The door groaned open under his hand — creeeak — loud enough in the pre-dawn quiet that he winced, half expecting the whole castle to wake and come running to see what had disturbed the dead heir's rest.
Nothing came running. That, more than anything, told him exactly how few people were left to run.
The hallway beyond was long and dim, lit only by a handful of wall-mounted lanterns burning low, their flames trembling — flicker, flicker — against a draft that had no business being indoors. He stepped out barefoot onto stone worn smooth by centuries of feet that weren't his, and the cold bit up through his soles hard enough to make him hiss between his teeth.
'Right. Shoes. Add that to the list.'
The memories supplied the shape of the hall without him having to think about it — this wing held the family quarters, his room the largest and closest to the stairs, a handful of others sitting empty because there was no longer a family large enough to fill them. He walked slowly, one hand trailing along the wall for balance, and let his borrowed memory narrate the ruin around him like an unwelcome tour guide.
The tapestries were the first thing he really noticed. Once they must have been rich with color — hunting scenes, coats of arms, a long faded portrait of some ancestor on horseback — but now they hung threadbare and moth-eaten, more grey than whatever their original color had been. Cobwebs stretched between the lantern brackets and the ceiling beams, thick enough in places to catch dust like little grey hammocks. A window at the end of the hall had a crack running through it that someone had patched with wax and cloth rather than glass, and wind still found its way through the seam, whistling thin and high, whooo, like the castle itself was in mourning.
'Dying castle' wasn't a metaphor he'd invented. It was simply accurate.
'Family Legacy: zero,' he murmured, half to himself, half to the system that hadn't spoken since he'd left the bedroom. 'Yeah. I believe it.'
He passed a suit of armor standing sentry beside the stairwell, its once-polished breastplate gone dull with tarnish, a spiderweb strung neatly between its helm and its raised, empty gauntlet. He paused in front of it long enough to note the family crest etched into the chestplate — a mountain rising behind a single sword, the Alphonsus sigil — before continuing on, boards creaking, creak, creak, beneath each step.
He was three doors past his own room, still getting used to the strange gait of legs that didn't fully belong to him, when he heard it.
A small sound. Almost nothing. A sniffle, quiet and quickly swallowed, coming from an alcove tucked into the hall ahead where a narrow window let in the first grey hint of dawn.
He slowed.
There, curled into the stone windowsill with her knees drawn up to her chest, sat a girl. Small — no older than seven or eight, if he had to guess, though the memories immediately supplied a name and an age both: Theresa Von Alphonsus. Tess. Nine years old, though she looked younger, her frame thin in a way that had nothing to do with a growth spurt and everything to do with meals skipped so the household accounts could stretch a little further. Her hair was the same dark shade as his — their — family's, tangled from sleep, and she wore a nightdress patched at the hem more than once. She hadn't noticed him yet, too busy staring out the cracked window at nothing in particular, her small shoulders hitching every few seconds with a breath that sounded like it was trying very hard not to become a sob.
Logan's memories surged forward, unprompted, filling in the gap before he could ask. His little sister. The only other member of House Alphonsus still living under this roof, aside from the servants who'd stayed out of loyalty they could no longer afford. Their mother had died birthing her. Their father followed two years ago. And now, as far as Tess knew, her only remaining brother had spent the last three days rotting in a sickbed, with old Aldric refusing to confirm whether he'd ever wake up again.
Something in his chest tightened that had nothing to do with the borrowed body's weak lungs.
'Hey.'
The word came out softer than he meant it to. Tess flinched anyway, small shoulders jerking, and her head snapped toward him with wide, red-rimmed eyes that went even wider the instant they landed on his face.
For a moment neither of them moved. The wind kept whistling through the cracked window, whooo, and somewhere below in the castle a rooster crowed once, badly, cock-a-doo—, cutting off halfway as though even the animals here couldn't quite manage things properly.
"Logan?" Her voice cracked on the single syllable, disbelief and hope tangled together so tightly he couldn't tell which one was winning. "You're— you're awake. You're really awake."
'I am,' he thought, watching her carefully, cataloguing every detail his borrowed memories hadn't already given him — the way her knuckles had gone white gripping the windowsill, the way her bare feet, just as cold as his own from the look of it, were tucked up beneath the hem of her nightdress like she'd been sitting there for hours. 'And apparently you've been terrified I wasn't going to be.'
"I'm awake," he said instead, keeping his voice gentle, unsure yet how Logan usually spoke to her, unsure whether gentle was even a register the old Logan had ever bothered using. Better to default to kindness and adjust later if it struck the memories as strange. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you."
