The guards reached the corridor before the rotation was supposed to.
Alistair heard them before he saw them, boots moving with more urgency than the hour called for.
He was already calculating exits when the figure stepped out of the side street ahead.
He wore a dark blue coat, a headband, and no weapons in sight. Alistair felt an odd familiarity with him, though he couldn't place it.
He stood in the corridor's center, completely still, as if he had been waiting there for some time and simply chose now to be visible.
Due went still beside Alistair.
Elara looked between them, her expression shifting quickly.
"I'm not your enemy." The man said it plainly, the same as before.
"I was in the building watching. Not for Therasia."
Alistair's scan hit him and returned the same blank it had since the settlement, neither suppressed nor absent. Just unreadable.
"Who sent you?" Alistair asked.
"Someone who wanted to inform you about a location," he replied.
He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper, setting it on the windowsill beside him rather than handing it over.
"Outside the city, someone wants to speak with you. But I won't say who. I've done what I came to do," he spoke.
The guards were shouting as they responded to the incident in the meeting room. The noise echoed through the east corridor.
Elara had been watching him since he appeared.
She leaned slightly toward Alistair, "He's telling the truth… about not being an enemy."
However, she didn't say how she knew, which made Alistair suspicious.
The man noticed her noticing. His eyes moved to her once, briefly, then he said nothing about it.
Alistair slowly took the paper from the windowsill.
Before he could push further, something shifted in the light above them.
A figure dropped from the rooftop opposite.
'Oh, great.'
His white cloak waved as he fell, a grain stitched at the ear.
He landed without drama, adjusted his cloak, and looked at Alistair with a rather relaxed expression.
"Elysium knows what you did to their soldiers on the bridge," Osren said.
Alistair waited.
Osren smiled, the kind that reached his eyes easily. "That's exactly why Elysium wants to meet you."
Hearing this, Alistair glanced left.
Cyrus was gone. No figure rounding a corner, no footsteps fading into the corridor. Just the empty space where he had been standing.
'Tch… he got away again. I have to know who's sending him.'
Alistair was rather disappointed, but he accepted it. He looked back at Osren.
Something moved in Osren's expression, something closer to recognition than suspicion.
"There's a waystation on neutral ground," Osren said. "Half a day east. Someone's waiting there." He started walking, already expecting them to follow.
"I said it's neutral," he reaffirmed.
Due glanced at Alistair. Alistair pocketed the paper and followed without a word.
Due fell beside him. Elara came last, her eyes on the back of Osren's white cloak, not finished with it yet.
The guard response intensified behind them, boots echoing on stone, orders being issued as they realized the east corridor was empty.
But they were already through the side passage and outside before the district could regroup.
The cold morning breeze hit them as the stone streets narrowed into the quieter lanes east of the administrative center.
Elara pulled her coat closed and looked at Alistair. "You still haven't answered my question."
"I know."
"I said I'm not interested until you do."
"I know that too."
She studied him for a moment, then looked forward again, at Osren moving ahead through the thinning streets, and kept walking without another word.
'I'm unsure why she's following us now, but I need to find an answer to her question while I still can.'
Due spoke quietly beside Alistair, interrupting his thoughts. "The paper."
Alistair unfolded it. The first thing he saw was a location written in a precise hand, nothing formal about it. No name or explanation, just the coordinates and a single word beneath them:
'Found.'
He folded it again, knowing there were more important matters to tend to.
They passed through the eastern gate as the city behind them started its morning, market stalls going up again, the administrative district's disruption already being folded back into Therasia's established order.
Outside the walls, the road stretched east into flat country.
The Oasis of Grain in every direction, pale fields and thin cloud cover, cold open ground.
Osren walked ahead confidently, no longer glancing back to check if they were following.
Due walked beside Alistair and said nothing. His hands moved occasionally in small settling gestures, quietly clearing whatever the morning had left unresolved — the corridor, the guards, the obligations made when he had stopped the first soldier mid-step. He cleared what he could while they moved.
Elara walked slightly apart, her eyes scanning the flat landscape, cataloguing distances.
They had been walking for twenty minutes when Osren spoke without turning around.
"Elysium's been watching this region since Shadow of Former Glory moved. The balance has been shifting for months, every major power repositioning, none of them has settled."
He paused briefly. "Then two people with no territory and no registration held off a thousand soldiers. That doesn't happen. When it does, Elysium pays attention."
"What does Elysium want from the meeting?" Alistair asked.
"I don't know yet." He said it without embarrassment. "The person who wants to speak with you hasn't told me. I was sent to make contact and bring you in." He added, "...I'm genuinely unbothered by that, if you were wondering."
Due spoke from beside Alistair. "How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
Due and Alistair exchanged a look. Osren caught it without turning around, some kind of awareness that had clearly kept him alive long enough in contested areas.
"Age is a strange thing to fixate on," he said, "given the company." His eyes narrowed slightly.
Elara made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. It was brief and disappeared quickly, but Osren's mouth curved slightly at the road ahead in response.
'This is odd. How is he so comfortable around someone who killed his men?'
The waystation emerged as they crested a low rise, old and long past its usefulness but still standing.
Neutral ground. The kind of place patrols overlook simply because it isn't worth monitoring.
It was empty.
Osren stopped at the bottom of the rise and looked at it for a moment without moving.
"They were supposed to be here," he said, more to himself.
He moved down the rise anyway, the others following.
The porch was quiet. No fire, no supplies, nothing to show that someone had waited here and then left.
Osren pushed the door open, checked the interior, and came back out.
Then he went still.
His eyes had dropped to the door's surface, just below eye level. Something carved there, small and precise, the kind of mark left by someone who had taken their time placing it exactly.
Due had gone still in a completely different way from Osren. Not surprise — recognition.
Neither of them spoke.
"What is that?" Alistair said.
Osren carefully ran his gloved fingers over the mark, saying nothing. He looked as though he was comparing it to something he already knew, checking each detail slowly.
Due's hands had stopped their settling movement entirely.
Both of them knew what it meant. However, neither was ready to say it in front of the other.