They left before sunrise.
No ceremony. No speech. Commander Vess walked to the front of the column and started moving and everyone else followed because the alternative was being left in a staging hall that had already been locked behind them.
Cael counted footsteps and took the rear.
From the back he could watch everyone. Their stride patterns. Who stayed close to who. Who looked at the treeline when it appeared on the left side of the road versus those who kept their eyes forward. Small things. The kind of things that told you who'd been in danger before and who was about to learn what it felt like.
By the third mile he had them sorted into three categories.
The first group — the four fighters and Dren — moved with purpose. They'd survive the first contact with whatever waited in those ruins. Maybe the second.
The second group — the three young ones and two of the debt-fillers — were liabilities. Not because they were weak. Because they were scared and trying to hide it, which meant when something happened they'd react instead of think.
The third group was the interesting one. The running girl, whose name he still didn't know. The older merchant-man, who walked with a slight drag in his left heel that hadn't been there last night. And a quiet, pale-haired recruit who hadn't spoken a single word since arrival and somehow managed to always be standing where the shadows were deepest.
Cael watched all three of them more than anyone else.
---
Around midday they stopped at a river crossing to refill rations.
Dren fell into step beside him without being invited, which Cael was beginning to understand was simply how Dren operated.
"You didn't sleep," Dren said.
"You were watching me?"
"I was watching everyone. You were the most interesting."
Cael said nothing.
"You went to the equipment room," Dren continued, voice low, tone completely casual. "Around the second hour. Came back eight minutes later."
Cael looked at him sideways. "And?"
"And nothing." Dren shrugged. "I'm not reporting it. I just want to know what you found."
"Nothing worth finding."
"You're a bad liar."
"I'm an excellent liar," Cael said. "I'm choosing not to bother with you specifically."
Dren was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed — short and genuine. "Alright. Fair."
They walked in silence for a stretch. The river moved fast beside them, brown with sediment.
"The three teams that didn't come back," Dren said eventually. "What do you think happened to them?"
"Same thing that happens to everyone who walks into something they don't understand."
"Which is?"
"They died confused."
Dren glanced at him. "And us?"
Cael looked ahead at Commander Vess moving at the front of the column, her grey armor catching the pale noon light. She hadn't looked back at the group in over an hour. She didn't need to. She had the tall recruiter walking drag at the left flank, tracking everything.
Watching Cael specifically about once every four minutes.
"We have better information," Cael said.
"Do we?"
"I do."
Dren was quiet again. Cael could feel him deciding something — the particular quality of silence that preceded a choice.
"I'm good in a fight," Dren said finally. "Seventh rank doesn't sound like much but Ashwalker abilities scale fast under pressure. I've handled situations most Fourths couldn't."
"I believe you."
"I'm not asking for gratitude. I'm telling you what I bring." A pause. "In case you're building something."
Cael looked at him for a long moment.
Perceptive. Practical. Not offering loyalty — offering utility. That was more honest than most people managed.
"I'll think about it," Cael said.
It was the most he'd offered anyone in three years.
---
The Greyveil Ruins appeared at the edge of dusk.
Cael had expected rubble. Collapsed towers, overgrown foundations, the kind of ruin that looked tired. What he hadn't expected was the sheer *scale* of it — structures still partially standing, black stone that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, archways so tall they made the treeline look modest.
And the silence.
Not quiet. Silence. The specific absence of sound that happened when everything that knew better had already left.
The running girl stopped walking without realizing it. Cael watched her do it — the way her body made the decision before her mind caught up.
The pale-haired recruit tilted his head slightly, like he was listening for something specific.
The older merchant-man's left heel drag disappeared entirely.
Cael filed all three reactions away.
Commander Vess raised a fist. The column halted.
"We camp here tonight," she said. "We enter at first light. No one crosses the threshold before my order."
"What's inside?" one of the young recruits asked.
Vess looked at him with the expression of someone who had answered that question too many times already. "Old things. Most of them dormant. Stay together, follow commands, and dormant is how they'll stay."
*Most of them,* Cael noted. Not *all.*
He turned and looked at the ruins properly for the first time.
The thing in the back of his mind was completely still. Not dormant — the way it went still when it was paying very close attention.
Then, so quiet he almost missed it:
*Home.*
Cael's jaw tightened.
He looked at the black stone archways. The light dying behind them. The silence that had swallowed every living thing that might have once nested nearby.
*Home,* it had said.
Which meant the anomaly the briefing document mentioned wasn't just something his unnamed ability resonated with.
It was something that had *come from the same place.*
And it had been here, waiting, while three teams died trying to find it.
He set up his bedroll at the edge of camp. Closest to the ruins. Farthest from everyone else.
Sleep didn't come for a long time.
When it did, he dreamed of a door with no handle, and something on the other side that already knew his name.