The road south from Huanan cut through terraced rice fields that climbed the hillsides like green stairs to heaven. By midday the city had vanished behind us, swallowed by distance and the haze of cooking fires. Ahead, the Jade Hills rose in gentle waves, their peaks softened by pine and morning mist.
I fell into step beside Adelheid when the road widened enough for three abreast. She walked with the careful efficiency of someone who had covered long distances in worse conditions than this—pack settled low, staff used as a walking aid rather than a weapon, eyes moving between the road ahead and the treeline.
"You were with them," I said. "In Al-Halun."
She glanced at me sidelong. "Kai told you?"
"He mentioned it. Said Yaheed saved a village from fel-beasts."
"Yaheed and Kai saved the village," she said, with the precision of someone who had told the story before and believed accuracy mattered. "I kept people from dying of infected bites afterward." She paused. "Different work. Equally necessary."
Ahead of us, Kai was talking to Jin about something—their voices too low to carry. Adelheid watched him with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"What was he like?" I asked. "Yaheed."
She considered the question the way she seemed to consider most things—without rushing. "Careful," she said finally. "Careful and stubborn and furiously moral. The kind of man who does the right thing and then spends three days arguing with himself about whether he did it *correctly*." A small smile. "The fel-beasts had nested in the village granary. Large nest—eight adults, maybe more. The standard approach would have been to burn them out. Fast. Clean. But burning the granary meant destroying the harvest. The village would have starved before spring."
"So Yaheed found another way."
"Yaheed found another way." She adjusted her pack strap. "Drove them out instead of killing them. Took three days. Cost him a broken rib and a dislocated shoulder." She glanced at me. "He never mentioned the rib. I found it when I was treating the shoulder."
I thought about that—a man suffering quietly through extra days of difficult work to save a harvest he wouldn't eat, for people he'd never meet again.
"And that's what got him exiled?"
Adelheid's expression shifted—something careful entering it, the way people look when a story becomes more complicated than it first appeared.
"The exile had two causes," she said. "The first: to Zephyrians, touching fel-beast blood is taboo. Spiritually defiling. That is why they hire adventurers for extermination work rather than handling it themselves—to keep their own hands clean of the contamination." She paused. "Yaheed bled for three days driving those beasts out. His hands were anything but clean by the end of it."
"But he saved—"
"He saved the village," Adelheid said. "Yes. The village that later accused him."
I stopped walking. She didn't.
"The same village?" I said, catching up.
"The same village." Her voice was precise and without judgment, the tone of someone reporting a fact they find painful but not surprising. "Zephyrian villagers. Devout. They had been grateful while the beasts were still in their granary. Once the danger passed—" She made a small gesture. "Gratitude is easier than faith, and faith is easier than shame. It is shameful, to a Zephyrian, to have been saved by someone who then violated the law in the saving. It reflects on them. It implicates them."
I thought about the coins in my pocket—an exile's bronze, pressed into Kai's hand last night. *May the young prince do great things.* Given freely, without bitterness, by the man those villagers had destroyed.
"Kai and I were exempt," Adelheid continued. "The blood-taboo applies only to Zephyrians. But the second cause—" She paused. "Yaheed had been traveling with non-Zephyrians. For years. To the orthodox, this was already suspicious. Already a sign of corruption. The blood-taboo gave them language for what they already believed about him."
"That he was impure."
"That he had abandoned the faith." She was quiet for a moment. "Which was not entirely wrong—only not in the way they meant it."
I looked at her. Something in her phrasing had shifted.
"He used to say," she continued, more slowly now, "that the law was made for the people. Not the people for the law." She said it carefully, the way you repeat a sentence you've turned over many times. "It sounds simple. It isn't. To the Zephyrian orthodoxy, that teaching is blasphemy—it places human need above divine decree. It suggests the Voice gave the law as a gift, not a chain."
"And Yaheed believed that?"
