Five figures crossed the wasteland at a speed that made the landscape irrelevant.

  Their land riders, constructs that hovered a few meters above the surface of the sand, moved in formation without discussion, the lead rider slightly ahead of the four behind it, the group maintaining the particular precision of people who had traveled together enough that coordination had become automatic rather than deliberate.

  Their robes were red and black, deep colors that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it, and the cowls that covered their faces obscured everything below the eyes, the whole arrangement designed to communicate uniformity of purpose rather than individuality of person.

  Creatures moved in the periphery of their passage. A Tier 1 Sandshard emerged from the sand twenty meters to their left, registered the speed and the Ethra signatures moving through its hunting ground, and withdrew.

  Normally, such a creature would have been worth stopping for, the core and carapace representing resources that no practical ranker left uncollected. The lead figure did not alter her course. The four behind her did not suggest otherwise.

  Their mission did not have room for the ordinary calculations of resource collection.

  The settlement appeared ahead of them in the way that things appear from high speed, the distance collapsing quickly, and they powered down their land riders as the full scope of what remained became visible.

  The riders settled to the sand with barely a sound, and for a moment, all five of them simply looked at what was in front of them in silence.

  What had been a settlement was now primarily a record of what had happened to one.

  The lead figure dismounted first, stepping down from her rider with the unhurried precision of someone who processes information best through proximity.

  She was a woman, and the cowl that the others still wore she pushed back from her head as she walked, revealing a bald head, the skin on the left side of her face marked with black tattoos that moved from her temple down past her jawline in patterns that were too deliberate to be decorative, a scar cutting across her right cheek at an angle that suggested it had been given rather than chosen.

  She walked toward the nearest body without adjusting her pace for the state of it.

  "Blood and bone Ethra," she said, to no one specifically, though the others were close enough to hear.

  "Standard wasteland methodology," one of them replied, dismounting and approaching with the dismissive confidence of someone who has already categorized the situation.

  "The barbarian clans that operate this far from the empire's reach favor these paths. Nothing unusual."

  The woman did not respond.

  She had stopped near a body that was not a body in the conventional sense, more a location where the material that had constituted a person had undergone a transformation that had no good equivalent in ordinary biological terms.

  The ground around it was discolored in a pattern that spread outward from the center, the soil darker and in places almost iridescent, the smell of it reaching her before she was fully aware she was smelling it.

  The others came up behind her and stopped.

  The silence lasted several seconds.

  "They wouldn't," one of them said, in the particular tone of someone who has just understood something they had been hoping not to understand.

  "We are a considerable distance from any point where anyone would notice," the woman said.

  "So yes. They would."

  She straightened and looked northward, into the pale, washed-out blue of the wasteland sky.

  Her eyes moved across the distance the way trained eyes move across territory, not searching but reading, parsing what the landscape was communicating about what had moved through it.

  "The Talahan Empire is that direction," she said.

  "A few days' travel by land rider," one of the others confirmed.

  "Jurisdiction becomes complicated once we cross the wasteland boundary. The clans and sects that govern the territories along that route are sovereign within the terms of their accord with the empire, and the accord grants us passage but not authority."

  "The empire needs to know what is operating in their peripheral territories," she said.

  "And we will ensure that knowledge reaches the appropriate level."

  "The empire has its own powers," another said, the cautionary tone careful rather than challenging.

  "A Regent as emperor. The dynastic clans with their own resources and alliances."

  "The empire," she said, turning back toward her land rider, "would not benefit from the alternative."

  "No one says no to the Heralds," she concluded, the observation carrying neither pride nor threat, simply the quality of a thing that had been established as true through long precedent.

  "Is that so?"

  The voice came from beneath the ground.

  The four Adepts moved with the unity of people who had been trained together for long enough that individual reaction had been replaced by collective response, their weapons out and their formations established around their leader in the time it took the voice to finish its sentence.

  The woman herself had not moved, her eyes already on the bulge in the earth three meters ahead of her, watching it with the focused patience of someone who prefers to understand what is coming before deciding what to do about it.

  A hand came through the surface.

  Human in shape but not in scale, the fingers long and tipped with something that was simultaneously nail and claw, the material covering the back of the hand a carapace of black and gold that caught the afternoon light and returned it in sharp edges.

