The elder hall was cooler than the afternoon outside. Shai pulled the door shut behind her and the noise of the village dropped away.

  She'd left Rika mid-sentence, which Rika would complain about later. Torren would distract her though, the mention of one of his pies would do that without issue.

  The council chamber was bright, light streaming in from the long windows on the west wall. All three were already seated.

  Elder Merin had a cup in front of him he hadn't touched. He watched her cross the room and said nothing. Elder Yara sat with her forearms on the table, scar tissue catching the light along her jaw. She gave Shai a single nod.

  Koss was the only one who smiled. Her four tails moved slowly as Shai took her seat, amber eyes tracking from Shai's face to her wrist and back again. Shai winced. The smile became a grin.

  Shai looked away quickly, back to Merin.

  "You were longer than expected," Merin said.

  "I made a judgement call," Shai replied. "I'll explain it as part of the report. I think you'll agree it was the right one."

  Yara nodded.

  "Then go ahead," Merin said, and settled back.

  "The size was the first thing I noticed," Shai said. "I came out of the treeline expecting an encampment. What I found was larger than anything I expected. Larger than Stonehall. The buildings run from the coast inland across most of the plain and the structures themselves are unlike anything I've seen. No wooden buildings, all of it stone or something like it. The layout is extremely uniform, like every building was made with some grand plan in mind. The windows are glass. Clear sheets better than any glasswork I've seen, and that's for every window of every building. I could make them out from the treeline but a human scout would likely have thought the walls just had open holes in them."

  Merin lifted his cup to take a sip.

  "The roads between the buildings are flat and black, perfectly level throughout. They don't look like they are made of stone or packed earth either. And there were objects on them, large metal things, dozens of them. At first I had no idea what they were but looking back, with what they told me, I believe they are carriages."

  The cup froze at Merin's lip. He lowered it. "You spoke to the inhabitants?"

  "I'll get to that shortly," Shai said. "First though, I decided to move north along the treeline toward the border. I wanted to rule out an imperial forward position before anything else. I checked for tracks but there were no signs of boot prints or cart trails in either direction. There was nothing. Only the usual animal tracks one would expect in a forest."

  She let that sit for a moment.

  "Shortly after I found nothing to the north, I heard movement coming from the direction of the town. I moved back to the treeline and saw five men climbing over their makeshift barricade. The barricade they used to mark the town's edge was improvised. A few of those metal carriages pushed together with whatever else came to hand. I quickly climbed a tree to watch."

  "They spread out across the grassland and began casting magic," Shai said. "Combat magic. All five of them. They practised for the better part of an hour and none of them knew what they were doing. Casting the same spells repeatedly, getting nowhere, pushing until a couple of them were visibly ill from it."

  Yara's eyes sharpened but she said nothing.

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  "They were adults. Not children fresh from an age ceremony. Grown men with combat magic who clearly had no formal training and no idea how their own abilities worked. Between the five of them I counted two clubs, two knives and a long metal pole. Nothing else."

  The silence that followed was brief.

  "That's not possible," Merin said.

  "No," Shai agreed. "It isn't. I couldn't make sense of it either. No retinue or handlers. No guards. They joked with each other while they practised. When one of them was sick from pushing too hard the others checked on him. They were unlike any human I know. Yes, we have some humans in the village guard but even when trained they still act the same as any other human for the most part. These men act closer to beast-kin. The sense of community we have, it felt the same."

  Koss's tails had slowed.

  "A goblin came through the trees while I was watching," Shai continued. "Wounded, but still dangerous. They fought it. It took longer than it should have and they nearly came unstuck more than once but they held together and they won. None of them broke. They were shocked though, not just by the fight but by the goblin itself, and when it was dead they froze like they hadn't expected to actually kill something."

  She paused. "Afterwards, one of them stored the goblin's corpse."

  Yara sat forward. "Stored it?"

  "Yes, He stored it whole, fully intact. It vanished and he confirmed it was in his inventory." Shai let that land. "I've never seen anything like it. That was when I climbed down."

  "I walked out of the treeline toward them," said Shai. "I introduced myself, told them I was a guard captain from a nearby village. They were frightened, not of me specifically, more like people who had already had one shock too many that day. I kept my distance and my hands where they could see them."

  Koss leaned forward slightly.

  "They settled quickly enough. Once they realised I wasn't a threat they started talking. That's when I found out what they actually are." She paused. "They're not from this world. Their town, the settlement on the plain, it was taken from another world entirely and dropped here. They had no warning, no choice in it. One moment they were living their lives, the next the sky went white and they were here."

  The room was quiet.

  "Another world..." Merin mused.

  "Yes. And what you see on the plain is only a portion of their original town. A small part of something much larger that was left behind."

  Yara's forearms pressed harder into the table. "How many people?"

  "Around three thousand in the part that came through."

  Merin set his cup down carefully. "And their magic. When did they receive it?"

  "That's the other thing," Shai said. "Their world has no magic. No monsters, no other races, nothing beyond humans. Everything they built, the things I saw in that town, all of it was done without magic. The magic they have now, they'd had it for less than a day when I found them."

  The quiet stretched a moment longer than the others.

  "They went from no magic, to successfully casting combat magic. They did this more than once, in a day," Koss said. "That's unheard of... You're sure their world has no magic? Or other races?"

  "None that they know of," Shai said. "They have old stories, myths about elves and dwarves, other races too. They think there may be a link between their myths and this world, far back in their history but there isn't a way to check. On their planet, there has never been any evidence any of it was ever real. No magic and just humans, for as far back as their history goes."

  Koss sat back slowly.

  "And they built all of that," Merin said, more to himself than anyone. "Their town, everything inside of it, without any magical aid. How did they manage it? Building a town bigger than Stonehall, entirely from stone must have taken forever."

  "There's more. The town was originally a lot bigger and that larger town was on the small to medium size for their country. They also said their town is kind of behind the times, so what's available here is a small amount of a place not even on the cutting edge of their races achievements."

  Yara cut across before Merin could continue. "Their weapons. You said they had clubs and knives when you watched them. What do they actually have. A town of three thousand with no walls and no magic for most of their history, they must have survived somehow."

  "They told me that their world did use swords and bows hundreds of years ago. Since then they have used a new type of weapon," Shai said. "But it's not something you would recognise. Nothing from this world." She paused. "One of them tried to explain it to me. I'll pass it on as best I can. Imagine a bow that doesn't need drawing. It fires something smaller than an arrow, faster than you can see, and it can do that five hundred times in a single minute. One person with one of these weapons against twenty soldiers with swords and armour. The person with the weapon wins."

  Yara said nothing. Her eyes hadn't moved from Shai's face.

  "They call them guns," Shai said. "And they told me those are not even close to the worst of what their world has."