"Yaheed believed the Voice was living." She glanced at me sidelong. "Not a Voice that spoke once, long ago, and fell silent. A Voice that still speaks. That the law was meant to serve life, not demand death in exchange for purity." She paused again. "The orthodox Zephyrians worship what they call the Voice, but what they describe bears very little resemblance to what Yaheed followed. He used to say their god demanded blood-purity and silence and submission, and that a god who demanded those things had never loved anyone."
The road climbed slightly. The Jade Hills rose ahead of us, pine-dark and patient.
"He was very certain of this," Adelheid said. "Not arrogantly. The way someone is certain of something they've tested rather than inherited." Something softened in her voice. "I am Astarian. We do not speak much of gods—we speak of memory and resonance and the patterns in things. But I listened to Yaheed talk about the Living Voice and I thought: this is a man who has heard something I have not. And whatever he heard, it made him capable of giving away his last coins to people he was about to leave behind."
We walked in silence for a moment. Ahead, Kai's laughter came again—short, genuine—and Jin's quieter response.
"The village filed the accusation three weeks after the beasts were gone," Adelheid said. "Yaheed told me later that he had known it was coming. He had known when he first touched the fel-beast blood that there would be a cost, and he had chosen to pay it." A pause. "He said the law was not wrong to exist. That without it, the Zephyrians would have been doing the extermination work themselves and more of them would have died. He just believed the law had a purpose, and that its purpose was life, not purity. When those two things came into conflict—" She shrugged. "He chose life."
"And lost everything."
"And lost everything." She said it without tragedy, which somehow made it worse. "He seemed at peace with it, when last I saw him. Not happy—I don't think exile ever stops hurting. But settled. As if the choice had clarified something in him that had always been cloudy before." She adjusted her pack. "He asked me to watch over Kai if I ever had the chance. I told him I wasn't in the habit of babysitting grown men." She paused. "He said: *then watch over him as a friend. He carries too many of the dead and not enough of the living.*"
I turned that over quietly.
*He carries too many of the dead and not enough of the living.*
I thought of the sword at Kai's hip. The pendant at his throat. The mining pick in the shield handle. An entire family preserved in metal and carried into battle.
"Is that why you came?" I asked. "Not just for Elric and Leyron. Also for Kai."
Adelheid looked at me for a moment with the evaluating expression of someone reassessing their assumptions about a thirteen-year-old.
"You notice things," she said.
"I'm trying to learn how."
She seemed to accept this. "I came for Leyron," she said. "And for Elric, who is owed a debt I haven't paid. And yes—partly for Kai." She glanced ahead at his broad shoulders, the shield that caught the light. "Yaheed couldn't be here. So I'll be here twice."
We walked on. The road curved upward. The pines thickened on either side.
I didn't say anything else for a long time. There was too much to think about.
A man who touched blood he wasn't supposed to touch, to save people who later destroyed him, and gave away his last coins to those he was leaving behind. A man who believed the law was made for the people, not the people for the law. A man who followed something he called the Living Voice—not the silent god of Zephyrian orthodoxy but something that still spoke, that still answered, that valued life over purity.
But walking behind Kai—who carried his dead in metal and couldn't put them down—and thinking about Yaheed—who had given everything away and seemed, somehow, more free than anyone I'd met—I found myself wondering whether the question had a real answer.
And whether I was walking toward it.
Kai briefly left Jin to walk beside me, shield catching the light with every step, the etched patterns seeming to pulse in time with his breathing.
I couldn't stop looking at the sword.
It hung at his hip, leather-wrapped hilt worn smooth from use. I'd seen it a thousand times—strapped to his back during drills, leaning against the wall in our quarters, part of him the way breath was part of him. But I'd never really seen it. Never understood what it cost to carry.
"You want to ask," Kai said quietly, not looking at me. "So ask."
I swallowed. "Kat's staff. How did you... why did you..."
He was quiet for a long moment. The road crunched beneath our boots. Somewhere in the fields, farmers sang as they worked—old Kanlian songs my mother used to hum while braiding my hair.
"She made it herself," he said finally. "Took her three years. Found the metal in a ley nexus near the borderlands—raw Andorium, still humming with earth-memory. Most people would've sold it. She turned it into a focusing tool."
