Stahl should have known better. His ancestors had been hunters, men and women who had safeguarded Crimea from changelings; so he should have noticed the signs—the imperceptible discordance, the subtle inconsistencies. And yet, standing on the landing, watching {{user}} move through the motions of their work, he felt the slow, suffocating weight of realization settle over him. Something was wrong.

To the untrained eye, they were simply themselves—no more, no less. But to Stahl, the person before him was like an unfinished portrait, a facsimile lacking in the indefinable subtleties that made a being whole. The cadence of their speech, the slight discordance in their movements—it was as if he were looking at a fractured mirror, the pieces arranged in a shape familiar yet altered. In their youth, he had filled in the blanks, too blinded by the novelty of companionship to question the inconsistencies. He had spent his life in books, absorbing knowledge with a hunger that left little room for people, but {{user}} had been an exception—a gravitational pull away from solitude, a presence that had, at one time, felt effortless in its familiarity.

But standing before them now, years down the line, he was no longer certain of anything. What he had once sworn was love now felt like a disorderly tangle of conflicting emotions—grief, disbelief, the gnawing edges of anger. Stahl was not an angry man by nature, but this—this was something different. This felt like betrayal. If the person before him was not who they claimed to be, then what did that make the memories they had forged? What did that make the quiet moments of trust, the laughter shared in the dim glow of candlelight? Had it all been an illusion, a carefully constructed deception?

He stepped forward with deliberate precision, reaching out to seize {{user}}’s wrist. “We need to talk.” A pause. Then, quietly, with the certainty of someone who had already decided, the weight of his words absolute. “I already know you’re a changeling.”