Kael had a contact in Ashenmoor.
He dropped the information the way he dropped most things; flatly, without decoration, sitting across the scarred war room table with his hands folded. His face was a fortress of neutrality, offering nothing to help us navigate how he felt about the admission.
"I have a contact in Ashenmoor who can access private archives," he said. Then he simply stopped talking and waited for the inevitable interrogation.
Caius leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "A contact?"
"Yes."
"In the heart of Greyveil territory?"
"Precisely."
"A contact you apparently failed to mention until this exact second," Caius's voice dropped into a dangerous, low vibrato, "despite three years of us needing a window into Greyveil's records."
*There was a brief of pause.*
"The contact operates under strict conditions," Kael said, his voice clipped. "One of which is that I do not expose her existence unless every other avenue has turned into a wall."
"Her?" Caius noted, his gaze tracking the subtle tension in Kael's posture.
Kael said nothing in that fact.
I watched the back and forth stretch between them; a long, silent dialogue of history and secrets that would never be articulated in my presence. There was a weight to the word her that sat in the room like lead.
"Can she get to the Valdenmere Codex?" I asked, cutting through the static.
"If it's in the Ashenmoor vault, she can reach it," Kael said, turning his focus to me. "She's been embedded there for four years. She knows the archive's internal rhythm better than the curators."
"Embedded," Caius repeated, his brow furrowing. "She's one of ours, then."
"She WAS one of ours," Kael clarified. "The arrangement is... more complicated now."
The kind of 'complicated,' I noted, that made a man like Kael, a man who usually moved with the economy of a machine adjust slightly in his chair.
"What's her name?" I asked.
"Sable," Kael said.
"Just Sable?"
"She doesn't use the other one anymore."
I decided not to push that bruise. Not yet.
"How do we reach her?"
"I send a specific courier through a specific route," Kael explained. "She responds within forty-eight hours if she's able. If she doesn't—"
"It means she's compromised," Caius finished. "Or dead."
"Or she's decided the risk finally outweighs the debt," Kael added. He said it without a flinch, which was either a testament to his composure or a mask for a much higher cost.
"Send the courier today," Caius commanded.
"Already written." Kael reached into his jacket and placed a heavy, wax-sealed letter on the table. "I drafted it this morning when neither of you appeared for the dawn gathering."
Caius and I both stared at the letter. Then at Kael.
"You anticipated this," I said.
"Not really, I saw the journal entry you left splayed on the bed when I checked the room this morning," Kael said simply. "The four underlined words were visible from the threshold."
I closed my eyes for a second. Of course they were.
"Very well then," Caius said. "Send it. But Kael—"
Kael waited.
"If there's anything else relevant you haven't mentioned because of 'conditions' or 'arrangements' —"
"There is nothing else," Kael said. "That I am aware of."
That specific qualifier; 'that I am aware of' hung in the air like a stone in a shoe. Small enough to ignore, but impossible to forget.
The courier was dispatched within the hour.
While the world waited for the shadow in Ashenmoor to move, I trained.
I doubled my hours, moving from one session to two. Mornings were spent in the damp chill of the underground training room with Aldric; evenings were spent alone, cross-legged on my bed with my mother's journal.
Maren had been a meticulous documentarian. Every spark of power, every backfire, every revelation was recorded in her sharp, frantic script. It was a roadmap Aldric had been trying to reconstruct from memory for over a decade.
When I brought it to him that afternoon and set it on the floor, he picked it up with hands that were visibly trembling. He read for twenty minutes in total silence, the only sound: the rustle of vellum.
When he finally looked up, his ancient silver eyes were shimmering.
"She documented the pressure management technique," he whispered, his voice thick. "I've been trying to rebuild this from fragments for ten years. She wrote it down. Six full pages of notes."
"Does it change things?" I asked, leaning in.
"It cuts your timeline in half," he said. "If this works the way she describes; and she never wrote down a theory she hadn't verified in her own blood, you could be ready for full curse contact in three weeks. Not six."
Three weeks. It wasn't just a number. Given that we were now dealing with a 'key' that was actively turning, three weeks was a lifetime.
"Tehat being said, teach me. Now."
"Sera you can't —"
"Now, Aldric. Please."
He looked at me over the edge of the book, saw the fire in my eyes, and stood up. "From the beginning, then. Pay attention."
I didn't blink. I was focused on him like a predator on its prey.
The technique was a total departure from everything we'd done. Instead of reaching for the dark magic and trying to bind it through sheer force of will which was exhausting, like trying to hold a gale-force wind in a clenched fist, my mother had developed a method of release.
She described it as the difference between battering a door down and simply finding the handle.
The first attempt felt clumsy in my hands. The second felt like a whisper of a promise. The third attempt, however, produced a result so clean and effortless that the air in the room seemed to go still.
"Is that it?" I whispered.
"That's is it," Aldric said. There was so much grief and pride packed into those two words that I had to look away.
We ran the session for two more hours.
By the end, my hands were steady.
My nose wasn't bleeding.
The ability was flowing through me like water that had finally found its proper channel after weeks of crashing against the rocks.
My mother had found this. Maybe in her kitchen, or a room just like this one. She had discovered this secret with her own hands, written it down, and then watched it be locked in a dark archive for seventeen years before her daughter found it in the most dangerous house in the territory.
She had left it for me.
Not by design because she couldn't have known the future but because she believed some things were too precious to let die.
She was right. I was ready to turn the lock.