His hand drifted to the hilt, fingers tracing the crossguard. "It was perfect for her. Light. Responsive. She could channel ley energy through it like breathing. Make stone remember it was water, make metal remember it was sand. Jin saw her do things..." He glanced ahead at Jin's straight back. "Things that shouldn't be possible."
"But you broke it," I said softly.
"Yeah." His voice was rough. "Three months after she died, I took it to the forge. Spent a week heating it, hammering it, hating every second. The Andorium core was hollow—designed that way so energy could flow through without resistance. I filled it. Made it heavy. Made it wrong."
"Why?"
Kai stopped walking. I stopped with him. Jin and Adelheid continued ahead, giving us space.
"Because I couldn't carry it the way she meant it to be carried." His jaw worked. "She was a builder. A teacher. She saw the world as something to understand, to shape. Every time I looked at that staff, all I could think was: she should be here. She should be teaching Jin. She should be laughing at my terrible jokes and telling me I hold my shield wrong."
He pulled the sword free—just an inch, enough to show the blade. The metal caught the light like water, like mercury, like something that wasn't quite solid. For a moment I thought I could feel it from where I stood — a faint warmth, a low vibration at a frequency just below sound. Then Kai's thumb pressed against the flat and it stilled.
I told myself it was the sun on metal.
I almost believed it.
"So I made it into something I could carry. A weapon. A promise." His voice dropped. "Every time I draw this blade, I remember her last words. Go. Live. So I do. I live hard enough for both of us."
His free hand went briefly to the pendant at his collar — the unconscious touch of a man checking that something is still there. "My mother used to say grief is just love with nowhere to go. I thought if I put it somewhere—" he gestured at the sword, the shield, the pendant— "it would stop moving around inside me."
"Did it?"
"No." He almost laughed. "Turns out love doesn't care what container you put it in. It just fills the shape and keeps pressing on the walls."
The sword slid back into its wrapping with a soft hiss.
"She wouldn't have wanted that," I said quietly.
Kai smiled—small, sad, honest. "No. She'd have wanted me to find my own path. Fall in love. Build something beautiful. But she's not here to want anything anymore." He touched the pendant at his throat. "So I carry what's left of her and try to be the kind of man she would've been proud of. Even if I'm doing it wrong."
We started walking again. The rice fields gave way to scattered pines, the road climbing into the foothills. I wanted to say something comforting, something wise. But I was thirteen and still terrified of who I might become, and Kai was twenty-three and still grieving the sister who'd died saving him.
So I just walked beside him, and hoped that was enough.
We made camp as the sun touched the western peaks, painting the sky in shades of copper and blood. Jin chose a clearing beside an old waystation—half-ruined stone walls and a well that still ran clean. Adelheid started a fire while Jin traced the perimeter with her staff, checking for ley disturbances.
"Old road," she said, tapping a moss-covered milestone. "Pre-Unification. Probably built during the Sovereign Era, when Kanlia was still seven kingdoms fighting over ley nexuses." She knelt, pressing her palm to the earth. "The memories here run deep."
I helped Kai set up the tent—a simple canvas affair that would fit all four of us if we slept close. We worked in comfortable silence, the kind that came from years of knowing each other's rhythms.
"Your mother walked this road," Kai said suddenly. "When she was young. Before she married your father."
I looked up. "How do you know?"
"She told me once. Said she used to travel with Ku when he was still a junior prospector, before he found the ley nexus that made his fortune. She was maybe twelve. Carried his tools, learned to read the land." He smiled. "Said these hills taught her more than any academy ever could."
The thought of my mother—elegant, reserved, the king's Kanlian third wife—as a girl scrambling through these hills with an adventurer brother made my chest ache. I'd only ever known her as she was in Garvos: controlled, careful, bound by protocol and politics.
"I wish I'd known that version of her," I said.
Kai's hand landed on my shoulder. "Maybe that's what this journey's for, Pete. Finding the parts of her that came before the crown. Before the duty."
Dinner was dried meat, rice balls, and tea so strong it made my teeth ache. Adelheid ate efficiently and without complaint—the habit of someone who had learned to take food when it was available and not discuss its quality.
