The morning that greeted them on the far side of the Frozen Peak.
The path descended into open land where the grass grew thick and golden at its tips, and the air carried the scent of bread and distant market fires.
The four of them walked with loose energy, the kind that comes from knowing the destination is close.
Barnett pointed ahead. "See that cluster of rooftops past the merchant road? That is Valenor."
Faye shielded her eyes against the bright sun and looked. "Finally."
"Finally," Vyvian agreed.
Rem said nothing but his pace quickened slightly, which for Rem was as close to excitement as he usually showed.
Barnett smiled at all three of them. "You are going to like it. It is loud and busy and a little chaotic. But there is good food."
"That is all I needed to hear," Faye replied.
They walked the rest of the way with easy conversation moving between them, stories about the journey, small observations about the land around them, Barnett asking questions about Sereneth and receiving Rem's characteristically precise answers. Vyvian drifted in and out of the conversation with his usual rhythm, sometimes engaged, sometimes quiet, watching the road ahead with those gray eyes that always seemed to be thinking about something slightly beyond whatever was being said.
The streets of valenor were wide and crowded, lined with merchant stalls that spilled color and noise across the stone roads in every direction. Traders from distant regions called out over each other in competing voices. The smell of spiced meat and fresh cloth and something sweet being cooked somewhere nearby all pressed together into a single overwhelming impression of life and commerce happening simultaneously without pause.
There was no shrine at the center of town.
Vyvian noticed the absence immediately. "No elder?"
Barnett shook his head. "Valenor never had one. The town runs on trade" His voice shifted slightly on that last word, something flattening in it.
Rem filed that detail away without comment.
"This side," Barnett said, gesturing down a quieter street branching off the main road. "Come to my house and rest for a bit. You guys have been traveling for days."
Barnett's house was modest and clean.
Everything was in its place. The front room was small but warm, the furniture simple.
On a bed at the far end of the room, a woman lay still.
She appeared to be in her middle years, her face carrying the particular stillness of someone who had been unwell for long enough that the body had learned to conserve everything. Her breathing was slow and even. A locket rested against her chest, catching the light from the window in a way that drew the eye.
Barnett moved to the small shelf near the kitchen and produced a plate of biscuits, handing one each to Vyvian, Faye, and Rem without ceremony.
"Thank you," all three said.
Then he crossed the room to his mother's side and crouched beside the bed. He placed his hand gently over hers.
"Mother."
Her eyes opened slowly. They found his face and something in them settled, the way a person settles when they see the thing they were worried about turn out to be alright.
"I did it," Barnett said quietly. "I got the cure. You are going to be fine. You do not have to worry anymore."
His mother looked at him for a long moment.
Then she smiled. Faint and warm and completely unbothered.
"You are worrying more than I ever did, Barney."
He laughed despite himself, the sound catching slightly in his throat.
Across the room, Vyvian stood with his biscuit in hand, looking at nothing in particular. Then his eyes drifted to the locket resting against Barnett's mother's chest.
He stared at it longer than he meant to.
"Rem. Faye." He kept his voice low. "Look at that locket."
Faye glanced over. "What about it?"
"It looks... I do not know. Expensive does not cover it. It just feels like something important."
Faye gave him a flat look. "Why are you staring at a sick woman's necklace?"
"I am not staring. I just noticed it. I could not stop myself from noticing it."
Rem looked briefly. "It does appear unusual."
"Weird," Faye and Rem said together.
Barnett gave his mother the medicine, watching carefully as she swallowed it. She patted his hand once, then closed her eyes and drifted back into sleep, her breathing already slightly steadier than before.
Barnett stood and turned to the others with something lighter in his expression.
"Come on. I will take you through the town. Show you around."
Valenor's streets looked different with a guide.
Barnett moved through them with the ease of someone who had grown up reading this particular crowd, knowing which stalls were worth stopping at and which merchants talked more than they delivered. He pointed things out as they walked, small details about the town that only a local would know.
Vyvian fell into step beside him.
"Barnett. That locket your mother is wearing. Is it valuable?"
Faye sighed audibly from behind them.
