Josh woke to the smell of mud and iron and cold morning air.

  For a single, perfect second, he didn't know where he was.

  Then his wrists moved and didn't, and the chain held, and the wooden platform pressed cold and unyielding into his back, and he remembered all of it — the forest, the skull, the horrible stillness of his own legs walking somewhere he hadn't told them to go — and he made a sound he was glad no one was close enough to hear.

  He lay there for a long moment, staring at the same too-blue sky.

  The notification hung at the edge of his vision like a screen he couldn't close. He read it again. And again. He was not a person who believed in systems or notifications or the kind of thing that chimed at you in the middle of dying. He was a person who had gone to a frat party and taken too many Adderall and built a zipline to a swimming pool.

  And yet.

  The skull was still in his head. Not as a memory — as a presence. A cold thing that had touched the inside of his thoughts and been very specific about what it found there.

  He willed the skill into being.

  Skill acquired: [Resistance to Mind Enslavement — Level 0]

  [???] — Locked.

  ——————————————————————————————————

  Something shifted. Minor. Like a door he hadn't known was open being gently pulled to. The skull's presence in his head dimmed — not gone, but further away.

  Downstairs, unhurried footsteps on the platform stairs.

  He knew, before he looked, exactly who it would be. The same hollow-cheeked man. The same folded hands. The same voice, mournful and used-up, already forming the same words.

  "The Baron calls for you."

  Josh watched the man undo his chain and tried to understand what had happened to him. Not the transmigration — he'd deal with that later, in some future version of himself that was better equipped for it — but the loop. The reset. The fact that he had died, and then not been dead, and was now here again with a new skill and the same chain and the same man and the same terrible sky.

  He thought: this has happened before. And it will happen again. And I am the only one who knows it.

  The man finished with the chain and turned to leave.

  "Wait," Josh said.

  The man paused on the stairs. Didn't turn around.

  "Your name," Josh said. "What is it?"

  A long pause. The man's shoulders shifted slightly.

  "Aldric," he said. Then he walked down the stairs and didn't look back.

  Josh sat on the edge of the platform and rubbed his wrists and looked at the camp. Same tents. Same mud. Same blue falcon snapping on its pole. Somewhere beyond the tree line, a skull full of antlers was waiting for him.

  He had died once.

  He was going to die again.

  He breathed in, breathed out, and tried — for the first time, deliberately — to think.

  Loop Two

  The Refusal

  This time, he knew before he opened his eyes.

  The smell told him — mud and iron and that particular cold that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the fact that he was outdoors and chained to a board. He lay still for a moment with his eyes closed and took inventory. Wrists: bound. Back: planks. Air: medieval. He was here again.

  He opened his eyes. Same sky. The hawk was even there, or a hawk, tracing the same lazy circle as if it too was caught in something it couldn't exit. He watched it for a moment and then looked at the chain and then at his own hands.

  The skill was still with him. He could feel it the way you feel a seatbelt — not actively, just as a faint resistance, a thing that would catch him if something reached for the inside of his head. Resistance to Mind Enslavement, Level 0. Small. But his.

  He sat up.

  Below the platform, Aldric was already there.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  He was leaning against the base post with his arms folded, looking at nothing in particular, as if he had been waiting long enough that he'd stopped waiting and just started existing. He looked up when Josh sat up. His expression didn't change.

  "The Baron calls for—"

  "Aldric," Josh said.

  The man went still. A small stillness, controlled, but Josh caught it.

  "How do you know my name?" Aldric said.

  "You told me." A beat. "Yesterday."

  Another pause, longer. Aldric studied him with an expression that moved through several rooms before it settled somewhere unreadable.

  "You were unconscious yesterday," Aldric said carefully. "You'd been on that board since the night before."

  Josh said nothing.

  Aldric climbed the stairs and undid the chain with the same practiced efficiency as before, but this time there was a quality of attention in his hands — not gentle, exactly, but less automatic. He was thinking about something. Josh let him think about it.

  "The Baron calls for you," Aldric repeated, quieter this time, as if reminding himself rather than Josh. He descended the stairs. Paused at the bottom without turning around. "Don't do anything foolish, boy."

  Then he walked away.

  — ? —

  Josh stood at the platform's edge and looked at the camp.

  He'd had a lot of time to think between waking up and now — the quality of light suggested early morning, and Aldric hadn't hurried him — and what he'd mostly thought about was the forest. Specifically: he had died in it. The skull was in there and the skull had done something to his legs and killed him, and going back into the forest was clearly the move of a person with a death wish.