  The arm followed the hand, and then the shoulder, and then the rest of it pulled itself from the earth with the deliberate, unhurried quality of something that considers gravity a matter of personal preference.

  It stood before them at a height that forced a reassessment of scale, the full carapace running from the crown of its head to the visible portions of its feet, each plate fitted to the next with the seamless precision of something grown rather than crafted.

  Its eyes were gold at the iris and black at the center, the inverse of what eyes should be, and it looked at the five Heralds in front of it with an expression that contained recognition and contempt in proportions that suggested the recognition had preceded and informed the contempt.

  It smiled, and the teeth behind the smile were sharpened.

  The aura it released was a physical event. The Adepts took the weight of it with the practiced discipline of people who had stood in the presence of Lord rank Ethra before and had developed the internal architecture required to remain functional under it, but the discipline showed at the edges, the small tells of bodies and hearts working to maintain what they had been trained to maintain against pressure designed to undo it. The woman took it without visible adjustment.

  From beneath the sand around them, sounds began, first one and then several and then many, the high-pitched shrieking of things responding to the pressure of a Lord rank aura, the way certain creatures respond to the vibration of a very large animal moving nearby.

  "Tier 4 shards," one of the Adepts said tightly, her circular blades rising into orbit around her as the first of the creatures broke the surface.

  The carapaced figure looked at the Heralds with its inverted eyes.

  "Cultists in my wasteland," it said.

  "The vagrants claim this territory. You were not invited."

  "Your name," the woman said. "And who you serve."

  The figure looked at her the way one looks at a question that is technically answerable but structurally irrelevant.

  "You brought your troubles here," it said, its gaze moving to the liquefied bodies on the ground with something that was not grief but was not indifference either.

  "Whatever you disturbed, you disturbed in our territory."

  "The Undeath Cult operated within your territory," she said.

  "What do you know of their movements?"

  The figure's smile returned, the dark amusement of someone who knows more than they intend to share.

  "You should not have come here," it said. "Not this close to the surge."

  She moved.

  The Adepts had not been anticipating the lead, not because they were inattentive but because the decision to move had been made at a speed that did not allow for anticipation, the woman covering the distance between herself and the carapaced figure in the time it took the figure to recognize that the distance was changing.

  She caught its hand at the point where the serrated claws would have found the nearest Adept's throat, her grip closing on the wrist, and she looked up at it from beneath.

  The claws pressed against her palm. They did not break the skin.

  Above them, the air was doing something it had not been doing a moment before, the wind shearing in patterns that built crude shapes, blades and spear points of compressed air that hung in the space between the combatants and the surging Sandshards, each one carrying enough pressure in its edge to demonstrate what it would do if released.

  The figure looked at her with its inverted eyes and laughed, and the sound of it was genuinely pleased.

  "A Lord," it said. "Finally, something worth waking up for."

  She did not respond to this. She simply held its gaze and waited.

  Both sides moved at once.

  ****

  Tunde felt the new arrivals before he saw them, his sight reading the Ethra signatures dropping into the cavern through the hole above them with the quiet efficiency it had developed over days of continuous use.

  Four Initiates. Two Disciples.

  The Ethra quality on the Disciples was the first thing he noted, the density of it, the control visible in the way it moved through their frames, not the scattered patterns of wasteland Initiates or even the practiced steadiness he had come to associate with Elyria's Disciple rank.

  This was something different, something that had been organized and refined by training rather than accumulated through experience, and the difference was immediately visible to his sight the way the difference between rough-hewn and finished stone is immediately visible to the hand.

  He stood beside Elyria in the emptied treasury room and watched the six figures approach with the measured care of people who had been told what to do and intended to do it correctly.

  The Disciples came forward.

  The male was tall, carrying a blade that his sight could not fully read, the composition of the weapon's Ethra shifting in his vision in ways that suggested layering or craftsmanship beyond ordinary imbuing.

  The female was shorter, her cropped hair framing a face that carried professional attention as its default expression, two knives at her sides that she had not reached for yet.

  "We are not bandits," Elyria said, her voice carrying the tone she used when stating facts she considered self-evidently true and was choosing to communicate rather than argue.

  "Surrender peacefully," the male Disciple said.

  His voice had the calm of someone who had delivered this instruction many times and found the consistent repetition of it reliable.