Barnett glanced at him with mild surprise. "It is a family treasure. Passed down through generations. Why do you ask?"
"I do not know exactly. It just seemed like something when I looked at it."
"Oh. Well it is precious to us, yes." Barnett smiled. "But precious in a family way, not a merchant way."
"Vyvian stop asking strange questions," Faye said.
Vyvian said nothing and kept walking.
Then Rem stopped.
"Is that a castle?"
At the far end of the main street, beyond the crowded market rows, a stone structure rose above everything around it.
Barnett's expression changed the moment his eyes landed on it.
"Yes," he said. The warmth in his voice was gone.
"Whose is it?" Rem asked.
"The man who owns most of the streets and land in Valenor," Barnett replied. The frustration in his tone was old and familiar, the kind that had been sitting there for years. "He collects unfair large amount rent from nearly every household and business in the town. We have tried reaching out to the major towns for help."
"And?" Faye asked.
"Nothing. They do not interfere."
"They are all corrupted," Vyvian said. The words came out quickly, without deliberation.
"Seems like it," Rem replied quietly.
Faye looked around at the crowded market, the merchants shouting, the children running, all of it happening in the shadow of that stone structure at the end of the road.
"Let us talk to some locals," she said. "We came here for information. Let us get it."
"Right," Rem agreed.
Barnett looked between them for a moment.
"You never actually told me what you are here for," he said. "Not properly."
Rem looked at him calmly. "We are traveling in search of information. We want to uncover things that the royal towns are deliberately ignoring and bring them into the open."
Barnett's eyes moved from Rem to Faye to Vyvian.
"So you are going to revolt against them?"
"Pretty much," Vyvian said.
"Yes," Faye added.
Barnett stared at them. "That is insane. You are going to get into serious trouble."
"We will see about that," Rem replied.
Before Barnett could respond, the heavy sound of hooves on stone reached them.
The castle gates had opened.
A young man in his twenties came through on horseback, dark short hair, brown eyes carrying the flat authority of someone who had never been told no by anyone who mattered. He wore a long dark blue coat over brown riding pants, and he moved through the crowded street with the easy assumption that people would clear his path.
They did.
His eyes found Barnett in the crowd without effort, the way someone finds a thing they have been looking for without needing to search.
"Barnett." His voice was conversational. Completely without warmth. "Your mother has yet to pay this month's rent. I will be collecting from everyone today. Have it ready by the time I reach your house."
Barnett's entire posture changed.
"Yes, Saint Charles. We will have it."
Charles barely acknowledged the response. He clicked his tongue at his horse and continued down the street.
The moment he was past, Barnett's composure collapsed.
"What am I going to do," he said, more to himself than anyone else. "I have nothing for the rent."
"You do not have it prepared?" Rem asked.
"How would I?" Barnett said, his voice rising slightly before he pulled it back down. "I was in Prythos. My mother cannot move. There was no one to earn it." He looked at the direction Charles had ridden. "What am I going to do?"
"You guys do what you are here for I will figure something out"Barnett said to them.
Vyvian, Faye and Rem go around to talk with locals.
After sometime the three returns to barnett's home in looking for him.
Barnett is there talking with his mother abour the rent and both of them worried.
The wait was not long.
Charles returned to Barnett's street within the hour, still on horseback, still wearing that same expression of complete indifference to whatever the answer was going to be.
The four of them were outside the house when he arrived.
Rem stepped forward slightly. "He does not have the rent. His mother is ill and he has been traveling."
Charles looked at Rem the way a person looks at something that has spoken when it was not expected to.
"I did not ask you."
"We are telling you," Faye said.
"The circumstances are straightforward," Rem continued, his voice carrying no heat, just clarity. "His mother has been ill. He traveled to Prythos specifically to obtain medicine for her recovery. There was no opportunity to earn the rent during that time. A reasonable allowance for one month given the circumstances costs you nothing meaningful."
Charles looked at him for a long moment.
Then he laughed. Short and dismissive.
"Reasonable allowance." He repeated the words like they were mildly amusing. "You three are not from here. You do not understand how this works." He looked past them at Barnett.
