and saw it differently now. Not progress. Just trespassing dressed up as hope. She ran her hand along the chest's surface and felt the carved tree, its roots deep and tangled. Two dragons circled it, their bodies forming a loop with no beginning and no end. The Greypeak mark. Lewis stood behind her, waiting for her to speak, to shout, to walk away. But Lacy stayed still. The trading post wasn't dead yet. She just needed to talk to people who'd spent generations learning not to listen. Her dream hadn't disappeared—it had just become harder, and maybe that meant it mattered more.