  "You will not be harmed."

  Elyria lowered her floating blades, each one settling to the floor in sequence. She raised her remaining hand and the metal construct that served as the other, open-palmed.

  Tunde let the curved blade he had been holding fall, the sound of it on the stone clear in the silence of the cavern.

  The female Disciple was in front of him before he finished straightening from releasing the weapon, the speed of her movement the kind of speed that belonged to a different category than the Disciples he had been fighting since the settlement's walls.

  She looked at the manacle on his wrist with a brief, focused attention, her eyes moving from it to his face and back, and then she produced the restraints.

  They were not metal and not rope, something that existed between those categories, silk-like in appearance but carrying the faint luminescence of something that had Ethra woven into its structure.

  They wrapped themselves around his wrists when she applied them, and the wrapping felt like something settling rather than something being fastened.

  "By the authority of the Talahan Empire and the Verdan Clan," she said, with the precision of someone reciting something that needs to be said correctly,

  "You are placed under arrest for crimes against the empire."

  "We didn't commit any crimes," Tunde said, hearing the inadequacy of the statement as it left his mouth and saying it anyway because the alternative was silence.

  "That determination has not yet been made," she said.

  "Do not speak unless you are asked to."

  He felt the weight of her aura as she said this, a controlled pressure that she had not been exerting before and was now applying with the precise intentionality of someone making a point through demonstration rather than words.

  It was not overwhelming, not the crushing force of the Lord rank presence that had pressed them flat earlier, but it was deliberate and it was directed specifically at him, and beneath it, he could feel his own Ethra responding with the resistance his cultivation had been building.

  He held the resistance quietly and did not make it visible.

  Something crossed her face, brief enough that he might have missed it if his sight had not been running. Not suspicion, more like an adjustment, the slight adjustment of someone who has just received slightly different information than they expected.

  She said nothing further.

  The manacle reacted to the silk restraints the moment they settled.

  He felt it as a vibration first, the familiar hum of the relic engaging with something in its environment, and then as a constriction, the relic apparently having assessed the restraints and arrived at a conclusion about them.

  The expected sequence did not follow.

  The manacle did not absorb the Ethra from the silk. It did not extend into blade form.

  It contracted, the metal of the cuff drawing inward, the dimensions of it shrinking against his wrist until it was a narrow band, present but minimal, fitting itself beneath the restraints with the quiet efficiency of something that had found a configuration it preferred.

  He looked at it. Elyria, her silver eyes sharper than the light in the cavern warranted, caught the motion and caught his eyes in the same glance.

  The look she gave him was brief and complete, a full instruction compressed into a single expression. He received it and filed it and kept his face still.

  Above them, the sound of impact traveled through the stone, the evidence of whatever was happening between the Lord from the ship and whoever he had found to disagree with him.

  The female Disciple made a sound that was not quite a sigh.

  "I knew he would find something to hit," she said.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The male Disciple laughed with the genuine ease of someone who found this expectation not at all surprising.

  "Two days on that vessel, and I understood completely why the elders were glad to have him gone. Perhaps this will provide an adequate outlet."

  Tunde processed this information alongside the sudden cold understanding that had arrived with it. The Lord on the ship.

  The Lord who had ended Khusen with the efficiency of someone performing a minor administrative task.

  If the Disciples were speaking of him as something that needed an outlet, as something the clan elders had been pleased to see leave, then Thorne, who was on the surface with that Lord, was in a situation that Tunde's presence underground was not improving.

  He started to move.

  The pain arrived precisely as he completed the first step, a sharp, specific pressure that found the path between his Ethra channels and made itself felt there, and his legs lost their confidence in the message from his brain, and he went sideways into the two Initiates who had been positioned for exactly this event.

  They righted him with the practiced ease of people who had done this before.

  "Thought so," the male Disciple said, without particular judgment.

  "My friend," Tunde said, the word feeling imprecise as he said it, but being the most accurate available term, "is up there. With your Lord."

  The female Disciple's expression shifted fractionally.

  "You are friends with a Revenant."

  It was not entirely a question. Elyria stepped into the moment before it could settle.

  "Acquaintances," she said, with careful emphasis.

  "Circumstantial companions. Nothing so developed as friendship. Please."

