Ten Minutes to Midnight - The Falling Nest at Crow's Gate

The wooden arch at the eas

The wooden arch at the eastern lip of

Oakhaven had been leaning four inches to the left for as long as anyone could remember.

Two hundred and thirty years of damp mountain mist had rotted the timber joints, turning the carved benediction—*Peace and

Rains*—into an illegible smudge of gray moss.Felix

Lin stood right beneath the heaviest crossbeam, his head tilted back at an angle that made his neck ache.He was eighteen, though his knees cracked like an old man’s when the air turned cold.

He wore a linen robe the color of faded tea, frayed at the cuffs where his mother had mended it twice with mismatched thread.

To anyone passing the gate—farmers hauling carts of winter turnips, women carrying baskets of damp laundry to the creek—he looked thoroughly useless.

A boy who ought to be tending his father’s shop, instead standing in the dirt, staring at a beam.”You’ve been up there three minutes,” a voice said.Felix didn’t look down immediately.

He let his eyes linger on a clump of dry clover sprouting from a mortar crack. “Four, actually.”The girl standing across the narrow gravel lane wasn’t from

She was maybe fourteen, thin-shouldered, wearing a dark gray travelling coat that smelled faintly of horse sweat and bitter herbs.

Her hair was tied back in two tight, neat braids that didn’t swing when she moved.

Her eyes were too large for her narrow face, dark and sharp, assessing him the way a butcher assesses a tough cut of mutton.”Why?” she asked.

Her tone wasn’t rude; it was worse.

It was methodically inquisitive.

Like an auditor checking tax ledgers.”It’s a long story,” Felix muttered, finally lowering his chin with a soft crack.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Hard to explain to someone who hasn’t spent three years watching a town dry up.””Try.”Felix sighed.

He disliked people who spoke in single-word imperatives.

It reminded him of the mid-level bureaucrats from his previous life—the ones who sat behind glass partitions with rubber stamps, asking for forms he’d never been given. *God, how long had it been?* two years?

Sometimes the memory of asphalt, diesel exhaust, and air-conditioned lecture halls felt like a dream he’d had during a fever.“There’s a twig nest up there,” Felix pointed a thumb toward the underside of the eave. “Right where the mortise joint is slipping.

The mortar gave out during yesterday’s frost.

In about two minutes, a draft from the eastern gulch is going to hit that ridge.

The beam will shift an inch.

The nest falls.”The girl raised her eyes.

She stared at the archway for a long five seconds.

The timber was solid oak, thick as a man’s thigh, black with age and resin.

From where she stood, the underside was shrouded in shadow.

There was no visible nest, no sway in the wood, no sound except the distant gurgle of water in the drainage ditch.“You can’t see a nest from here,” she said flatly.”No,” Felix agreed. “You can’t.””Then you’re guessing.””I’m predicting,” Felix corrected. “There’s a difference.

Guessing is what my father does when he buys salt pork from the southern merchants.

Predicting is what happens when you’ve had nothing to do for two weeks except watch the wind.”The girl blinked.

A tiny crease formed between her narrow eyebrows, the first sign of crack in her rigid composure. “They call you the

Lin, don’t they?””They call me

Odd,” he corrected mildly. “Or ‘that

Lin boy who caught a chill two winters ago and came out of it talking like a disgraced clerk from the capital.’ Take your pick.”She didn’t smile.

She took one small step closer, her leather boots crunching on the river stones. “Is it true you ask people if they’ve come to ‘census the population’?”Felix winced. *Right.

That slip-up from last autumn.* He’d asked the local magistrate’s clerk if he was doing a door-to-door census, and the man had looked at him as if he’d spoken in ancient

Imperial. “It was a joke.

It didn’t translate well.””Translate?””Never mind,” Felix waved a hand, suddenly feeling tired.

The sun was breaking over the eastern ridge now, casting long, sharp shadows across the ruts in the dirt road.

The air smelled of woodsmoke and damp pine needles.

It was a good morning, or it would have been if this strange girl hadn’t decided to conduct a cross-examination in the middle of the street. “Look, little sister, if you’re looking for the magistrate’s office, it’s three lanes back.

If you’re looking for tea, the stall near the well brews things that taste like boiled grass, but it’s hot.”The girl didn’t answer.

