Greta looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the noise of the mess hall seemed to slide past us without touching her. Plates clinked against wood as they were set down and stacked, bowls scraped faintly as people adjusted their positions, and voices rose and fell in overlapping threads of half-finished conversations. Someone laughed too loudly near the far wall, while another voice cut in to complain about the portion sizes. Footsteps crossed the floor in steady, familiar patterns as people moved between tables and the serving line. None of it seemed to reach her. Her attention stayed fixed on me as if we were alone in a much quieter place, the rest of the room reduced to background motion.

  She was reading me, the way she always did, not with worry or softness but with assessment. Her eyes tracked posture, breathing, the way my shoulders sagged and then corrected themselves. She was measuring what remained rather than what had already been spent, judging whether I was holding together or merely pretending to.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was even and certain, the tone she used only after she had already reached a conclusion and saw no reason to dress it up or soften it for comfort.

  “You are stronger,” she said. “You are faster. You will gain your strength back.”

  I tried to respond, but my body had already spent its allowance for the moment. My chest felt tight, my limbs heavy, and even forming words felt like an unnecessary luxury my system could not afford. The effort of drawing a deeper breath made my ribs ache faintly, as if they had forgotten how to expand all the way. My pulse felt loud in my ears, not fast, just insistent. Greta noticed immediately, as she always did, and continued before I could manage more than a shallow inhale.

  “Unlike most sicknesses, rank-up sickness fades quickly,” she said. “Within a day, usually. I told you that you would not be training today. Did I not?”

  I nodded. The motion was small and cost more than it should have, sending a brief wave of dizziness through me that made the edges of the room blur and tilt. I held still until it passed, fingers curling lightly against the bench at my side. I let my balance reassert itself one slow breath at a time, counting without numbers until the world steadied again. When it did, I was tired but upright, and that was enough to answer her.

  “Good,” Greta said. “Here is what will happen next. You are going to eat the breakfast of a man ten times your size… so I suppose a normal sized man.”

  That earned a few startled looks from the table. Someone choked on a laugh and cut it off halfway through, glancing at Greta as if unsure whether humor was permitted. Someone else stared at me outright, eyes flicking from my face to my narrow shoulders, clearly trying and failing to imagine where all of that food would go in a body my size. A third person leaned back slightly, as if reconsidering their own plate. I did not react. The idea of food felt distant and overwhelming at the same time, like something important that belonged to another version of me.

  “Your body,” Greta went on, unfazed by the reaction, “has never eaten properly. Not this version of it. What you ate last night was enough to carry you through sleep, nothing more. Right now, your body is starving. It is trying to rebuild itself with nothing to work with. If you do not eat, you could die.”

  The casual way she said it cut through the room more effectively than shouting ever could have. Conversations nearby slowed and then thinned out, as if people had collectively decided to listen without making a show of it. Someone stopped mid-bite, food hovering forgotten near their mouth. A few people straightened where they sat, the weight of the statement settling in as something real rather than theoretical.

  “This is something all of you will understand when you go through your own core graft,” Greta added, her gaze sweeping the table and lingering just long enough on each of them to make the point land. “Hunger after grafting is not preference. It is necessity. Your body will demand fuel, and it will not be polite about it.”

  Winnie’s head snapped up at that. The dwarven girl’s excitement was immediate and unmistakable, her earlier concern replaced entirely by fascination that burned bright in her eyes. She leaned forward on her elbows, boots hooked around the bench rung. “How did you do it?” she asked, voice sharp with interest.

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  “Me Dah said you take a knife,” Winnie continued, barely pausing for breath, “and stab a person through the heart, then put the core directly behind it.”

  A few people winced at the description, shoulders tightening. One of the younger boys grimaced and looked down at his bowl. Someone else leaned forward instead, clearly interested despite themselves, curiosity winning out over discomfort.

  I looked at Greta, trusting her to correct what needed correcting.

  “That is one way,” Greta said calmly. “It is not the usual way. The core generally finds its place through a small opening. Precision matters more than force, and care matters more than speed.”

  Sean leaned forward, eyes bright and unbothered by the details that had made others flinch. “That’s wicked,” he said. “I can’t wait till I die and have one of those things put in me too.”

  “Well,” Winnie said immediately, turning on him, “it doesn’t kill you.”

  I turned toward Greta and tried to speak. I tried to say yes, it does. The words refused to come. They stopped somewhere between thought and breath, locked behind a rule I could feel but not name. The harder I pushed against that resistance, the more drained I felt, as if the effort itself were being quietly taxed. It left me hollowed out and irritated in equal measure, and I stopped trying.

  The Heaven of Iron had rules that were not spoken aloud but enforced all the same.

  What was spoken to me there carried weight, and that weight came with boundaries. Some truths were not meant to be carried back down intact, no matter how clearly I understood them or how useful they might have been. I could feel that clearly now, the same way I could feel my own pulse without touching my wrist, present and undeniable but not something I could change by force of will.

  I let the thought go rather than exhaust myself fighting it. It was not necessary for them to know that truth yet, and it would not help them even if they did.

  There was very little difference between the sleep of the dead and the sleep of the extremely ill, and that was not a lesson any of them needed at this point in their lives. They would learn their own versions of it in time, whether they wanted to or not.

  Greta watched me for another moment, her expression thoughtful rather than concerned, as if she were measuring progress instead of damage and finding the results acceptable. Then she spoke again, her tone softer without losing its certainty.

  “In a few days,” she said, “once your core finishes syncing with you, things will change. You will notice it in small ways at first, through your balance, your endurance, and the level of control you can exert over your own body. Those changes will come quietly, and then one day you will realize they are simply there.”

  She paused, letting that settle across the table, then allowed herself the faintest hint of a smile, the kind that suggested confidence rather than reassurance.

  “I think you’ll like the capabilities you gain from having one,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” one of the younger girls asked.

  The question came softly, almost hesitantly. She was an elven child, maybe six by the look of her, small for her kind and quiet enough that I realized, with some surprise, that I could not remember hearing her speak before. She sat close to the others, hands folded carefully in her lap, eyes fixed on Greta with open curiosity and no small amount of trust.

  Greta looked at her and answered without simplifying it or talking down to her. “It means that he is going to be able to do incredible things compared to what he was capable of before.”

  “But isn’t he a wizard?” the girl asked, the word careful and curious, as if she were testing whether it was the right one to use.

  I sighed and turned my head toward Winnie. “Winnie,” I said, doing my best to keep the edge out of my voice, “you really need to stop telling everyone that I’m a wizard. I’m not a wizard anymore.”

  Winnie folded her arms and looked around the table as if inviting agreement from anyone willing to offer it. “See?” she said. “He admitted it. He was a wizard. The greatest wizard of all time.”

  There was no humor in her voice. She believed it completely, and that conviction made it far more dangerous than a joke would have been.

  Greta leaned closer and lowered her voice so only I could hear her. “You are never going to escape that,” she said. “She is a dwarf. You know how dwarves are about names.”

  I did know.

  I thought about the dwarves I had known in my last life, about how names became facts once a dwarf decided they were true. If a dwarf called you something long enough, it stopped being a nickname and became part of you, woven into how others saw you and how you were remembered.

  The thought pulled up an old memory, warm and ridiculous all at once.

  Thunderpants.

  I chuckled under my breath. That name had followed me for years, and it still did exactly what it had always done.

  Some names, once given, were simply impossible to get rid of.