  What he'd thought about second was the direction of north.

  The camp was oriented around the Baron's tent, which sat at its rough centre and faced east. The forest to the east was where the skull was. Fine. But north — north was different. He'd caught a glimpse of it: beyond the camp's northern edge, the trees thinned, and beyond the trees there was what looked like the beginning of a road, a real one, rutted and wide and heading somewhere.

  He didn't know where. But somewhere wasn't here.

  Kaelen's memories offered nothing useful on this subject. Kaelen had never been north of camp. Kaelen had never, in his short and miserable experience of the world, had reason to go anywhere he wasn't sent.

  Josh had.

  He rolled his shoulders, stepped off the platform stairs, and turned north.

  — ? —

  The camp had a rhythm and he moved with it.

  This was something he'd absorbed without meaning to from Kaelen's memories — how to exist in a space like this without becoming visible. Keep your head down but not too far down; too far down was the walk of a man who was guilty of something. Keep moving but not quickly; quickly was the walk of a man who was going somewhere he shouldn't. Look purposeful and small. Stable boys were furniture. Furniture didn't get stopped.

  He passed a cookfire where three soldiers were eating without talking. Passed a tent with armour hanging on a rack outside it, pieces of plate swaying gently. Passed a farrier working with his back turned, hammering something that rang clear and metallic in the morning air.

  The northern edge was close. He could see where the tents stopped and the tree line began, and there — yes — a gap in the trees, rutted earth beyond it. His heart rate went up in a way he was aware was counterproductive. He kept his pace steady.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten.

  A hand closed on his shoulder.

  — ? —

  Josh stopped.

  The hand was large. It turned him with a force that was professionally calibrated — not violent, exactly, but entirely without the possibility of resistance. Josh turned and looked up at Sir Gilmour.

  The man was a wall with a face. Broad shoulders that the armour seemed to be struggling to contain, a blond beard trimmed short and neat, the blue falcon of the Baron's household picked out on his breastplate in enamel. He had the look of a person who had spent so long doing a physical job that he'd stopped being conscious of his own size. He was looking at Josh with professional boredom.

  "Where are ya going, boy?"

  His voice matched the rest of him. Deep, unhurried, the voice of a man who didn't need to shout because things tended to happen when he spoke at normal volume.

  Josh's brain, which had been running very fast in the background this entire time, produced an answer.

  "Hay," Josh said. "For the horses."

  He watched Gilmour process this. The knight's eyes moved — to Josh's empty hands, to the direction he'd been walking, which was away from the stables, to Josh's face again. The processing was quick. Gilmour was not a stupid man; he'd just met enough desperate people to recognise the shape of a lie without needing to hear it land.

  He tilted his head. Scratched his beard with two fingers.

  "Hay," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Fetch hay."

  "Yes."

  "With your hands."

  Josh said nothing.

  Gilmour looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, simply and without heat: "I don't believe ya."

  — ? —

  Later — in the half-second between the boot and the ground — Josh would catalogue his mistakes.

  The excuse was the obvious one. Of course it was. He'd reached for the first word that meant 'this is a normal errand' and grabbed hay because the camp smelled like it. He hadn't thought about the direction he'd been walking. He hadn't thought about carrying nothing. He hadn't thought about the fact that stable boys didn't usually fetch their own hay and that a knight who'd spent his career in camps would know that in the same unconscious way Josh knew which direction a red light meant.

  He'd thought he was clever.

  He'd been so certain that the problem was boldness — that the first loop he'd failed because he hesitated and the second loop he would succeed because he didn't — that he'd sprinted straight past the actual problem, which was that he didn't know enough. Not enough about this camp. Not enough about these people. Not enough about anything.

  He took one step back.

  He turned.

  He ran.

  He made it six steps.

  The boot caught him square between the shoulders with a force that suggested Gilmour had not moved quickly so much as simply extended his leg, calmly, at the precise angle required. Josh left the ground. He was airborne for a moment that felt longer than it was, long enough to see the rutted mud of the camp coming up to meet him with a kind of indifferent patience, and then he hit it and the world became gravel and pain and the copper taste of a bitten cheek.

  He tried to stand. He got as far as his knees before a boot settled onto the back of his neck and pressed him flat again, not hard, just enough.

  "Filthy deserter."