Charles moved through the small house with the ownership of someone walking through a space that already belonged to him in every way that counted. His eyes moved across the room and landed on Barnett's mother lying in the bed.
Then they moved to the locket resting against her chest.
He was quiet for a moment.
"You do not have the rent," he said.
"No," Barnett replied. "But I will get it. I just need more time."
"Time." Charles repeated it the same way he had repeated reasonable allowance. "You people always need more time."
He looked at the locket again.
"That looks valuable."
"It is a family heirloom," Barnett said immediately. "It is not for sale."
"I did not say anything about sale," Charles replied. He took a single step toward the bed. "I said it looks valuable. I will take it as payment for this month."
"That is not yours to take," Vyvian said.
Charles turned to look at him for the first time with any real attention.
"Boy. I strongly suggest you understand where you are and who you are speaking to."
"We understand exactly where we are," Faye said. "And we understand exactly what you are doing."
Charles looked between the three of them with something that might have been amusement if it were warmer.
Then he reached toward the locket.
Barnett's mother's hand came up and closed around the locket before his fingers reached it. She sat up slowly, the medicine already having done enough that her body could answer when it needed to. Her eyes were fully open and completely clear.
She looked at Charles with an expression that had no fear in it whatsoever.
And she slapped him.
The sound of it cut through the small room like a crack of ice.
Charles went completely still.
"This treasure," she said, her voice quiet and absolute, "does not belong to you. It does not belong to this house. It belongs to my family and to my son after me. You will not touch it."
She pulled the locket back against her chest.
The room was silent.
Charles stood with his face turned to the side, one hand slowly rising toward his cheek. The expression that moved across his face was not pain. It was something that had never been given a name because the people around him had never caused it before.
Disbelief.
Then it curdled into something else entirely.
He pulled out his sword and beheaded barnetts mother.
The sound that followed was the worst sound any of them had ever heard inside a small room.
Barnett's mother was gone.
Charles straightened and looked at what he had done without any change in his expression.
"Stupid old hag," he said and spat on the her beheaded head.
And he turned away.
Vyvian felt it happen the way you feel a temperature drop, not a single moment but a shift that moves through everything at once. Something in him went very still and then something behind that stillness broke open completely.
Faye made a sound that was not a word.
Rem said nothing. His hands were already moving.
All three of them transformed simultaneously.
The small room could barely contain what came out of them. Scales and fire and mass and cold filling the space until the walls seemed to press outward. Their Qi surged together into a single overwhelming pressure that made the air itself feel unstable.
Charles turned back around.
He looked at the three hybrid forms in front of him and laughed.
"Puny little children," he said. The laughter was genuine. "You actually think those forms mean something to me?"
Behind them, Barnett had not moved.
He was on his knees beside the bed. His hands were shaking. His mother's hand rested in both of his and he held it the way you hold something when you already know it cannot hold you back.
He cried.
Then slowly, carefully, he reached up and took the locket from around her neck. He closed his fingers around it.
The locket began to glow.
Not the warm glow of lantern light. Something older and deeper and entirely without gentleness. It pulsed once in his closed hand like a heartbeat finding its rhythm for the first time.
Barnett stood.
His Qi surged outward and he transformed.
The hawk hybrid came first, feathers dark brown and sharp, yellow eyes burning, the form solid and present and already larger than it should have been. Then the locket's glow spread from his hand across his entire body and the transformation kept going.
It did not stop.
He grew.
Ten feet. Twenty. The ceiling of the small house simply ceased to be relevant as his form pushed through it without resistance. Thirty feet of dark feathers and glowing yellow eyes and talons so long they carved lines in the stone floor just from resting against it. Retrices spreading behind him like a living shadow. Wings that when they opened blotted out the afternoon light through every window simultaneously.
The house was simply gone around him.
Valenor's street now had something standing in it that had not been standing there a moment before.
Charles looked up.
For the first time, his expression changed.
He stepped down from his horse slowly, his eyes moving up the full height of what Barnett had become.
Then he smirked.