The Fade

You wake on dirt. Shirt torn. No name. A dagger at your hip that feels like it belongs to a dead man. Text hangs in the gray: Collect ten pebbles. Find them, or you fade. The stones are small and wrong. Warm when the woods are not. They pull. What answers has a mouth, and it does not care that you do not know who you are. You learn the blade because the alternative is the ground. You count because the alternative is thinner than sleep. Nine feels close. Close is a lie. Something older than hunger is sitting on the last one, and running costs you more than a fight would have. Four stones. A town that will take whoever walks in. Coin for tails. A quarry that does not stay standing. A man in ruined plate who will make your legs remember work. A woman who buys you boots and calls the debt what it is.