The café was quiet on Tuesday mornings.
Adrian had stopped fighting this sometime in his second year — no special offers, no early open, just the knowledge that Tuesdays moved slowly and the week would find its own pace. He restocked on Tuesdays. Fixed small things. Sat with his coffee longer than he should.
Magnar came downstairs at half seven to find him doing exactly that — leaning against the counter with both hands around a cup, looking at nothing in particular with the expression of someone whose mind had gone somewhere and not fully returned.
He poured without being asked and sat at the near end of the counter.
They were quiet for a while. Then Adrian set his cup down and said, without preamble: "I need to ask you something."
Magnar waited.
"You're capable," Adrian said. "More than capable. I've seen enough people come through here to know the difference between someone figuring themselves out and someone who already has. You handle yourself like a man who's handled a great deal more than this." He gestured at the room, the café, the general smallness of it. "And you've been working for a bed and meals for months. No complaints, no ambition I can see, nothing." He looked at him directly. "So I need to know — are you running from something? The law, someone, something you did? Because I'd rather ask you plainly than keep wondering."
"I'm not running," Magnar said.
"You're sure."
"I'm not a criminal. I'm not a threat to you or this place or anyone in it."
Adrian looked at him for a long moment, then exhaled and picked his cup back up. "Alright. I believe you." He turned the cup in his hands. "So then what is it? Where are you actually from? Because every time I get close to a real answer you give me something that sounds like one and isn't."
Magnar was quiet for a moment.
"I'm from somewhere that doesn't exist anymore," he said. "Not destroyed. Gone, in a way I don't have good language for yet. It was real. I came from there. There's no path back." He kept his voice level. "I've been looking for something for a long time. What I'm looking for is connected to why I'm here, in this city, in this building. It isn't something I can explain fully — not because I don't want to, but because it requires context you don't have, and I don't know how to give you that context without it sounding like I've lost my mind."
Adrian was quiet.
"Your family," Magnar said. "The questions I've been asking — they're connected to it. The name. The portrait. I don't have enough yet to tell you in a way that would be honest rather than alarming. But it isn't nothing."
Something crossed Adrian's face — not suspicion, more like a man deciding what he could reasonably hold onto. "You're going to figure out whatever it is you're figuring out," he said. "And then what?"
"Then I'll tell you. Everything I can." Magnar met his eyes. "You've been good to me, Adrian. More than you had any reason to be. I want you to know I understand that. When this is easier to explain, I will explain it. Even if it takes a while."
Adrian held the look for a moment. Then he turned back to the shelf. "I'm going to hold you to that," he said. Quieter. Not satisfied — but not closed.
"Good," Magnar said.
He finished his coffee and set the cup down.
Upstairs, he reached inward the way he had every morning since arriving — the same reach into the same silence, the same nothing answering back. Except this time it wasn't nothing.
He went very still.
It was small. Smaller than anything useful, smaller than what a first-year student at Ferren's academy could have managed on the worst day of their training. A warmth at the very bottom of what he could feel, like pressing your hand against stone that had been in sunlight hours ago. Not power. Just the ghost of the architecture that had once held it.
He didn't reach for it. Didn't test it. He had lost it once already in ways he still didn't fully understand, and whatever had begun here was too fragile to risk with impatience. He simply noted it — that it was there, that it hadn't been there yesterday, that something in the work he was doing across both timelines had begun to move something that five months of mornings had not.
It wasn't hope exactly. It was more precise than that. Evidence.
He let the pull take him.
The terrain had been opening for the better part of an hour — forest giving way to cultivated land, then to scattered outer settlements in the afternoon light. The road improved steadily underfoot, packed earth becoming fitted stone, each block a slightly different shade from the last. Centuries of repair, laid one generation over another.
Then Drevane appeared on the low rise ahead.
Magnar stopped walking without meaning to.
It was not Aldvorne. Aldvorne had been built inward — walls, gates, the deliberate architecture of a city that knew what it was. Drevane spread. Its edges bled into market grounds without clear boundary, buildings growing taller toward the center without ever quite becoming imposing. A place that had grown because people kept arriving, not because anyone had drawn a plan.
"Two hundred thousand people," Orvyn said, stopping beside him. "Roughly. A third of them are never here long enough to be counted properly."
"You grew up in the empire," Magnar said. "Not here."
"Eastern edge. A city called Vareth, two days from the coast." He looked at Drevane with the easy familiarity of someone on their sixth visit. "My father was a structural mage. Bridge work. He wanted me to follow him into it."
"You didn't."
"I was better with water than earth, which he took personally for about two years and then got over." His voice dropped slightly — not grief exactly, just the weight of something old. "He came around when I made senior disciple. Brought the whole family to Aldvorne for the ceremony. Shook Ferren's hand for longer than anyone needed." A brief pause. "He died the following winter. So I'm glad he came."
Magnar said nothing. Let it sit.
After a moment Orvyn adjusted his pack and started walking again. "The Northwestern quarter is north of the main avenue. Southwestern is south. The avenue itself belongs technically to neither, which is why every significant negotiation in the last forty years has happened within three blocks of it." He glanced over. "The food is better on the southern side."
"You've said that twice."
"It bears repeating." He nodded toward the city's edge, where the outer market was already audible before it was visible. "Come on. I'll show you where we're staying."
Magnar took one more look at Drevane — warm-stoned, unhurried, sitting at the intersection of two empires with the ease of a place that had long since stopped being concerned about either — and followed.