She was nothing like the paintings.
The Kingdom's Saint was depicted in official portraiture as serene, luminous, and untouchable; draped in flowing white, hands folded, wearing the specific expression of someone who'd moved beyond the petty concerns of ordinary people to achieve a permanent state of grace.
Those paintings hung in every administrative building in the Vellen Kingdom, and they all agreed on her perfection.
The woman who opened the door of the Temple of System Alignment's Ardenmoor chapter looked like she hadn't slept in four days.
Thessaly. She was twenty-three years old, which was exceptionally young for a Saint; The System's divine appointment process usually required decades of grinding formal progression. She'd been elevated at nineteen, a feat that was entirely unprecedented. The faction that had championed her rise used it as ultimate proof that The System's judgment was beyond human question.
Her eyes were a weary grey. Her dark hair was currently not doing whatever it was supposed to be doing, escaping its pins in frustrated strands. She was clutching a stack of assessment reports in one hand and looking at Varek with the specific expression of someone who'd been interrupted mid-crisis and hadn't decided yet whether the interruption was going to make her life better or worse.
"You're the Classless from the arena," she said, her voice raspy.
"I am."
"Why are you at my door?"
"Because you've been filing anomaly reports for three weeks and none of the System's regional administrators have given you a satisfactory explanation," Varek said. "But I have one."
She looked at him. Then she looked at Cael, who was standing behind him. Then back. Something in her facial expression changed. It was not a softening, and not suspicion exactly, but the particular, sharp alertness of someone who'd been asking a question for so long that the sudden arrival of an answer felt almost like an ambush.
"Come in," she said.
The chapter house's interior had been ruthlessly converted into a working space. The ceremonial furniture; the gilded chairs and prayer altars had been pushed to the walls to make room for long tables covered in System interface printouts, assessment logs, and maps of the city pinned with incident markers.
It looked like the frantic workspace of someone who took things seriously even when the institution they represented preferred they didn't.
Varek walked to the center of the room and looked at the maps. The incident markers clustered in predictable, rhythmic patterns; the market district, the guild halls, the Players' residential quarter. It was his own movements over the past two weeks, mapped out by a stranger who didn't know they were tracking a person.
"The EXP variances," he said, pointing to a cluster near the market. "Players experiencing minor, unexplained drops in accumulated experience. The System logging them as server-side errors."
"Forty-seven confirmed incidents," Thessaly said, crossing her arms over her chest. "The regional administrator told me it was a calibration issue. The central System team told me it was an expected variance within normal parameters."
Her voice carried the specific, hollow flatness of someone forced to repeat answers they'd already decided were lies.
"Neither explanation accounts for the geographic clustering. It moves."
"No," Varek said. "It wouldn't."
"Because it isn't a calibration issue."
"Exactly."
She looked at him steadily, the exhaustion in her eyes replaced by a dangerous focus. "Then what is it?"
He held her gaze, refusing to blink. "It's... me."
The room went very, very quiet.
Thessaly's expression cycled through several things in rapid succession: shock, a cold reassessment, a flash of something that might have been righteous anger, and then the careful, professional neutrality of someone who'd trained themselves to process raw information before reacting to it.
"The Drain Echo," she said. It wasn't a question. She'd seen the arena match logs; she'd connected the dots faster than almost anyone else in the city would have.
"Yes."
"You're stealing experience from people."
"In fractions. Passively. No individual loss is meaningful enough to trigger a formal alert."
"That isn't the point, and you know it."
"No," he agreed. "It's not." He sat down in a nearby chair, not waiting for an invitation, just claiming the space. He sat the way someone sat when they were prepared to have a very long, very difficult conversation. "The point is that The System told your administrators it was a calibration error. Your administrators told you the same. The System knew exactly what was happening and chose to mislabel it."
Silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating.
"Why would it do that?" Thessaly asked, her voice careful, as if she were treading on thin ice.
"Because what I'm doing shouldn't be possible," he said. "And the System doesn't flag things as impossible. It reclassifies them as errors to keep the architecture clean. It keeps people like you from asking the right questions."
She was looking at him with an expression he recognized. The look of someone standing at the precipice of a much larger understanding and trying to decide whether to take the final step forward into the dark.
"What are you?" she asked.
"Someone who was here before the System was," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "And someone who understands things about it that The System would prefer you didn't."
Thessaly stood very still for a long, agonizing moment. Then, with a sigh that seemed to deflate her entire posture, she pulled out a chair, sat down directly across from him, and slammed her reports onto the table between them.
"Start talking," she said.
Cael, still standing by the door with her hand near her blade, watched the Saint lean forward slightly in her chair; an unconscious movement of the body overriding professional caution. She watched the light of curiosity overtake the weariness in Thessaly's eyes and thought to herself: there goes another one.
She wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that.