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T here were nights when he still woke with the weight of dying men in his hands.

The battlefield was long behind him, but the memories clung like blood that wouldn’t wash away. Torn bodies. The frantic press of his palms against wounds he couldn’t close fast enough. The desperate eyes of soldiers begging for mercy he couldn’t grant. He had saved so many.

But it was the ones he lost who whispered to him in the dark.

He had left that life. And yet, the past followed him—in the ache of old wounds, in the weight of his name, in the distance he kept from the city that was supposed to be home.

Because it wasn’t. Not really.

He had walked away from his people, from the clan he could no longer face, from the warriors who had once called him brother. There was no home left for him—not in the land of his birth and not here among those who respected his skill but never truly saw him.

Maybe that was why he’d come to Everwood. He could do good here. He could serve. But he would never belong.

That was the cost of surviving when others had not.

Kazrek exhaled and rubbed a hand over his face. The scent of boiled cloth and calendula hung thick in the air. Above, rain tapped the roof tiles in a steady rhythm. The clinic was mostly dark, save for the lantern he’d left burning in the side window—partly out of habit, partly for the stray ginger cat who slipped in when the streets turned cold.

Because a man without roots had nothing to lose.

And yet, on the nights when sleep refused to come, he wondered—just for a moment—what it would feel like to have something worth staying for.