She gave him one last, long look—a look that felt uncomfortably like a livestock dealer checking a horse’s teeth—then bowed her head a fraction of an inch.

Without another word, she turned on her heel and walked away, her gray coat snapping around her thin ankles.Felix watched her cross the square and approach a plain, iron-rimmed carriage parked near the apothecary’s shop.

Two heavy gray draft horses stood in the traces, their breath blooming in the crisp morning air.The girl didn’t get into the cab.

She climbed onto the driver’s bench with practiced, fluid efficiency, picked up the leather reins, and settled them between her fingers.From inside the darkened cab, a voice spoke.

It was a woman’s voice—clear, cold, and possessing that faint, terrible edge of casual authority that only came from generations of owning land and hanging poachers.”Did you measure him?” the voice asked.”His speech is coherent,

Clara,” the girl replied, her eyes fixed on the horses’ ears. “Logical, though eccentric.

The locals believe his mind was damaged by the lung-fever two years back.

He speaks in idioms no one recognizes.””And the arch?””He claims a nest will fall.

I inspected the timber.

There is no structural instability visible from the road.

I cannot confirm if there are birds inside.”A short silence followed from inside the carriage.

The horses shifted, their iron shoes clicking against the cobbles.”A nest,” the woman’s voice murmured.

There was a soft, dry rustle of silk—the sound of someone turning the page of a heavy ledger. “How wonderfully absurd.

My grandfather used to tell a story about *him*.

Before the border wars, before the grand campaigns, he used to stand in the middle of the capital market when the sky was clear as glass and yell for everyone to take in their drying linen because it was about to rain.”The girl at the reins didn’t turn.

But her shoulders went rigid. “The

Founder?””Who else?” The voice inside the cab sounded lighter now, touched by an icy sort of amusement. “When we reach the district seat at

Marches, give the directive to

Administrator

Have the boy named for the

Aethelgard trials.

The spring draft is due anyway.”The girl blinked. “You want to recommend a shopkeeper’s son for

Without testing his

Core?””If he has talent, the

Academy will find it.

If he is merely a fool who stares at birds, the wilderness between here and the mountains will swallow him quietly.

Either way, it settles the matter.” The voice grew sharper. “And tell

Li to deal with

Zhang while he’s at it.

A commoner with seven private manors on a town magistrate’s salary is getting vulgar.

Transfer him to the

Dragon-Snake border garrison.

If he survives three years in the mud, he can keep three of them.””Understood,

Clara?””Yes?””Ensure my name does not appear on the recommendation paper.

I have no desire to explain to the

Ministry why

I am sending town idiots to the

Imperial exams.”The whip cracked softly against the air.

The gray horses strained against their collars, and the heavy carriage rumbled over the gravel, heading north toward the mountain pass.—Under the decaying archway,

Felix let out a long breath.He reached into his sleeve, his fingers brushing against something small, smooth, and cold.

A round glass marble—the only thing he’d had in his pocket the afternoon he’d slipped on the wet stairs behind his university dormitory, struck his temple against a brick wall, and woken up six hundred years into the past in a world that smelled of wood ash and horse dung.He stared at the wood above him.*Crack.*It wasn’t a loud sound.

Just a dry, snapping pop as a swollen spruce peg gave way under the strain of fifty years of dry rot.

A corner of the carved fly-eave tilted three inches.A sudden, sharp gust of wind came whistling down from the eastern ravine, catching the exposed underside of the beam.A bundle of dark, matted straw and dried mud separated from the wood, plunging straight down toward the gravel lane.Felix didn’t move his feet.

He simply gathered the hem of his long linen coat with both hands, forming a wide, loose hammock between his knees.*Thump.*The nest landed square in the cloth.

A cloud of dust and dried pine needles puffed up into his face, making him sneeze violently.

Inside the tangled circle of twigs, two tiny, featherless chicks, no bigger than his thumb, opened their wide yellow beaks and hissed blindly at the morning light.Felix grinned.

It was a stupid, helpless sort of grin that made him look three years younger than he was.”Got you,” he whispered.He turned and trotted down the alleyway, his soft-soled cloth shoes slapping against the smooth, damp flagstones.