  The female Disciple looked at her with the expression of someone who has received an answer and has noted both its content and the speed with which it was delivered.

  "You will speak when asked," she said.

  Elyria inclined her head with the grace of someone who is acknowledging an instruction without in any way committing to following it, the gesture technically compliant and functionally its own statement.

  The Disciple recognized this and said nothing further, which was itself a kind of answer.

  A device appeared from one of the Initiate's hands, a small object that hit the cavern floor and expanded, metal rearranging itself in a sequence that produced a series of circular platforms rising from the base to the level of the hole above, a path upward built in seconds from materials that had not been those materials a moment before.

  Tunde looked at the construction with the particular attention he gave to things he did not understand and wanted to.

  They were directed upward.

  ****

  The ship above the settlement was something that required several seconds to fully receive.

  He had understood, abstractly, that ships capable of flight existed on this continent. He had seen the flying objects on the horizon during their final approach to the wasteland, had registered them as evidence of a world with capabilities beyond what he had grown up knowing.

  The abstract understanding and the physical reality of standing beneath a vessel of that scale, close enough to feel the displacement of air from its engines as a pressure against his face, were different experiences in the way that knowing fire is hot and putting your hand in it are different experiences.

  It hovered with the patient assurance of something that does not need to demonstrate its capability to be aware of it, the hull a deep green that had been maintained beyond mere function, the banner of the blade and serpent crisp in the air against its darker background.

  The engines produced a sound that was felt more than heard, a sustained vibration that traveled through the ground and up through the soles of his feet.

  His eyes moved from the ship to the ground.

  Khusen lay with his eyes open and his expression caught in the specific configuration of someone who had been in the middle of a thought that had not been completed, the golden sand Ethra that had filled the air around him now absent, his body already beginning the process of returning to the dust of the wasteland that had produced him.

  Tunde had seen enough death over the past days to read the state of a body without processing it through the full weight of what it meant, and he read this one and moved on.

  Thorne was on his knees.

  The crystallized cuffs binding his wrists were a deep, translucent green, the color of something grown rather than manufactured, and they held him with the kind of certainty that Ethra reinforced restraints at Adept grade or above produced.

  Two Adepts flanked him, their attention on him with the complete, professional focus of people who had been assigned a task and had no other thoughts.

  Thorne's face was forward, his expression containing several things simultaneously, none of which were fear.

  The Lord stood nearby.

  He had sheathed the blade, or the blade had returned to floating beside him, which was not the same as sheathed but produced a similar aesthetic.

  He was looking at the settlement around him with the mild interest of someone taking inventory of a situation they have already resolved, and the act of looking carried the same weight as his presence, the Lord's aura not pressing outward aggressively but present in the way that weather is present, a condition of the surrounding environment rather than something being applied to it.

  He glanced at Tunde.

  The instinct that fired at the contact of that gaze was not the learned caution of someone who has been told that Lords are dangerous.

  It was something older and more immediate than learning, the specific fear that prey animals have developed for predators, not for the Lord specifically but for the category of thing he represented, the tier of power at which the gap between it and everything below it becomes a qualitative rather than quantitative distinction.

  Tunde held the gaze for the two seconds that felt like eternity and looked down.

  They were pushed to their knees on the sand.

  An Adept stepped forward, raised a hand, and reduced Khusen's body to ash with a technique that produced a brief white light, clean and complete, nothing remaining that could be described as what it had been.

  Tunde stared at the ash for a moment and then looked at the Adept boarding the ship and understood, with a clarity that required no elaboration, what the distance between his current rank and the ranks above him felt like from the inside.

  The Lord looked at the assembled group, rankers of his clan and prisoners alike, and spoke.

  "We move."

  Two words. The weight they carried arrived before they finished, settling across the area with the particular authority of someone who has never needed to speak loudly to be heard.

  Tunde felt his own Ethra slow in response, the ambient pressure of the Lord's presence making itself felt in the specific way that high rank Ethra affected lower rank cultivation, a heaviness in the chest, a thickening of the internal circulation that required active management to work through.

  He managed it. He breathed and cycled and managed it, and they were dragged to their feet and toward the vessel.

  ****

  The interior of the ship was brown-walled and larger than its exterior had suggested it could be, the corridors wide enough to pass in both directions without particular consideration and stretching further than he could see at the first turn.

