I opened my eyes after my morning Rimelion meditation. Through the teeth-gritting act of self-denial, I had to admit… it was working.

  I wasn’t jittery anymore. I wasn’t pacing like a caffeinated squirrel. And I wasn’t hurling myself off cliffs to “test resilience.” Well… not as often.

  Progress.

  I sat up slowly and let my gaze wander around the little room. Sunlight cut through the shutters in soft, dusty stripes. The wooden walls were patched and uneven, every board carrying the wear of decades, but they held together with stubborn charm.

  It smelled faintly of wood smoke and bread from downstairs. Homey. Too homey.

  Today wasn’t the last day here. That would be tomorrow. Still, the thought of leaving pressed strangely and heavily on my chest. I’d grown to like this quaint little inn. I made a mental note to ask some players to keep an eye on it once the demons came knocking… demons I’d be unleashing, no less. The irony stung, but at least I could plan for collateral.

  Breakfast was simple; bread, eggs, tea that tasted faintly of herbs I couldn’t name… and then I stepped out into the morning air. The streets were already alive with chatter and footsteps, the faint jingle of a merchant’s cart echoing against the stone. I took the long way, a slow stroll, savoring the ordinary bustle before plunging back into the stink of my true workplace.

  The sewers.

  All the stones down there reeked of damp rot and iron. And beneath the Binding Stone was the project that had eaten most of my time… and sanity. While my friends were off fighting pirate cats, river bandits, and raiding dungeons with actual loot, I’d been here, hunched over chalk and blood, doing demon math homework.

  Nobody guarded the chamber anymore.

  Shad had made sure of that. He was cooperating… in his own roundabout, smug-grandmaster way. He didn’t really believe I could pull this off, but he’d prepared regardless.

  The Binding Stone chamber was empty at first glance. Just a bare room of cold stone. But my knees remembered the hours I’d spent here… etched grooves in the floor from drawing, red marks on my palms from overusing mana, the faint scratches where runes had been corrected again and again. The silence was thick after all that work.

  I let out a long breath. This was it. No more tweaking, no more second-guessing. Tomorrow, it would either fizzle into embarrassing nothingness… or go boom.

  Nothing in between.

  I cast one last look at the room, memorizing every corner, every chalk smear, every trace of my obsession. Then I turned and walked away, footsteps echoing down the narrow, damp tunnels until the sunlight of the streets swallowed me again.

  First part done. Now… I had to notify Shad.

  I surfaced from the sewers into the city’s morning like a diver breaking the skin of a lake… sour air giving way to sunlight, noise, and the faint promise of bread.

  The streets were already shaking off sleep.

  A cart rattled past with clinking bottles, a pair of kids raced each other along the rosy stone curb, and somewhere a bell was doing its honest best to be on time. I fell in with the flow, keeping my pace slow. I had a message to deliver, and it deserved more than my power-walking into it like a mistake.

  The farther I got from the tunnels, the less of the sewer stink clung to me. Warmth pooled on the paving, the rosy stone brightening to soft peach.

  Ugh. Won’t miss those.

  Market stalls were being pushed open. Steam curled from a brazier where a vendor prodded skewers, the fat hissing like gossip. Across from him, a tea seller nested clay kettles like a set of sleeping turtles, each one breathing out a different smell.

  I bought a cup. Not Steppe Bite. The inn’s wolf-themed liquid dare could keep its stick… just something simple and dark with a bitter finish. The vendor handed it to me in a thick clay cup that fit my palms as if it had been carved to warm them.

  I stood in the shadow of a signboard and watched the street wake up.

  He’s still a grandmaster. The thought had been walking with me since dawn. But I asked around. Kitchen girls with their hair tied up in kerchiefs. A drover who’d hauled steel under his contracts. A weaver who supplied rope to his guards.

  Nobody whispered in fear.

  They grumbled about taxes, sure, but they also said he paid his slaves a wage. They said he’d had a fever ward put aside last winter when the cough went through the dormitories. They said he got into arguments with the other grandmasters when greed became a policy.

  He treated slaves like people, still wrong, still bound in the ugly system, but he helped where help didn’t pencil out. That had to count for something, right?

  I sipped, let the bitterness flatten my tongue into attention, and watched the foam settle.

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  Yes. It counts. It doesn’t erase the rest, I told myself, but it counts.

  Shad’s building rose at the end of the street like a polite correction. They clocked me coming from half a block away, and I raised my cup like a neutral flag.

  Waiting felt… right.

  Not kneeling, not asking permission. Just finishing my tea in front of his door, letting my nerves settle into manageable piles. Meditation had knocked the edge off the jitter; I’d give it that. My heartbeat did its best impersonation of a metronome. I stared at the ripple in my cup and imagined a progress bar creeping along.

  [Notify Shad: 0% → 100%]

  I drained the last mouthful, set the empty cup on the vendor’s return tray, and squared my shoulders.

  The guards didn’t cross their spears. They didn’t even bristle. One nodded and stepped aside. The smell was a wall: damp soil, crushed mint, sap, that clean cut of leaf you only get when something living has just been trimmed.

  Of course, he was here. He was always here. I had never seen Shad anywhere else but in his own house. Not at a desk, not on some ceremonial chair, not in a gallery with his ancestors frowning from frames. Always among his plants, hands dirty, sleeves rolled to the forearm, hair caught back with a strip of cloth that had probably been the hem of a work shirt before it became a headband.

  I didn’t even announce myself.

