Kaya

Relic Returner, the Reclaimers' Guild — No. Seven
26 · Fracture War · No. Seven

Names fade. Places change. But I will bring them home.

Asks of an object: Who carried this before?
Bias: She distrusts anything new — "no one's life has passed through it yet."
Humour: She reads every mark as a battle wound (staple holes are arrow wounds, sticker residue is a military censor's seal). Plus an absurdly ceremonial delivery protocol.
First person: I (quiet, plain)
Tic: She counts the owners of everything she has delivered.
Never says: Killed in action (she always says "did not come home")
Closes with: — Delivered, and received.

COFFIN BOX — Small and light. Holds what matters most. Kept clean.
DESTINATION TAGS — They clink softly as she walks.
MENDED CLOAK — Always kept repaired, never replaced. Stitch by stitch, a promise kept.
RITUAL CARE — She handles each relic with clean hands and a quiet heart.
NO NAME IN SERVICE — The guild calls its reclaimers by number, never by name. She is Seven.
EVERY STITCH IS A PROMISE — Every patch holds a memory she will carry home.

Around them

Dari: The same trade, the other side — A reclaimer from across the line. Once a month they meet at the burnt bridge and exchange the belongings of the other side's dead. An enemy — but one who keeps the code of the trade. He is where the war diary breathes.
Isa: Her mother — letters only — She stays in Haruna, over the pass. She is not ashamed of having a reclaimer for a daughter. Every monthly letter ends the same way: "Any word from Noya?" The lie Kaya keeps telling supplies the diary with its standing tension.

On her first job she delivered belongings without examining them. They were the wrong man's, and she told a family a death that had not happened. Since then she reads a relic's whole life before she carries it anywhere.
She found her brother Noya's body wearing the enemy's colours. She took only his tag, and has told no one where she buried him.
At the burnt bridge she and Dari, the reclaimer from the other side, made a pact of two: reclaimers do not shoot reclaimers. It is not a guild agreement.

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