"Do you remember the food in Al-Halun?" Kai asked her, across the fire. "After."
She considered. "Flatbread and something they called a stew. I think it was mostly water and optimism."
"Best meal of my life."
"You had a broken rib and a fever. Your standards were compromised."
"Still the best meal of my life."
Adelheid almost smiled. Almost. "You said that about the goat cheese in the next village too. And the dried fish in the village after that."
"Everything tastes better when you've just not died."
"Then you must be eating extraordinarily well lately," she said dryly, "given your apparent daily proximity to death."
Kai laughed — real, unguarded, the laugh I'd heard him surprise himself with on the road. "Adie. You haven't changed at all."
"I have. I'm considerably more tired." She poured herself more tea. "And you have changed. You're funnier than you used to be. Yaheed always said you would be, once you stopped trying so hard to be serious."
The name landed gently between them. Neither flinched from it.
"How is he?" Kai asked. "Last time you saw him."
"Thin. Purposeful." Adelheid wrapped both hands around her cup. "He was in Ramos, as you know. Taking small work. Staying useful." She paused. "He asked about you. Not directly—Yaheed never asks about things directly. But he asked."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were alive and employed and in possession of all your original limbs." She met his eyes. "He seemed satisfied with that. For now."
Jin was listening from across the fire, pretending to study her maps. I was pretending to be asleep. Neither of us was fooling anyone.
"Get some sleep, Pete," Kai said. "I'll take first watch."
I crawled into the tent and was asleep before I could worry about tomorrow.
I woke sometime later—groggy, disoriented, needing to piss. The fire had burned down to embers. Through the tent flap I could see two figures sitting beside it: Kai and Jin, speaking in voices too low to hear.
I should have announced myself. Should have coughed, made noise, let them know I was awake.
I didn't.
"—don't have to do this," Jin was saying. "Pavlos is... he's ambitious, yes. But he's not wrong about the value of strong ties between Garvos and Kanlia."
Kai's voice was tight. "He sees you as a chess piece."
"And you see me as what?" There was an edge to her words. "The girl you couldn't save? Kat's student who needs protecting?"
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" Jin shifted, and in the firelight I could see her face—sharp, tired, guarded. "You've been carrying Kat's memory for ten years, Kai. You turned her staff into a weapon. You wear your mother's pendant like armor. You carry your father's pick into battle." Her voice cracked, just barely. "Sometimes I think you're so busy being their memorial that you forget to be yourself."
Silence.
When Kai finally spoke, his voice was raw. "What if there's nothing left of myself to be?"
"Then you're a liar." Jin's hand moved—I couldn't see clearly, but it looked like she touched his arm. "Because the man I know isn't made of ghosts. He's made of choices. Every time you could have let grief swallow you, you chose to keep walking. Every time you could have turned bitter, you chose kindness. That's you, Kai. Not them."
"I think about her every day," he whispered. "Your teacher. My sister."
"So do I." Jin's voice was very quiet. "Every time I use the staff. Every time I read a ley line and it sings back the way she taught me it would." She paused. "I carry her too, Kai. I just carry her in the work. In doing what she trained me to do." Another pause, longer. "I used to think that was better than what you do. Healthier. More functional."
"Used to?"
Jin looked at the fire. "The portal today. Coming through—I felt it too. The ambush." She didn't look at him. "I've crossed a hundred times and I've never felt it that clearly before. I think—" she stopped. Started again. "I think I've been moving fast enough that it couldn't catch me. Today I was standing still for a moment and it did."
Silence.
"I don't know if carrying it in the work is better," she said finally. "I know it's different. I know I can still function. But I also know I've mapped every ley line in the Jade Hills and I've never once stopped to ask why I need to keep moving."
Kai looked at her for a long time.
"Because stopping feels like dying," he said softly.
Jin's jaw tightened. "Yes."
"Then maybe we're both wrong," he said. "Just wrong in different directions."
Kai was very still.
Jin stood. Brushed off her robe. The composure settling back over her face like a mask she'd worn so long she'd forgotten it was a mask.