She was off the windowsill and across the hall before he finished the sentence, bare feet slapping stone, pat-pat-pat-pat, and then she collided into him hard enough that he had to brace against the wall to keep them both upright. Thin arms wrapped around his middle, gripping tight, her face pressed into his robe, and he felt more than heard the sob she'd apparently been holding back finally break loose.
"Aldric said—" she started, muffled against the fabric, "he said you might not— that the fever might— and I didn't want to believe him, but everyone kept looking so sad, and nobody would tell me anything, and I thought—"
"Hey. Hey." He put a hand on her back, awkward at first, unfamiliar with the motion, then steadier once instinct — or maybe just the sheer unmistakable wrongness of a nine-year-old crying alone in a freezing hallway — took over. "I'm here. Still breathing. Still annoyingly alive, apparently."
She let out a wet laugh that was half hiccup, hic, and pulled back just enough to look up at him, swiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her nightdress. "You don't sound like you."
'Perceptive.'
He kept his expression as steady as he could manage. "Almost dying does strange things to a person, I hear."
Tess studied him a moment longer, something searching in her expression that made him distinctly uncomfortable — as though some part of her, some instinct too young to have words for it yet, sensed that the brother standing in front of her wasn't entirely the one who'd fallen off that horse three nights ago. But whatever she saw, or thought she saw, she didn't push. She was nine, and her brother was alive, and apparently that was enough for now.
"You're freezing," she said instead, glancing down at his bare feet. "And you shouldn't be out of bed. Aldric said—"
"Aldric," he said, with more dryness than he intended, "can tell me himself when I see him." He crouched, ignoring the twinge in legs unused to the movement, so he was closer to her eye level. "How long have you been sitting out here?"
Tess looked away, which was answer enough.
"Tess."
"...Since Aldric came out of your room the second time and wouldn't look at me," she admitted quietly. "I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking—" She stopped herself, jaw tightening in a way that made her look, for just a moment, far older than nine.
He filed that away too. A castle this poor, a family this small, and a little girl who'd apparently learned to expect the worst before anyone had to tell her outright. That wasn't a childhood. That was survival dressed up in a nightdress.
'Alright.' Something settled in his chest, cold and clear and entirely new — not Logan's laziness, not Logan's indifference, but something closer to resolve. 'Whatever else this body used to be, that changes now.'
"Come on," he said, straightening, offering her his hand. "It's freezing out here, and if I collapse in this hallway because some overzealous physician decides I've overexerted myself, you'll never let me hear the end of it."
That earned him a small, watery laugh, and small fingers slipped into his — cold, far too cold for a child sleeping under her own family's roof, he noted grimly — as she fell into step beside him.
"Where are we going?"
'That,' he thought, glancing down the long, cobweb-draped hall toward the stairs, toward the rest of a castle he hadn't seen yet and a barony he knew even less about, toward two glowing systems waiting patiently behind his eyes for him to figure out what to do with them, 'is an excellent question.'
"To find out exactly how bad things are," he said aloud. "And then to start fixing them."
Tess blinked up at him, clearly unconvinced this was something her brother — the Logan she'd grown up watching drink and gamble and ignore every single one of his responsibilities — would ever say. But she didn't argue. She just held his hand a little tighter as they walked.
They reached the top of the stairwell a few minutes later, and he stopped there without meaning to, taken by the view down into the great hall below. Grey morning light filtered weakly through tall, narrow windows, catching dust motes that drifted lazily through the air like the whole room was suspended in amber. The hall itself had clearly been grand once — high vaulted ceilings, a hearth large enough to roast a boar whole, long banners bearing the mountain-and-sword sigil hanging from the rafters. But the hearth sat cold and empty, ash long since swept but never relit, and two of the banners had torn loose from their moorings at some point and never been rehung, left crumpled in a heap against the wall like nobody had the energy to care.
A single servant moved through the space below, an older woman with a broom, sweeping at flagstones that would need far more than sweeping to look presentable again — shh, shh, shh — the sound small and lonely in a hall built to hold hundreds.
'Family Prestige: very low,' he thought grimly, echoing the phrase the system had shown him without being asked. 'No arguments here.'
Tess tugged gently at his hand, drawing his attention back down to her upturned face. "You're staring again," she said. "You do that a lot now. You didn't used to just — look at things."
'No,' he thought, glancing once more at the cold hearth, the torn banners, the single tired servant sweeping a hall too big for her, 'I don't imagine he did.'
"Guess almost dying gives a man perspective," he said instead, and started them both down the stairs, boards protesting beneath their combined weight, creak, creak, each step carrying him further from the bed he'd woken in and closer to whatever remained of the family he'd apparently agreed, somewhere between one life and the next, to save.