  It smelled of metal and something that was the ship's own character, the accumulated presence of whatever Ethra had been used within it over whatever period it had been in operation.

  Cultivators moved through the corridors with the purposeful ease of people who knew where they were and where they were going, each one carrying the particular quality of training that he had noted in the Disciples who had arrested them, that organized, refined density that distinguished clan trained rankers from the accumulated experience variety he had been fighting since the wasteland.

  Even the Initiates moved differently, the smallest details of their posture and awareness communicating a foundation that the bandit Initiates had not possessed.

  He watched all of this in the margins of his vision as they were marched deeper into the ship, taking turns that went downward, deeper into the hull, until they reached a corridor where the lighting was dim and the doors were metal with small square openings at face height.

  Thorne was taken first, a direction given with a single gesture by one of the Adepts, and the corridor absorbed him before Tunde could form the words he wanted to say.

  The door of their own cell closed behind them with the solid sound of something that had been designed to close and to stay closed.

  The silence that settled in the dimly lit room was the kind that follows a great deal of noise and activity, the specific silence of people who have been through something together and have arrived at a pause in which the shape of what they have been through can be seen more clearly than during it.

  Elyria sat against the far wall. Tunde sat against the near one.

  "From one cell to another," she said.

  He managed a smile, and the fact that it was genuine surprised him slightly.

  He looked at the relic on his wrist, now the narrow band it had made itself into, its inscriptions dormant, the metal cool against his skin.

  "When did that happen?" Elyria asked, her eyes on it.

  "When she applied the restraints," he said.

  "It seemed to decide on its own."

  "Hm." She was quiet for a moment, her silver eyes moving between the band and his face.

  "The restraints are crafted from binding creature material. Tier 3 at minimum, based on the quality of the hold. The relic read the restraints and chose a configuration that would not interact with them." She paused.

  "It made a tactical decision."

  Tunde looked at the band.

  "Is that normal for relics?"

  "No," she said simply.

  He absorbed this and put it in the category of things about the relic that he did not yet have the framework to fully process, a category that had been accumulating entries since the pit.

  "What happens to us now?" he asked.

  Elyria considered this with the honest, methodical quality she brought to practical problems.

  "They believe we are either bandits or associates of the Revenant cult. If the former, the consequences are manageable, jail time, labor, a fine if we're fortunate and someone with authority decides our story holds. If they conclude the latter," she looked at him directly,

  "We don't survive the ship."

  The silence this produced had texture.

  "He helped us," Tunde said, after a time.

  Not a defense, not an argument, just a thing that was true and needed to be said.

  "And we helped him in return," Elyria said, the irritation in her voice the irritation of someone who has said something before and finds themselves saying it again.

  "I have explained this more than once. The world sees association before it investigates circumstances. We are standing next to a Revenant, which means the world sees us as people standing next to a Revenant, and the rest is detail that requires someone with authority to care enough to hear."

  Tunde said nothing.

  "Power," she said, more quietly.

  "And the appearance of it. That is what determines whether your words are heard or discarded. Right now, we have neither, which means we need someone in that room to be willing to listen before they decide." She looked at the ceiling.

  "Which is not impossible. It simply requires us to be extremely careful about what we say and how we say it."

  The door opened before he had finished considering this.

  ****

  Disciple Rhyn was a person who filled the space he occupied with the comfortable competence of someone who had been trained into their rank rather than having stumbled into it, his black and green robes clean in a way that suggested he considered cleanliness a form of discipline.

  He tapped the silk restraints on Tunde's wrists with two fingers, and they unravelled and fell, the Ethra holding them releasing with the efficiency of something responding to the authority of someone who had applied it.

  "Disciple Rhyn," he said.

  "That is how you address me." He moved to Elyria.

  "If you attempt to leave the path I set, I will stop you. I am instructed to use the necessary force to do so."

  "One handed and a stage below you," Elyria said, in the tone of someone making a reasonable point.

  "I am genuinely unsure what threat you believe I represent."

  "The precision of your Ethra control as a Disciple without a defined concept is its own category of concern," Rhyn said, without defensiveness or rancor, simply as a professional assessment. "And the Initiate's battle instincts are sharper than his rank suggests they should be." He looked at Tunde briefly. "Both of those things make you more interesting than your ranks alone would indicate."

