Doan's party arrived in Ardenmoor on a Wednesday.
Varek was at the market when they rode in, and he watched them from across the crowded square with the detached, clinical attention of someone checking the final result of a long calculation.
It had been ten days since Vel's Crossing.
They had leveled; Doan was sitting at Level 8 now, with the rest of his party trailing between 5 and 7. The System Beloved passive had been working overtime, pulling them through encounters and smoothing the jagged edges of the road.
The SSS-tier class was already beginning to compound, its influence visible in the way they sat their horses and the way the light seemed to catch them just a bit more brightly than the merchants around them.
Doan spotted him within four minutes.
Of course he did. He'd been looking for him.
"Varek!" The shout carried easily across the bustling square. Several heads turned, the CLASSLESS marker above Varek's head made him a lighthouse for ridicule or curiosity, and the sheer gap between that marker and Doan's enthusiastic response to it registered as interesting to everyone who noticed.
Doan crossed the square with the high, restless energy of someone who'd spent ten days on the road and was genuinely relieved to see a familiar face in the sprawl of a new city.
He looked good; leaner, sharper than he'd been in Vel's Crossing, carrying the early-game glow of someone whose System was finally delivering on every one of its grand promises.
"You made it," Doan said, stopping a comfortable distance out. He wasn't crowding. He'd never been the type to crowd.
"I said I would," Varek said.
"You said maybe."
"Same thing."
Doan laughed. It was an open, unguarded sound that his whole party had already learned to relax into because it meant, fundamentally, that everything was fine.
Behind him, Missa was watching Varek with the specific, razor-edged wariness of someone who'd spent ten days listening to Doan talk about a Classless stranger and had formed several firm opinions on the matter.
"You know the city?" Doan asked, gesturing to the towering guild spires.
"Well enough."
"We need lodging. Good lodging. Corro has opinions about beds that I'm tired of hearing."
"Third street west of the Exchange," Varek said, his voice even. "The Waymark Inn. Tell them Orvyn Dast recommended you. The rate drops by a third."
Doan blinked, his smile faltering for a split second. "You know the Guild Master? Of Ironveil?"
"Well not entirely but we've spoken."
The look on Doan's face was the look of someone recalibrating an assessment for the third or fourth time in as many weeks.
He was getting used to doing it with Varek, though he clearly didn't understand the mechanics of how it kept happening.
"Right," he said, shaking it off. "Okay. Are you... staying somewhere nearby?"
"Yes, just three streets over."
"Then dinner tonight. I'm buying." He said it simply, as if the answer was already a foregone conclusion and the offer was just a formality to be observed.
Varek looked at him for a long, quiet beat.
"I can't say no to a free meal," he said.
Doan's grin was immediate and completely without guile. He turned back to his party, waving them toward the west. Missa was still watching Varek. Her expression had changed from outward wariness to something more complicated. It wasn't trust, not by a long shot, but it was the reluctant, heavy acknowledgment of someone who'd fully expected to dismiss a person and found that the person wouldn't stay dismissed.
Varek noted the change moved on anyway.
*****
Dinner was loud.
Corro had opinions about everything from the vintage of the ale to the architecture of the ceiling and expressed them all simultaneously.
Yven; the fourth party member, a quiet, solid young man with a Sentinel class who'd said approximately twelve words since Vel's Crossing surprised everyone by laughing twice.
Apparently, this set some kind of record within the group.
Missa drank more than Varek had expected and became, under the influence, considerably more direct than her default setting usually allowed.
"Why are you following him?" she asked Cael point-blank. Cael had appeared at the table without being invited and had been absorbed into the group's periphery the way water simply absorbs things that don't resist.
Cael looked up from her cup, her amber eyes reflecting the candlelight. "I'm not following anyone."
"You've been within fifty meters of him ever since Vel's Crossing."
"Ardenmoor is a small city."
"It has eighty thousand people, shadow-walker."
Cael looked at Missa for a silent moment. Then she looked at Varek. He was watching the exchange with the mild, academic interest of someone observing a change in the weather; present, attentive, but entirely uninvolved.
"I find the company tolerable," Cael said finally.
Missa squinted at her, her eyes narrowed. "That's the least convincing thing I've heard all week."
"Good thing I don't need to convince you."
Doan was grinning at the back-and-forth. He looked at Varek across the table, over the remains of the meal.
Varek looked back with an expression that said absolutely nothing at all.
"I like your people," Doan said quietly, leaning in.
"They're not my people," Varek said.
Doan's grin didn't waver. "Sure," he said pleasantly, and raised his cup in a silent toast.
Under the table, the Ashen Shard pulsed once. It was slow. Steady. The way it always did whenever he was in Doan's proximity. It wasn't a warning exactly, more like a persistent reminder. A patient one. The kind of reminder that didn't need to be urgent because it knew, with absolute certainty, that time was on its side.
Varek wrapped his fingers around his cup and kept his face perfectly still.
[DRAIN ECHO — ACTIVE]
[Targets: DOAN SOLACE (Lv.8) / MISSA (Lv.6) / CORRO (Lv.5) / YVEN (Lv.7)]
[Total absorption: 0.8% combined accumulated EXP]
[Void Register updated: +1,240 unregistered EXP]
He let them feed him and they didn't even notice the bloodless theft....