"Pavlos will send another message within the month," she said. Her voice was back to its usual precision. "His proposal will be formal this time. My uncle will want me to consider it seriously." She looked at the fire, not at Kai. "It would be good for Huanan. A strong alliance with Garvos. Access to the eastern portal network. Resources we need." A pause. "He's not wrong about the value of the connection."
"Jin—"
"I know what I want, Kai." Soft. Final. "I've known for years. But wanting something and being permitted to have it are different problems." She picked up her staff. "And I am very tired of solving problems tonight."
She walked into the darkness, staff tapping against stone.
Kai sat alone by the fire for a long time after that.
When I finally worked up the courage to slip out of the tent—quietly, carefully—he was still there, staring into the embers.
"Couldn't sleep?" he asked without looking up.
"Needed to piss."
"Uh huh."
I went to the tree line, did my business, came back. Kai had poked the fire back to life. He gestured to the space beside him.
I sat.
"You heard," he said.
"Some of it."
He nodded slowly. "Your mother used to tell me that the hardest part of carrying the dead isn't the grief. It's knowing when to put them down."
"Are you going to?"
"I don't know how." He touched the pendant at his throat. "They're all I have left of who I used to be. If I let them go..."
"You might find out who you are now?"
Kai looked at me—really looked, the way he had in Ramos when I'd asked what happened if I didn't do great things.
"You're too smart for thirteen, you know that?"
"My mother's son."
He smiled. Genuine this time. "Yeah. You are."
We sat in comfortable silence, watching the fire breathe.
I turned the bronze coin over in my pocket — I'd taken to carrying it loose rather than buried at the bottom of my pack, the way you keep something you want to remember is there.
"Yaheed knew he'd be exiled," I said. "Before he drove out the beast. He knew and he did it anyway."
Kai looked at me. "Adie told you."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. "Yaheed would say the exile was worth it. That doing right always costs something and the cost doesn't change whether the thing was right." He stared into the fire. "I used to think that was easy for him to say. That he hadn't lost enough to know how wrong it can feel even when you're right."
"And now?"
Kai reached into his own pocket. Turned his coin once. Put it back. "Now I think maybe he lost more than I gave him credit for. And chose anyway." A pause. "Which is either wisdom or madness."
"Maybe both," I said.
Kai almost smiled. "Go to sleep, Pete."
I crawled back into the tent.
Through the canvas, I could hear him moving around the camp, checking perimeter, adding wood to the fire. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
But underneath, I could hear something else: the quiet, careful sound of a man trying to figure out how to live again.
Morning came grey and cold, mist clinging to the hills like spider silk. We broke camp quickly, efficiently, the four of us moving in practiced rhythm. Jin didn't look at Kai. Kai didn't look at Jin. Adelheid noticed but said nothing.
I shouldered my pack and tried to pretend I hadn't heard anything last night.
The road climbed higher as the day wore on, pine giving way to bare rock and scrub grass. By midafternoon we'd reached the crest of the first real hill, and Jin called a halt.
"There," she said, pointing south.
I followed her gesture and felt my stomach drop.
The ruins sprawled across the valley below like the bones of something immense and terrible. Broken towers jutted from the earth at impossible angles. Collapsed walls formed maze-like patterns that hurt to look at too long. And beneath it all---visible even from this distance---ley lines pulsed in waves of sickly green light.
"The nexus is active," Jin said. She had her staff planted against the earth, both hands on it, and her face had gone the careful blank of someone receiving information they don't want. "I can feel it from here. It shouldn't be this strong."
She pressed her palm flat and went very still. When she spoke again her voice had a quality I hadn't heard from her before --- not alarm, something quieter than alarm. The specific stillness of someone whose instruments have returned an impossible reading.
"The color is wrong," she said.
Kai: "Wrong how?"
"Ley lines wake near a Crumbling. They've always woken yellow." She didn't look up from the earth. "The color of the hills at sunrise. Every geomancer on this continent has read that color. It's the first thing we learn to recognize." A pause. "That is not yellow."
"How long?" Kai asked.
