The invitation sat on Aether's desk in the morning light, its golden letters catching the sun with the patient confidence of something that knew it would eventually be addressed.
He hadn't packed a bag.
Across the room, the departure date was legible on the scroll without his needing to look at it. Tomorrow. The word had the quality of a fact that had decided to become urgent overnight, and he was responding to it by spreading maps across the library table at an hour when most of the academy was still considering whether to be fully awake.
Red marks surrounded several noble estates. A cluster near the old merchant district. Another grouping near the eastern administrative buildings where certain families maintained offices that predated the current dynasty's record-keeping. Lines connecting them to trade routes that appeared in commercial registries but whose actual function, based on what he'd observed in the observatory's underground, served a different purpose than declared.
