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Fenris had always been able to tell when his stay at a place had gotten stale. The signs were subtle but unchanging, repeating and familiar, an underlying geometry that was easy to spot, if you knew what you were looking for.
It was etched in the innkeeper’s smile, in the way it no longer reached his ears in greeting. In the way his eyes turned away from him, passing over his ledgers, not really reading them.
It was in the shadows passing over the grim-cut faces that now sat in the corner— new, not regulars. It rested on the backs of their hovering hands, their fingertips twitching over leather sheathes, sharp silhouettes promising steel and iron.
It was in the scrape of golden coin across a wooden table when no one thought he might be watching.
But Fenris knew what to look for.
He had known, even before the very first night he had stepped inside the doors and asked for the keys to a room. He had made sure to know. Every exit, every face. Each detail filling in the sprawl of maps and directories in his mind, the necessary glossary of things to note— the things that had always kept him alive.
And so he ran, and so he fought, and so he kept on running— on to the next bed where he could sleep with one eye open and his sword at the ready behind his head. Fight or flight was less a response to him and more a pulse— it hummed its rhythm in his veins, long after the danger had passed.
And that was why he was so unused to this peace, to the pattern he was seeing now.
Each week inside the Hanged Man, torches lit up faces of welcome instead of greed, smiles instead of sneers, family instead of strangers. Faces steadily becoming even more familiar to him than his fear.
Every morning he woke to eyes of honeyed gold, as warm as the sun breaking daylight through his windows. To a man fighting his own wars inside his head, but— oh Maker— even with the weight of that burden on his feathered shoulders, he still laughed with all the joy of a feast on Satinalia, he was still kind.
Fenris was still learning that people were not sinking ships. That beneath his bare feet, there could be ground that would not shift, would not fall out and away from under him. That he had a home and it was his, and it was hard won, that it was not something that any magister could take away— even if one torched the place down into ashes. The love inside would still remain.
And so he had been tossed into the ocean fighting a storm, a tempest that would continue on, until the last moon of his life hung from the sky and he closed his restless eyes one final time. But he would not be alone. He would not be lost. Above, there would be stars to guide his steering back to Kirkwall.
And there, he knew he would find anchors.