The cloak was still in his hands when Elara woke up.
She looked at him, then at Due's empty chair, then back at Alistair. She didn't ask any questions.
Seeing the empty seat, she already knew what was happening.
Alistair carefully set the cloak down on the chair. He handled it like he was putting something back exactly where it belonged.
"Stay here," he said.
Elara's expression mirrored what it always did when he spoke to her like that.
An objection rose to her face, but she held it back and pushed it down.
It wasn't gone; it was just contained for the moment. She glanced at the empty chair for a few seconds.
"Come back," she said.
Alistair didn't reply to her. He pulled his hood up and walked out into the cold morning air.
The road leading east was empty.
It was pre-dawn, and the Oasis of Grain looked grey and flat in every direction.
The horizon was barely distinguishable from the sky above it.
The stillness of the morning faded as the first bit of sunlight appeared.
Alistair's scan checked the area and found nothing strange.
There was only the ground and the road, along with the faint smell of cold grain from the nearby fields.
He walked steadily. He wasn't running, but he felt the weight of the approaching battlefield and the importance of his timing.
Due had a head start, and the battlefield was still half an hour away.
Alistair had to wait until Due was finished with his work.
That was the plan they had made, and the delay pressed on him with a quiet urgency.
Due's Characteristic required space to work properly.
Alistair walking onto that field before the obligations were discharged was a variable that Due had specifically asked him not to introduce.
So he just walked. The road stayed empty ahead of him, and the cold settled into his armor.
It was the particular way cold did when there was nothing moving to push it back.
He thought about the fifteen percent.
The new ceiling had settled into Due's Characteristic permanently.
It was irreversible, like a healed bone that had changed slightly from how it was before.
Due had proposed the trap himself. He had explained the cost plainly, nodded once when Alistair nodded back, and then never mentioned it again.
That was Due's version of making peace with a decision.
'He trusts me,' Alistair thought. 'Not the faction. Me.'
That was a different kind of weight than he had been expecting when he first left the Black Mountains.
He had expected to find useful people eventually.
He wanted capable people whose interests aligned with his own long enough to matter.
However, he had not expected someone to permanently reduce their own capacity for a plan they had built together in a camp on neutral ground.
He hadn't expected Elara either.
A bird passed overhead, moving east. It flew low and purposefully.
Alistair's scan tracked it briefly and then let it go. It wasn't threatening.
It was just the morning doing what mornings did, indifferent to what was about to happen on the battlefield ahead.
Eventually, his scan reached the edge of the field.
He sensed the weight of past obligations immediately.
It was the quiet presence of everyone who had died on that ground, their memories lingering like an unspoken burden.
His Equalizer had been picking up this feeling in the air for weeks. It was a constant reminder of what was at stake in this war.
Due felt it as a real weight, a constant pull towards something that needed to be resolved.
He had carried this feeling quietly since they came up from the underground palace.
Due was somewhere out there in the dark right now. He was alone, the way he had been alone for years before Alistair fell through his ceiling.
'She would have had something to say about this.'
The thought arrived without warning. His mother's face appeared in his mind.
She had a blank expression, looking as if she were deciding whether to speak or let him figure things out on his own.
She always showed patience, knowing that some lessons are better learned through experience.
She had looked at him that way often. It happened more often than he had appreciated at the time.
She would have had something to say about Due and the fifteen percent.
She would have wondered what it meant that someone was willing to spend that much for a faction that had barely existed a month ago.
His mother had always been better at reading what things meant than he was.
She could see the shape of what was happening underneath what was visible.
Alistair didn't know if she would have approved of what he was doing.
He knew she would have wanted to know the real reason why he was doing it.
Not the clean version he gave other people about the Echelon and the Nameless Throne, but the version underneath that.
He had never figured out how to say it to her when she was alive. He was still figuring it out now, but she wasn't here to hear it anymore.
The thought came, and he let it sit for a moment. Then, slowly, he put it back.
Sun Harvest was real enough now that there was something to lose. That wasn't an abstract idea anymore.
It was Due on a battlefield alone, and Elara in a camp telling him to come back. It was settlements being punished for sheltering them.
He had left the Upholders of Law and Justice with ambition, but somewhere along the way, it had become something heavier. It had other people's costs inside it now.
Suddenly, the ground shook aggressively.
Alistair stopped walking as a deafening explosion shattered the silence of the Oasis.
The shockwave rippled through the earth, creating a deep boom that vibrated through his bones. It was the signal that chaos had started on the battlefield ahead.
A second explosion followed almost immediately, then a third.
He turned toward the east. The sky above the battlefield was wrong. It was lit from below, and four separate columns of smoke were beginning to rise against the grey sky.
They were orange at the base and darkened as they climbed higher.
Alistair stood on the road and watched it. The sound continued for a long moment and then finally stopped.
The smoke kept rising, steady and slow. They looked like four dark lines drawn upward into a sky that was just beginning to lighten.
Alistair exhaled slowly, then started walking again. He moved faster now, his scan pushing out to its maximum range toward the crater's edge.
He needed to see Due standing.