"Days. Maybe longer." She opened her eyes. "Someone has been feeding it."
Kai's hand went to his sword. "What if someone activated it deliberately?"
Jin's face went pale. "You'd need a massive Andorium core. And something alive to anchor the flow."
"Or something dead," Adelheid said quietly. "If the stories about Sunjee are true."
Adelheid had moved to the edge of the ridge, looking down. Her satchel was already open---I could see her hands moving through it without looking, the inventory check of someone preparing for work. Wound cloth. Vials. The small folded instrument I still didn't recognize.
"Adie." Kai's voice was quiet.
She looked up.
"If it goes badly down there---"
"It won't." She closed the satchel with a practiced snap. "And if it does, I'll deal with that when it happens." She looked at the ruins below---ancient, broken, pulsing with wrongness even from this distance---and something settled in her expression. Not calm, exactly. The thing that comes after calm, when you've already made your peace and what remains is just the work. "Yaheed couldn't be here. So I'll be here twice."
Kai held her gaze for a moment. Then nodded once.
"Then we don't waste time," he said, turning to the others. "We move fast, we stay together, and we don't touch anything that glows." His hand went to his sword hilt---not drawing, just confirming it was there. "And if something moves in the shadows and it doesn't breathe, don't let it get close."
He started down the slope without waiting for agreement.
Jin followed immediately, staff tapping the loose stone with careful precision, her eyes already mapping the terrain below. Adelheid fell in behind her.
I stayed on the ridge for one more heartbeat, staring at the ruins. Somewhere down there, my uncle---my mother's brother's friend, the chronicler who had brought her news of her family's death---was either alive or dead.
Either way, we were about to find out which.
I touched the bronze coin in my pocket---Yaheed's gift, the exile's blessing---and whispered a prayer to gods I wasn't sure I believed in.
Then I followed my family into the valley of broken things.
*
The road narrowed as we descended, becoming little more than a goat track. Loose stones slid beneath our boots. The air grew heavier, thick with ozone and something else—something metallic and wrong that made my teeth ache.
We were halfway down when I saw it: a small shrine built into the cliff face.
It was old—older than the road, maybe older than the ruins themselves. Just a carved niche in the rock, barely large enough for the offerings inside: smooth stones, dried flowers, a small clay cup filled with what had once been oil.
"Petras," Kai called from below. "Keep up."
I should have listened. Should have walked past.
But something pulled at me—a whisper in the back of my mind, a sense of recognition that made no sense.
I stepped closer.
The shrine was dedicated to the Road Keeper, one of the old Kanlian spirits my mother used to pray to. The kind of deity that wasn't quite a god but wasn't quite nothing—just a presence, a protection, a hope that travelers would make it home.
Someone had left an offering recently. A small cloth bundle tied with silk cord, the kind used in traditional journey blessings. The cloth bundle was small — silk cord, careful knots, the kind of bundle made by someone who had done this before and believed it mattered. I should have walked past.
But my gift was already awake from a day of traveling through hills that remembered everything, ley lines humming beneath the rock, centuries of memory pressing up through the stone underfoot. In that state I sometimes felt things before I touched them — a warmth, a pull, like standing near a fire you can't quite see.
The cloth was pulling.
Not loudly. Not insistently. The way very old, very peaceful things sometimes called — patiently, without urgency, because they had been waiting long enough that a few more seconds didn't matter.
My hand moved before my brain caught up.
I touched the cloth.
The world tilted.
*
Sunlight. Warm on my face. I'm younger—maybe twelve, maybe thirteen. My feet hurt from walking but I don't care because Ku is showing me how to read the stones.
"See how the mica catches the light?" His voice is patient, warm. "That means there's a ley vein running underneath. Not strong enough to mine, but strong enough to remember."
I press my palm to the rock. It's warm. Alive. I can feel the earth-memory humming beneath my skin—not pictures, not words, just the sense of deep time, of mountains that used to be ocean floor, of stone that remembers being fire.
"I feel it!" I laugh, delighted. "I can feel it, ge!"
