11:45 AM.
Aldenmere City — The Copper Kettle, Main Street.
Aldenmere had three places where academy students regularly ate when they were in the city.
The first was the string of cheap quick-service stalls along the bridge approach road, which served practical food at practical speed for students who had twenty minutes and were spending them on practical errands.
The second was the practitioners' dietary establishments in the southern quarter, which served high-mana-content preparation meals that were excellent for post-training recovery and priced accordingly.
The third was the Copper Kettle on the main commercial street, which was neither cheap nor specialized and had no particular claim to being the best food in the city, but which had, in the twelve years it had been operating, accumulated the specific quality of a place that felt like it had been in your neighborhood forever, even the first time you walked into it.
I discovered it in week four. I came back approximately twice a month.
It was not a strategic choice. It was a personal one. There was a difference, and I was allowed to have both.
The Copper Kettle was about half-full at this hour — the mid-morning crowd had thinned out and the lunch crowd hadn't fully arrived.
The proprietor, a woman named Kess who I had learned from three months of visits was sixty-one years old, had moved to Aldenmere from a small town in the Rainfield territory thirty years ago, and had very strong opinions about the correct preparation of the thick grain soup that was the establishment's unofficial signature dish, was behind the counter with a cloth in one hand and an argument with her supplier about the quality of the current month's root vegetable delivery.
I sat at the counter, because the counter was where Kess stopped to talk when she had a moment, and I had come to understand that Kess's conversations were reliable sources of information about the city that no institutional documentation provided.
The grain soup arrived without ordering — I had been enough times that Kess's approach was to put it in front of me and let me tell her if I wanted something different. I didn't.
There was a piece of dark bread on the side and a small portion of the roasted pressed-seed paste that the kitchen made in-house and that was, objectively, one of the better things available in the city.
I ate. I thought.
Taros Blackthorn had confirmed ten days for the device. Placement would require access to the east maintenance sub-level during a period when Instructor Vane would be absent — that window needed to be identified and Elena's shadow-sense support for the placement confirmed. That was a separate logistical thread.
The evidence package update: needed to happen today. The session fourteen discrepancy that Maris had flagged.
The dungeon trial preparation: thirteen days now.
Chamber Seven required me to reach the northeast maintenance junction during the trial without the rest of Group Seven knowing specifically why. I had a route from W. Maren.
I needed a plausible in-trial reason for briefly diverging from the group's path.
I had been working on the divergence cover for two weeks.
The best option was a mana-density anomaly read — a detection report during the trial that sent me ahead to verify a signature before the group committed to the corridor. It was defensible.
Wind Reading in a dungeon would produce exactly this kind of forward-scan directive. The group would understand it as standard detection protocol.
They didn't need to know what specifically I was scanning for.
Maris would figure it out afterward. Probably during it. But she would let it play out because she had enough tactical sense to understand that some information was better delivered by demonstrated outcome than by advance briefing.
I was still working on whether to tell Aiden anything.
He had requested the group transfer himself. He was doing it because he had identified something in Group Seven's methodology that he wanted to understand better. Which meant he was paying very close attention.
The attention was, depending on how I handled the next thirteen days, either an asset or a complication.
Kess came back down the counter.
"Quiet morning," she said. It was her standard opening — an observation that invited a response or didn't require one, depending on what the person on the other side of the counter seemed to need.
"Commission took longer than expected," I said. "Taros Blackthorn."
Kess made a sound. "How is he?"
"Building something complicated."
"He's always building something complicated."
She refilled my tea without asking.
"He had three orders from the capital last month. Some guild procurement thing. Said he couldn't discuss the specifics."
She straightened the cloth on the counter.
"The guilds have been active lately. More scouts through the city than usual for this time of year."
I looked up.
"Guild scouts? Which guilds?"
"Two major ones. And the Hunters' Association sent a representative."
She shrugged, which was the shrug of a proprietor who noticed everything and attached significance to it later. "Usually the scout season is spring.
Coming this early means they're looking for something specific."
Guild scouts. In Aldenmere. In late autumn — not the standard recruitment season.
They were here for the dungeon trial. Not the formal trial results — those wouldn't be processed until winter term.
But the word from Vorn's office about the dungeon's cult operation and the students who had been involved would have circulated through institutional channels faster than official documentation.
Scouts moved on intelligence.
They didn't wait for grade reports.
I ate the rest of my bread. Filed the information. Added a notation in the notebook:
Aldenmere. Guild scouts in the city — early season presence, multiple guilds, Hunter's Association rep.
This is not a coincidence. Vorn's office leaked or briefed.
Someone outside the academy has been told there are first-year students worth evaluating before the standard recruitment window opens.
Below that, the thought that came immediately afterward:
In the original story, Ethan Von Sliverstel was scouted by three major guilds before his second year. It was a plot point. I had written the scene and everything.
The scene had not included Lucas Martin in it anywhere.
I finished the soup. Paid. Thanks, Kess. I walked out into the late autumn city.
The scout season was early.
I had thirteen days to do the dungeon trial.
One of these facts was connected to the other. I didn't yet know how tightly.
I started back toward the bridge.
To Be Continue...