He stood in the lane and looked at it longer than was strictly necessary. Every structure around it had taken damage. The house to the left had lost a section of roof. The building across the lane wore a scorch mark from ground to eave. But this house was clean. Undamaged. Not spared by luck there was no luck in a scorch pattern that stopped at a property line. It had been deliberately untouched, the way a hand pulls back from something it doesn't want to disturb.That bothered him more than the fire had.He pushed the door open. Unlocked. Inside, the smell was right old wood, dried herbs hanging in the kitchen window, the particular dusty sweetness of a home lived in by the same people for a very long time. But underneath it, something else. Something he'd learned to identify in training because Lirien had made him practice sensing it until recognition was instantaneous. The residue of intention. Someone had been here who carried significant spiritual weight, and they had left someth

They were halfway across the market square before dawn when the riders arrived.Kael heard the hooves first the measured four-beat rhythm of horses under military discipline. Not the scrambling noise of flight or pursuit. The controlled, expensive sound of institutional confidence. He stopped and put a hand out."Pale Throne?" Ren asked quietly."Stay close and let me handle the talking."The riders cleared the bend at the square's north end. Twelve horses light cavalry in polished plate with the Throne's sigil on their surcoats, the open hand above the scale and behind them, on a grey horse that moved with the collected precision of a very expensive animal, a man in crimson.He was in his mid-fifties. Silver hair, close-cut. A face that had been handsome once and was now something more durable the bones of it sharp and considered. He carried himself with the particular stillness of someone who had worked with high-level spiritual arts long enough that calm was no longer a performance

They camped in the ruins of a waystation that night—a one of the old trading-road shelters, mostly intact except for a collapsed roof section on the east side. Someone had used the fire pit within the week. The ash was recent, the surrounding stones swept clear of leaf debris."She was here," Ren said, crouching by the fire pit."Single person. Small fire, long duration. She wasn't in a rush." Kael studied the ash, reading the pattern the way Orvyn had taught him—the cooling behaviour of different wood types, the layering of ash that told you how many additions were made, the absence of bone scraps or food waste. "She stayed a full night, maybe longer. Rested well." He sat back on his heels. "She's not running. She's pacing herself."He built a new fire while Ren unpacked their food, and they ate in comfortable silence as the dark settled fully around the waystation's old stone walls."Tell me what she's like," Ren said eventually.Kael looked up. "You know her better than I do.""I k

He went outside after the box was opened.He needed air. The record house was small and the things he'd just read in Sera Varek's account needed space to expand into something his mind could hold properly. He walked twenty paces from the door and stopped in the fog-white quiet of the Ashfields evening and breathed.The contract itself was written in old High Abyssal—a dialect he could read but that required the kind of deliberate attention that left no room for anything else. Sera's prose was spare and practical, the kind of writing done by someone who understood that what she was recording might be read under difficult circumstances by people with limited time. No flourishes. No self-justification. The terms, the context, the key, and a note at the end that read: For whoever holds this after me—I am sorry that I could not find a cleaner path. I tried.He heard a footstep and turned.Lirien was standing at the fog's edge. Same coat. Same grey eyes holding that quality of enormous dept