  I took three steps in and stopped, because I knew he’d look up when the room told him to. He did. Just a glance, eyes flicking from the stalk he was teasing along a trellis to me. A corner of his mouth ticked, his version of a nod.

  “Is it time?”

  I blinked. “Tomorrow. I came—”

  The plants moved before he did. Vines lifted as if testing a breeze that wasn’t there, then gathered into a patient, insistent current that pressed into my shins and waist. Not hostile. Not a shove. More like a herd of green hands guiding me toward the door with the sort of care you reserve for a child drifting too close to a well.

  “Then go,” he said, already turning back to his work. “I’ll be ready.”

  I rocked a fraction on my heels, the polite green tide nudging me backward. I should have been annoyed. I had a speech prepared, a whole neat stack of words about logistics and timing and contingencies, and here I was being escorted out by a trellis.

  But the nudge had the same calmness as his voice. No drama. No appetite for it.

  “Fine,” I said, because I am not above pettiness when plants are winning at conversation. “Try not to be dead when I come back.”

  “Try not to be,” he echoed, not looking at me. He pinched a stem, and the plant shivered. “That would spoil things.”

  The vines didn’t so much push as accompany. One brushed my wrist, cool and damp, then withdrew as if it had touched a stove. Another gathered the trailing hem of my cloak and flicked it free of a puddle I hadn’t even seen. If I’d been in a better mood, I would have laughed. As it was, I let them herd me to the threshold and stopped there, one foot on mosaic tile, one on the clean hallway stone.

  “Shad,” I said.

  He glanced up again. Not impatient. Expectant.

  “I meant what I said.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed chalk. I didn’t owe him this, not by law or war logic, but Irwen hadn’t advised me to throw good allies away because my pride wanted a tantrum. “I’ll cut the heads. You don’t have to wear the crown after.”

  Something flickered on his face… approval or amusement, I couldn’t tell. “Then we are each doing what we are good at,” he said. “Go.”

  The door waited for me like a held breath.

  The guards didn’t look at me when I stepped back into the street, which is the kindest thing guards can do. Sunlight slotted between buildings, pooling in stripes along the paving. I walked through the brightest one and let it soak into my shoulders.

  The lakeside gate wasn’t what I expected.

  I’d pictured interrogation. Papers. Guards demanded to know why a “noblewoman” wanted to stroll out of the city walls with nothing but nerves and a bag of demon homework in her head. Maybe even a checkpoint where some officer with an inflated hat insisted on searching me for contraband.

  Instead… the gates stood wide open.

  Two guards leaned against their pikes, trading idle banter in the arch's shade. Travelers filed out easily, merchants tugging mules, women with baskets, a handful of kids trailing sticks through the dust. Nobody stopped. Nobody fussed. Just a glance, a nod, and the next person was waved on.

  That was it?

  I slowed my steps, squared my shoulders, and tried to project the confidence of someone who absolutely belonged here. And sure enough, when I passed beneath the arch, the guards gave me the same once-over and nod as the rest. No questions. No suspicion. Just… acknowledgment.

  I kept walking, heart thudding, until the walls fell behind me.

  That’s it? I just… walked out?

  I glanced back over my shoulder. From this side, the walls loomed high, their stone blocks rosy in the morning light, the open gate a mouth swallowing and spitting out streams of people. To get inside it was stricter, more controlled, but out?

  So much for impregnable fortress city, I thought, lips twitching. Don’t tell Mom.

  Ahead lay the port village, hugging the lake’s edge like a wooden collar. Where the city’s annoying stone was polished and proud, this place was all beams and shingles, plank-walks and rope-pulleys. Narrow lanes crisscrossed between squat houses with overhanging roofs, their timbers stained by lake winds.

  Laundry flapped like flags between windows. The air smelled of tar, fish, smoke, and brine.

  The port itself dominated everything… piers and wharves stretching like fingers into the glittering lake, each one crowded with boats. Some were small fishing skiffs, nets drying in the sun. Others were cargo barges, their decks stacked with crates and barrels, men shouting as they hauled loads onto shore. A handful of sleeker vessels, low and fast, bobbed closer to the outer docks, their sails furled but ready.

  People bustled everywhere.

  Dockhands with coiled ropes slung across their shoulders. Women selling skewers of grilled fish to hungry laborers. Children darted between the stalls, barefoot and laughing. It was rougher than the inner city, louder, but alive in a way the stone avenues weren’t.

  I threaded through the crowd, keeping my hood low, observing. The rhythm of life here was practical, straightforward. Work and food, sweat and laughter. And for the first time, I found myself weirdly at ease.

  Then the air shifted.

  It started as a ripple. A murmur. Someone paused mid-shout, eyes narrowing toward the water. Another man shaded his brow with his hand. Conversations died in pockets, replaced by hushed whispers and the shuffle of bodies nudging toward the lakeshore.

  Curiosity clawed at me. I edged around a narrow lane, turned a corner between two low warehouses, and craned my head.

  Out on the horizon, sails.

  Not one, not ten, but dozens… an entire line of them. At least forty ships, sails fat with wind, cutting toward the harbor in formation. Broad warships at the center, swifter escorts on the wings, heavy transports lumbering in the rear.

  They weren’t made the same; it looked more like pirates invading than an official army. But above every single mast, snapping proudly in the wind, flew a flag I knew too well.

  Deep navy blue. A six-pointed snowflake at its heart. Seven stars circling it, crowned by a gleaming diadem.

  The Rimebreak Navy.

  My Navy.

  They were here.