He passed the fishmonger setting out his buckets of creek trout, passed the butcher wiping down his greasy oak block.”Watch your feet,

Second!” the butcher yelled after him, wiping a red hand on his apron. “Grown man running around catching sparrows like a ten-year-old!””They’re swallows,

Vance!” Felix called back without slowing down. “Big difference!

Swallows eat mosquitoes; sparrows just eat your grain!”He burst through the painted wooden gates of his father’s courtyard, his lungs burning pleasantly in the chill morning air. “Tillie!

Tillie, come out here!

Look what your idiot brother brought you!”A tiny figure exploded out of the kitchen doorway.

She couldn’t have been more than eleven, wearing a quilted padded jacket that was three sizes too big for her, her thin arms sticking out like broom handles.

Her face was smudged with black ink across one cheek.”What is it?

Did you find the honey cakes?” she squeaked, skidding to a stop on the slick gravel.”Better,” Felix held out the nest.Tillie froze.

Her eyes, already absurdly large for her small, pinched face, went as wide as copper coins.

She looked at the tiny, wriggling yellow beaks, then up at

Felix, then back at the nest. “Birds?

They didn’t smash?””I caught them,” Felix said proudly, puffing out his chest. “Right under the east gate arch.

Just dropped right into my lap.””You didn’t climb up there, did you?”A woman stepped out from the shade of the kitchen porch.

She was in her late thirties, her hair pinned back with a plain brass needle.

Her eyes were the exact shape of

Felix’s, but where his were lazy and distracted, hers were lined with the sharp, permanent worry of a mother who had spent two weeks sitting beside a cold bed, listening to her only son cough up black phlegm.”I didn’t climb anything,

Ma,” Felix said quickly, holding his arms out to show his clean sleeves. “I swear.

The beam snapped.

I was just standing there.”His mother looked at his clothes, checking for mud or tears.

Finding none, her shoulders relaxed a fraction.

She shook her head, though a faint, reluctant smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Tillie, go wash that ink off your chin before your father sees it.

Felix, get those things out of the wind.

If they die in the house, your sister will cry for three days.””Yes,

Ma,” Felix grinned.An hour later, the sun was high enough to melt the frost on the tiles.

Tillie sat on the low wooden bench beneath the window, watching the two chicks gulp down tiny slivers of soaked grain from the tip of a bamboo splinter.”This one is named

Felix,” Tillie announced, pointing a grubby finger at the larger chick. “And this one is

Tillie.”Felix raised an eyebrow. “You want to name a bird after yourself?

That means every time it poops in the basket, you’re technically insulting your own honor.”Tillie scowled at him, sticking out her tongue. “It’s better than calling them ‘Second

Master’ like the people at the well do.”Felix chuckled, leaning his head back against the whitewashed wall.

The wood was warm where the sun hit it.

In the main room behind them, he could hear his father rustling through the account ledgers, muttering under his breath about the price of tea leaves in the southern provinces.

His mother was chopping salted cabbage in the kitchen, the steady, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* of the heavy cleaver echoing through the yard.It was a small life.

Safe.When he had first woken up in this body, burning with fever and unable to remember his own name, he had been terrified.

He had expected a world of flying swords, immortal sects, and demonic overlords who flattened mountains with a flick of their sleeves.

Oakhaven was just a dusty market town at the edge of nowhere.

The most dangerous thing in town was

Zhang’s aggressive guard dog, and the grandest building was the two-story grain warehouse near the river.He liked it this way.

He didn’t want to conquer anything.

He didn’t want to cultivate immortal spirits or fight dragon-monsters.

He just wanted to eat his mother’s pickled cabbage, teach his sister basic arithmetic so she wouldn’t get cheated by the silk merchants, and occasionally use his strange little secret to keep a nest of swallows from breaking on the cobblestones.He closed his eyes, letting the morning sun soak into his skin.He didn’t know that three miles to the north, on the dusty high road to

Marches, a gray carriage was rolling through the pines.

He didn’t know that inside a leather satchel on the driver’s bench lay a thick piece of yellow parchment stamped with the heavy wax seal of the

Governor.And he certainly didn’t know that in less than forty-eight hours, his small, quiet world would be torn open from the inside out.