Ryazania POV:
There's something hollow about silence when it becomes too familiar.
By the time the sun touched the edges of the mountains again, I had stopped trying to sleep. Dreams had grown thin lately, shadows stretched over memory, not comfort. I sat alone by the workshop's window, watching the press as if it could speak.
In another life, I might've been a printer. A scholar. A girl without a blade.
But not in this one.
In this one, truth was always a transaction, and the cost was never paid in coin.
The press, for all its simplicity, was no longer a machine to me. It was a mirror. With every page it yielded, it revealed more about the world we lived in and the people willing to bend it. To own the flow of knowledge was to command history itself. Not through swords, but through stories.
Vengir had once told me that power lies in blood. That thrones were won by the sharpened edge of a weapon, not by the blunt force of ink.
But that was only half the truth.
Power lies in belief.
And belief can be printed.
I closed my eyes and let the system drift quietly through my thoughts, its calm logic brushing against my emotions like wind across stone.
[Unregistered signal response: Delayed. Proximity unknown.][Speculative trace: Memory construct. Unconfirmed match with "Subject: Ryuu."]
Hope is a dangerous thing. But so is resignation.
I left the workshop as dawn crept in, its fingers golden and thin, like the memory of warmth after a long winter. The halls were empty. Even Velna was nowhere to be seen. The manor had a way of feeling like a painting when no one else stirred: perfect, polished, and entirely unreal.
It made me wonder how long it could last.
Garret Halven POV:
The first morning light slipped through the crystalline slats of Ivoria's lower gate, catching the dust in beams of fire and glass.
I'd returned from the underground with more questions than orders and Vos had been quiet ever since. The Watchers were preparing something. That much was clear.
But it wasn't the girl they feared.
It was the idea she carried.
The empire had always believed in its own permanence. Its cities were built like temples, its laws carved into memory, its rulers cloaked in ceremonial absolutes. But empires do not fall from fire or rebellion alone.
They fall when people begin to think differently.
And that press, her press, was doing exactly that.
Information was a whisper when guarded. It became thunder when freed.
I lit a cigarette beneath the stonework arch of the outer hold. My breath mingled with the smoke, vanishing into morning's chill.
I had seen too many revolutions begin with blood.
This one was beginning with ink.
Ryazania POV:
By midday, word had come.
A reply. Not from Ryuu. Not yet.
But from someone who remembered him.
It was a scrawled note delivered in silence, slipped beneath the manor gate and signed only with a symbol I did not recognize, an eclipse wreathed in chains. The handwriting was rushed, but deliberate.
"The boy you seek was seen near the Crystal Divide. Wounded. Taken. The Order remembers his face. Seek the Hollow Vale. But beware… he is not alone anymore."
The system pulsed.
[Symbol match: 72% probability – Obscured Faction: Eclipse Order. Alignment: Fractured Neutrality.][Recommended action: Immediate analysis or consultation.]
I folded the note and stared out at the horizon, my thoughts like embers drifting into unknown winds.
Was Ryuu even still himself?
What do years, pain, and isolation carve into a person? What remains, and what is replaced?
And deeper still, what would I become if I found him only to learn I was too late?
Philosophy often says that the journey matters more than the destination.
But philosophers don't bleed for their truths.
They don't dig through ruins of empires with swords drawn and names clutched tight in their chests.
They don't wake up with the weight of another world's silence pressing on their shoulders.
I wasn't a philosopher.
But I was beginning to understand.
Ideas are the sharpest blades.
Ryazania POV
Evening returned with a quiet tension.
Vengir had sensed it too, the way the servants moved more cautiously, how Velna's polite words held an edge of rehearsal. Something had shifted.
I held the note tight in my palm as we walked the edge of the manor gardens, beyond where any polite conversation might reach. Lanterns burned in the distance, but the stars above felt closer, colder.
"We're being watched," Vengir muttered.
"We've been watched," I corrected. "Now they're simply waiting."
He grunted. "Waiting for what?"
"For me to become the threat they fear I am."
The words escaped before I could stop them. Maybe I'd always known this path would narrow, not widen. That every choice I made would lead toward a single point of confrontation.
That even hope had a cost.
I stopped at the edge of a small stone bridge and unfolded the message again.
The Order remembers his face.
There were so many ways to read those words. Reverence. Pity. Warning.
And just beneath them, a sentence I had missed the first time, scrawled faintly in the margin:
He dreams in pieces.
I didn't know what that meant. Not yet. But it felt true.
Ryuu POV
He stood at the edge of the frozen cliff, wind biting at the scars on his face. Snow clung to his coat, and the shadows behind him whispered in tongues no man should understand.
Ryuu wasn't sure how long he had been in the Hollow Vale.
Time didn't pass here. It unraveled.
He remembered being taken. The pain. The strange light. The voice that filled his veins and rewrote the rhythm of his pulse. He had resisted at first. Cried out. Fought. But over time, the voice stopped sounding foreign.
And started sounding like him.
Now, it came not as words, but as certainty.
You are the bridge, it said once in a dream soaked with blood and stars. Not between worlds, but between what was and what must be.
He stared down at his hands. Once, they had trembled with fear.
Now, they trembled with potential.
Somewhere beyond the mountains, beyond frost and fire, he felt a pull. Not like memory. Not like pain.
Like gravity.
Her name brushed his thoughts like warmth he could no longer hold.
Ryazania.
If he remembered anything, it was the way she looked at the world. Like it could still be saved.
He wasn't sure he believed that anymore.
But he wanted her to try.
Ryazania POV
We're leaving at dawn, I said.
Vengir nodded. "Where?"
I opened my hand, let the note catch the moonlight.
To the Hollow Vale.
He didn't speak for a while. Just looked out toward the eastern ridgeline, where distant storms gathered in silence.
Finally, he muttered, "If I die in a haunted valley filled with snow and riddles, I'm blaming you."
I smiled faintly. "Noted."
And yet, as I stood there, listening to the garden's stillness, I felt the world stretching again, like a bowstring drawn too far.