˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
The sky above Thessaloniki did not look like it was building toward anything.
It looked, to anyone passing through the small unremarkable town at the edge of the Greek coastline, like an ordinary overcast afternoon. Grey clouds. Warm air. The faint smell of rain that had not decided to fall yet. Nothing unusual. Nothing worth stopping for.
Evren Drakos had learned to read that particular sky the way sailors read water: not for what it looked like but for what it was doing underneath.
It was doing quite a lot.
She sat on the flat roof of the community storehouse, legs dangling over the edge, and felt the static building in the air around her the way other people felt heat or cold. It pressed against her skin like a second atmosphere, charged and restless, searching for somewhere to go. She absorbed it without thinking about it, the way she breathed, the way her heart beat. Automatic. Constant. Occasionally inconvenient.
A sparrow landed on the roof edge two feet from her left hand.
It looked at her.
It flew away very quickly.
"Still doing that?" said a voice from below.
Evren looked down. Aasha Tonitru was standing at the base of the storehouse wall, staff in hand, squinting up at her with the easy grin that seemed to be her default expression regardless of the situation.
"I am not doing anything," Evren said. "The air is just charged today."
"The air is always charged around you."
"That is not my fault."
"It is a little bit your fault," Aasha said cheerfully. She planted her staff and vaulted up onto the lower ledge with the enthusiasm of someone who had not yet learned that enthusiasm and altitude were a concerning combination. "Dilwyn is looking for you. Meeting in twenty minutes."
Evren sighed. She had known about the meeting. She had been hoping that sitting on the roof and letting the static settle would count as preparation. "What is it about?"
"He did not say specifically." Aasha hauled herself the rest of the way up and sat beside her, close enough that Evren shifted automatically to maintain the small buffer of space she always kept between herself and other people. Aasha, who understood this without it ever having been explained, did not comment on it. "But Arashi came back from patrol this morning and he had the face."
"Which face?"
"The one that means he found something he does not like."
Evren looked back at the grey sky. Arashi had several faces, all of them variations on the same controlled stillness, but she had learned to read them over years of proximity the way she read the charged air. The face Aasha meant was the one where something had shifted behind his eyes that he had not yet decided to communicate.
"How bad?" Evren said.
"I do not know," Aasha said. "He was not talking." She paused. "More than usual."
Evren stood up and brushed the dust from her trousers and looked out over the rooftops of their settlement, the low buildings and the narrow streets and the small particular world that four hundred years of careful survival had built in the mortal realm. It was not Nephoria. It was not the kingdom in the clouds that their forefather had been cast out of, the one that existed in the old stories as a place of impossible beauty and casual cruelty.
It was theirs.
That was enough. Usually.
"Come on then," she said.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
The meeting room was not grand.
It was a long low space at the back of the community hall, its walls hung with maps of the surrounding region and patrol routes and the coded communication charts the guards used for long-range signals. A scarred wooden table occupied the centre. The chairs around it had been collected from various places over various years and matched only in the sense that they were all chairs.
Dilwyn Davies was already there when they arrived, standing at the head of the table with his iron chain coiled at his belt and his arms crossed and the expression he wore when he had thought carefully about something and arrived at a conclusion he did not like. Beside him, Coem Derrianis leaned against the wall with his arms folded, hazel eyes bright amber at the edges the way they got when he was paying close attention to something.
Arashi was at the far end of the table.
He looked at Evren when she came in. Then he looked at Aasha. Then he looked back at Dilwyn.
He gave one small nod.
Whatever that meant, Dilwyn understood it. He pulled a piece of paper from the inside of his coat and laid it on the table.
"Patrol found this," he said. "Pinned to the eastern marker stone. Three days ago."
Everyone looked at it. It was a map. Hand-drawn, detailed, showing the edges of their settlement's territory with a precision that should not have been possible for someone who had never been inside it.
"Someone has been watching us," Dilwyn said. "Long enough to have drawn this."
The room was quiet.
"Nephorian?" Coem said.
"Unknown," Dilwyn said. "The map uses Nephorian cartographic conventions. The paper is not mortal-made. Beyond that we cannot be certain."
Evren looked at the map. At the clean, careful lines of it. Someone had stood at the edges of their territory, patient and undetected, and drawn this. And then left it where they would find it.
"They wanted us to know they had been watching," she said.
"Yes," Dilwyn said.
"Why?"
"That," Dilwyn said, "is the question."
Arashi moved. Just slightly, just a shift of his weight, which from Arashi was the equivalent of standing up and making an announcement. Everyone looked at him.
He reached into his coat and produced a second piece of paper. He laid it on the table beside the map.
It was a note. Four words, written in the same hand as the map.
I come in peace.
Silence.
Then Aasha, who could be relied upon to say what everyone else was thinking: "Well. That is either very reassuring or very bad."
"It is one or the other," Dilwyn agreed. He looked at the note for a long moment. Then he looked up at the people around the table. "We have been here for four centuries. We have been careful for four centuries. We do not know who wrote this or what they want or how they found us." He paused. "We also do not know if they are a threat."
"We do not know if they are not," Coem said.
"No," Dilwyn said. "We do not."
He folded his hands on the table.
"So we watch," he said. "And we wait. And if they come, we are ready." He looked at Arashi. "Double the eastern patrols. I want to know the moment anyone approaches the settlement boundary."
Arashi nodded once.
"And if they come in peace?" Evren said.
Dilwyn looked at the four words on the table.
"Then we find out what peace looks like," he said, "coming from above."
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