The camp beyond the canal had no civic lines, no shield coverage, and no stone older than a generation.
It had Tessa Varn's bread line, four borrowed stoves, plus two hundred people the civic network had decided to forget.
Hajin was helping Ferra stake her third measuring cord when the old man came across the footbridge alone.
No guards, no wardens, no ceremonial anything arrived with him, just one walking stick plus the heaviest name in the entire city.
The camp noticed him the way a field notices weather, a stillness moving outward from the footbridge in one slow and widening ring.
Eirwen's hand settled on her bow without drawing while Juna stepped sideways to shield the visitor's line to Ash.
"You closed the road this morning, so the walk here must have been longer without it," Hajin said.
"I did not close it. I only failed to stop it, which at my age is the same crime with better manners."