  He gestured, and they followed him into the corridor.

  The ship was in motion.

  The hum of it was different from the engines at rest, a sustained directional quality that communicated movement, and through the porthole he caught a glimpse of cloud at speed, the ground below it a tan blur that was rapidly becoming something other than wasteland, the landscape changing beneath them as the vessel carried them north at a pace that days of running through the desert made feel obscene in its efficiency.

  Tunde watched it and thought about distance and time and the fact that the world consistently proved to be larger and faster than whatever framework he had most recently updated his understanding to contain.

  They arrived at a door guarded by two Disciples, one of whom was the woman who had arrested them, now in a conversation with Rhyn that had the easy quality of people who knew each other well and were performing the minor ritual of people who know each other well pretending they do not find guard duty tedious.

  The doors opened.

  The room was large enough that Tunde had to adjust his sense of the ship's internal geography; the ceiling higher than the corridors had suggested was available, the floor a deep green stone that carried faint patterns in it, veins of lighter color that moved in ways that were either natural or very carefully made to appear so.

  At the far end, three figures sat on a raised platform of the same green stone, behind them a carved image of the clan's sigil rendered at a scale that communicated permanent presence rather than decorative intent.

  Three Adepts.

  He read their Ethra through his sight in the brief moment before he decided that the sight was a capability that should remain invisible in this room, with these people, and deactivated it.

  The one in the center was old in the way that people who have been at Adept rank for a significant stretch of time are old, the years present in his face without having robbed it of its density, his grey hair cut close, a cloth of shimmering scripts tied across his eyes in a configuration that covered them completely.

  A simple wooden staff leaned against his platform. The one on his left was a black-haired man with three thin rings floating behind him in a slow, independent orbit, the rings neither weapon nor decoration but something that existed in the space between those categories.

  The one on his right was a woman whose smile arrived before her attention fully landed on them, the expression soft in a way that his instincts read as something to attend to more carefully than the man with the rings.

  They were brought to a stop several meters from the platform, and Rhyn gestured for them to kneel.

  "Great Adepts of the clan," Rhyn announced, his voice carrying the formal register of someone reciting an established form,

  "I bring before you the suspects apprehended in the company of the Revenant and within the territory of the bandit settlement."

  Tunde looked at the floor and kept his Ethra still.

  "Return to your duties, Rhyn," the woman said.

  "You have our thanks."

  Rhyn bowed, turned without looking at either of them again, and left. The door closed behind him, and the room held its silence for long enough that Tunde was aware of his own heartbeat.

  "Raise your heads," said the voice of the blindfolded elder, which carried the particular authority of someone who has been listened to for a very long time.

  He raised his head and looked at three Adepts who were looking at him.

  "I am Elder Joran," the blindfolded one said.

  "The elder to my left is Moros. The elder to my right is Celia. That is sufficient information for your current situation, given that your lives reside presently in our hands."

  Tunde nodded, keeping the movement small.

  Joran clapped his hands once. The sound was sharp in the still air of the room. Tunde managed to not react visibly to the clap and to the question it raised about what, precisely, a blindfolded elder was seeing when he looked at them.

  "As a matter of rank, the Disciple will speak first," Elder Moros said.

  His voice had the texture of gravel and the temperature of something that had decided a long time ago what it thought of most things and had not found reason to revise.

  Elyria straightened from her kneeling position without standing, the adjustment small but communicating that she was choosing to engage rather than simply endure.

  "Esteemed elders," she said.

  "I am Elyria. I hold the rank of Disciple, without a defined concept as yet."

  "A Disciple without a concept," Elder Celia said, the soft smile remaining in place as her eyes sharpened.

  "That is unusual."

  "It is," Elyria agreed, without elaboration.

  "Be advised," Joran said, and the softness of his delivery carried no softness in its meaning,

  "That any untruth you offer this panel will be identified and resolved immediately. I mention this not as a threat but as information that should inform your choices."

  "I have not lied," Elyria said.

  "Which is why you are still sitting in that position rather than in a different one," Joran replied pleasantly.

  Elyria inclined her head. She told them what she had chosen to tell, and Tunde listened as the version of events she constructed emerged, accurate in its facts and carefully selected in what facts it included.

