Osren talked as they walked, and he didn't hold anything back.
Elysium had been observing the Oasis of Grain since Glory's revival. Every major power repositioning, every factional shift, and the slow recalibration that followed the awakening of history's most powerful man because a stranger knocked on his door.
'Well, second most powerful.'
Then Sun Harvest appeared, and everything that had been moving quietly started moving faster.
He brought up the bridge in Therasia, the Sunborne soldiers, and the arrows that phased through them.
Alistair kept his eyes forward and said nothing, waiting for the accusation, or whatever tone people used when they were trying to sound composed about something.
Osren smiled instead. "You didn't kill anyone," he said.
The words sat there for a moment.
"Those weren't real soldiers. That was Mastic. He produces illusions at a scale nobody else can manage with that Aspect. Therasia's archers shot at empty air for ten minutes and never knew it."
He glanced at Alistair. "You figured out something was wrong. You just figured out the wrong part of it."
Alistair frowned.
'I spent the entire fight searching for a Characteristic that was never there. The man I couldn't read on that bridge was maintaining the illusion from somewhere I never found.'
He said none of it out loud.
Due, walking beside him, asked without looking at Osren, "Is he here?"
"No." Osren looked straight ahead, his white cloak catching the morning light. "He doesn't leave Elysium's borders without a reason. However, the bridge was a reason."
Elara had been quietly listening through all of it. She looked at Alistair and asked, "Did you know? When you were fighting them?"
"No."
She nodded and said nothing else.
Alistair was honestly a little surprised by that. He glanced at Osren briefly.
The boy had gone through all of it without any anger behind it, which was still sitting oddly with him.
Alistair thought about the bridge. He'd stood on that gate and spoken the words of Thorne to an army he believed was real. He'd fought them. He'd fallen into them. The memory of that morning had been sitting in him for weeks as a battle, and now Osren was telling him it had been something else entirely.
'I nearly died fighting air.'
He wasn't sure if that was humbling or just irritating. He decided it was both and moved on.
The road continued east. A crossroads appeared ahead, two paths meeting at an angle with a stone marker between them.
Near the marker stood an older man with a pack on his back, clearly having been there longer than he planned.
Due stopped, and Alistair watched quietly.
The obligation formed before Due even reached the man, as is usually the case with him. Due sighed and went to resolve it anyway.
The conversation lasted a few minutes.
The traveler left with a slightly confused but pleased expression, a coin in his pocket, and directions he apparently hadn't known he needed.
Due came back and adjusted his collar without comment.
Seeing this, Osren looked at him with genuine curiosity. "Does that ever stop?"
"No," Due replied pleasantly.
They continued to walk. The flat grain fields gave way to gently rolling land. Trees appeared in groups instead of standing alone, and the road surface improved from packed dirt to a better-maintained path.
At some point, Osren and Elara began talking. He asked her about Therasia. Not to gather anything useful, just to know what it is actually like to grow up somewhere that controls people through precision rather than force.
Alistair noticed because her voice changed partway through, shifting from something composed to something more natural, before she caught herself and pulled back.
She fell quiet, obviously annoyed with herself. However, Osren didn't push.
Due said quietly, not turning his head, "She's going to tell him more than she planned."
"I know," said Alistair.
"That's useful."
Alistair shook his head slightly. "That's not why I'm letting it happen."
Hearing this, Due looked at him. His expression shifted briefly, as if revising an assumption he'd made without realizing it.
He said nothing else and went back to managing whatever threads he was managing.
The border of Elysium's influence didn't announce itself with anything obvious. The road just changed, and the settlements on either side of it stopped looking like they were waiting to be abandoned. Stone walls in good repair. Fields planted in careful rows, not just barely enough to survive on. A woman walked down the road at an unhurried pace, as if trouble were not something she expected to find here.
Two children ran past them laughing, not glancing once at Alistair's armor or Due's cloak or the white-haired boy leading strangers through their territory.
Alistair was quietly taken aback.
His scan picked something up.
There were many layered and dense signatures across the area, making Alistair widen his eyes.
A weaver at a market stall with a thermal reading that didn't match her trade. A baker's apprentice whose output would have made him a commander in Therasia's army. An old woman sitting on a porch with a Characteristic so quiet and so deep that Alistair couldn't identify it without stopping to focus.
He kept walking only to find more.
'This place is full of people Therasia would have conscripted on sight. And not one of them looks afraid.'
Osren stopped ahead of them.
He turned and looked at the three of them, and the ease he always carried was still there, but something more serious had settled in front of it.
"The person who wanted to meet you, I can arrange an audience in two days." He looked at Alistair specifically. "What do you actually want from Elysium? Not the diplomatic answer. The real one."
Alistair was quiet for a moment.
He could have given the rehearsed version. The Echelon, the Nameless Throne, a system that needed dismantling. All of it was true, and none of it would have answered what Osren was actually asking.
"Expectations," said Alistair.
He explained it simply. Not the grand version about toppling the Echelon. The version about what Sun Harvest needed to become if it was going to be worth the cost of existing. He spoke plainly and didn't dress it up, because Osren had asked for the real answer and Alistair was too tired to give a fake one.
Osren listened without interrupting.
When it was done, he stood there quietly for a moment. The ease in his face hadn't changed, but something behind it had clearly shifted.
He turned east and kept walking, without saying whether what he had heard was what he expected.
Alistair could tell Osren had already decided something by the look on his face. He just couldn't tell what.