Ku grins. "That's my girl. You've got the gift. Weaker than mine, maybe, but it's there." He ruffles my hair. "Keep practicing and maybe someday you'll teach someone like I taught you."
I make a face. "I don't want to teach. I want to travel. See all four continents. Find nexuses no one's charted yet."
"Then you'll need to learn patience first." He points to the shrine. "Make an offering. Thank the Road Keeper for safe passage."
I pull a ribbon from my hair—blue silk, my favorite—and tie it around a smooth stone. Place it in the niche. Whisper the traditional prayer: "Keep my feet steady, keep my path clear, bring me home."
Ku's hand on my shoulder. "Good girl, Mey-mey. Now let's see if we can make it to the next waystation before dark."
We walk together into the golden afternoon, and I am happy.
*
The memory faded, leaving me breathless. My mother's ribbon—still there after thirty years. In any other continent, it would retain that joy forever. But here in Kanlia, the Crumbling could take it any day. Maybe that's why she'd left it. A gamble. A hope that this one memory would survive long enough for someone to find.
I'd found it. But I couldn't keep it.
The realization hit like a fist to the chest.
That happy girl in the vision—free, curious, laughing—had become the careful, controlled woman who raised me. The world had taken her dreams and replaced them with duty. With protocol. With a half-blood son who would never be heir and a position at court that required constant vigilance.
She'd never made it home.
And neither would I, if I wasn't careful.
"Pete!"
Kai was suddenly there, hands on my shoulders, steadying me. "What happened? What did you see?"
"My mother," I whispered. "When she was my age. She was... she was happy."
His expression softened. "The gift?"
I nodded, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.
Kai pulled me into a rough hug—the kind that said I understand without needing words. I buried my face in his shoulder and tried not to cry.
"It's okay to be scared," he said quietly. "To see who people were before life happened to them. To know they had dreams that never came true."
"I don't want to end up like her," I said into his chest. "Trapped. Careful. Always watching what I say."
"Then don't." He pulled back, hands still on my shoulders, looking me dead in the eye. "Your mother made her choices. Some were forced on her. Some she made herself. But they were hers. Yours are still ahead of you."
"What if I make the wrong ones?"
"Then you'll make different ones next time." He smiled. "That's the thing about being alive, Pete. You get to keep choosing."
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The ribbon was still there in the shrine, faded now but recognizable. Blue silk. My mother's favorite color.
I added my own offering beside it: a bronze Bravossi coin -- not the one Yaheed gave.
"What are you doing?" Kai asked.
"Leaving something for the Road Keeper." I whispered the prayer my mother had taught me. "Keep my feet steady, keep my path clear, bring me home."
I added my own words: "And let me be brave enough to choose my own home when I find it."
The coin gleamed in the dim light—small, worthless, precious.
I stood there for a moment longer than necessary, feeling the ley line hum beneath my feet, feeling the old stone of the shrine against my fingertips where I'd rested my hand for balance. It was remembering too — hundreds of offerings, hundreds of travelers, hundreds of prayers spoken to something that may or may not have been listening.
But the earth remembered them all regardless. Every prayer that had passed through this place, whether heard or not, was recorded in the stone.
I muttered, *what kind of world keeps records of prayers?*
I didn't have an answer. But it was the first time I'd thought to ask the question.
We left it there and continued down the path.
I touched the bronze coin in my pocket---Yaheed's gift, the exile's blessing---and said a prayer to gods I wasn't sure I believed in yet.
Then I thought about what Adelheid had said on the road. This is a man who has heard something I have not. A man who followed a Living Voice that still spoke, that still answered, that kept records of every prayer whether heard or not---
Behind us, a shrine held two offerings: one from a girl who'd lost her way, and one from a boy determined not to.
*
We made camp at the valley's edge as the light failed --- close enough to see the ruins' outer wall, far enough that the wrongness didn't press too hard. Jin traced a ley-line perimeter around the camp and said nothing about what she found. Adelheid set a fire. Kai took first watch without being asked.
I lay in the tent and listened to the ruins breathe.
Somewhere inside them, Master Elric was either alive or dead.
Tomorrow we would find out which.