Crayburn Cross, Mid-Velgrath Riverlands
They departed before dawn, moving light. The sky was pale iron, the road quiet but not abandoned. Caravan ruts still grooved the frost, and every third mile bore the signs of Riverwatch patrols—bootprints too clean to be bandits, and the occasional broken branch left as mark.
Aeron kept the boy close, but it was Harwin who spotted the first clue.
"There." He dismounted, brushing away pine needles from a sigil carved low into a stone post: a thistle entwined with a serpent.
"Elric's mark," Harwin muttered. "Left only for those who know where to look."
Aeron crouched beside it. The thistle was scored deep, the serpent's tail chipped—an old message, revised.
"They doubled back," he said. "Headed east again. Toward the old copper fields."
Harwin frowned. "No road there."
"Exactly."
They reached the fields by dusk. What once had been a mining village was now little more than hollow shafts and broken shanties. Snow gathered in the ruins like ghosts clinging to memory.
They made camp beneath a collapsed trestle. The boy fetched dry bark from a timberline while Harwin skinned a hare they'd found half-frozen by the stream. Aeron traced the token—the scorched coin—between his fingers, over and over.
"You know who dropped it," Harwin said, not as a question.
"I have a name," Aeron replied. "But I want a face. I want to know who else survived."
Harwin nodded, mouth full. "And if it's a trap?"
"Then it's one we walk into prepared."
They shared the fire, the three of them, but sleep did not come easily. Not for Aeron. Not that night.
Not when he heard the whistle.
Not when he saw the second signal—three glints of steel from the ridge above.
Not when the boy stirred and whispered, "Someone's watching."
Aeron didn't draw his blade. Not yet.
Instead, he reached into his satchel and placed the coin by the firelight, turning the blackened side upward.
It shone.
And from the ridge, a voice called down.
"You still carry it, then. Half a crown, half a grave."