  She had come from Silvershade, she said, fleeing in the aftermath of an attack by creatures of the deep forest, a conflict over resources that had spilled outward from its origin and reached her family's stronghold.

  The nexus point that had been prepared for evacuation had deposited her in the wrong location, the wasteland of Bloodfire rather than the intended destination within her continent.

  Everything that had followed had been the consequence of that displacement and the circumstances she had encountered within it.

  She did not mention her family's name. She mentioned the Regent of Forests only in the context of the nexus point, as the power whose infrastructure had been used.

  It was a complete story that contained no lies and omitted several things Tunde suspected the elders would have found interesting.

  Elder Moros looked at her with the flat assessment of someone cataloguing the distance between what has been said and what might have been said.

  "The attack on Silvershade," he said.

  "We have heard indications of something of this nature. Your account is consistent with those indications."

  "It is, because it is accurate," Elyria said.

  Joran's attention moved to Tunde.

  "Initiate," he said. "Speak."

  Tunde kept his sight dormant, kept his hands still, kept his Ethra in its steady circulation, and told the truth.

  He told it the way he had been learning to tell difficult things, simply and without elaboration, the same story he had told Elyria in the cell what felt like a lifetime ago. The settlement underground.

  The continent of Crystalreach, the name that had meant nothing to him until he saw what it meant to Thorne and Elyria.

  The ship across the sea, the pit, the manacle he kept his wrist still to avoid drawing attention to. What had followed.

  He did not mention the relic's functions beyond its existence as something he had found.

  When he finished, the silence lasted long enough for him to become aware of the sound of the ship's engines again.

  Joran made a sound that, in a different register, might have been a laugh.

  "A refugee from Silvershade and a prisoner from Crystalreach," he said.

  "If you were lying, it would be a remarkably poor choice of cover story, which argues either for your sincerity or for a very sophisticated understanding of how cover stories should work."

  "They could still be associated," Moros said.

  His rings had increased their speed slightly, which Tunde interpreted as agitation.

  "The Revenant could have recruited them precisely because they appear unassociated. A lord of the Undeath Cult operating on this continent, working with a bandit who had access to Lord rank advancement, is not a simple or isolated situation. An invasion, a scouting operation, a preparation for something larger. Any of these would benefit from people who appear innocent."

  "Thorne was not working with the Undeath Cult," Tunde said.

  Elyria closed her eyes briefly.

  "Explain yourself," Celia said, the soft smile unchanged but the danger behind it no longer hidden.

  Tunde looked at the three Adepts and made the decision that honesty was the only thing he currently had to offer that had any value.

  "I don't have the full story," he said.

  "But what I know is that he was turned against his will, his team was destroyed, and his reason for being in that settlement was to find the person responsible for what was done to him. He was looking for answers about who sold his team to the people who did this to him." He paused.

  "He was a Herald. Before."

  The quality of silence in the room changed.

  Moros sat very still. Celia's smile had taken on a different character.

  Joran had his head slightly tilted, the blindfold unmoving, and Tunde had the distinct sense that whatever the elder was using to perceive the world, it was working with considerable depth.

  "A Herald turned Revenant," Joran said, after a moment.

  "Through betrayal within the cult's own structure." He was quiet, and the quality of the quiet was contemplative rather than interrogative.

  "At a time when we are already monitoring unusual cult activity on this continent." He turned this over, visibly.

  "This could be many things."

  "It could be a fabrication," Moros said flatly.

  "It could be," Joran agreed.

  "Or it could be exactly what it presents as, which makes it either significantly more complicated or significantly simpler, depending on what the Heralds know about their own internal situation." He folded his hands.

  "Either way, we are close to an event that makes additional rankers, even unaffiliated ones, a resource to be weighed rather than discarded."

  Moros's expression communicated his opinion of this with clarity.

  "You cannot seriously propose bringing outsiders into the clan."

  "I propose nothing," Joran said.

  "I note the context and observe that the Lord's judgment in this matter is what it has always been, final and not ours to preempt." He looked at Elyria and then at Tunde.

  "Tell me your intentions. Both of you."

  "I am trying to reach the Tralon Technocracy," Elyria said.

  "To pursue my Ethra path through the Aspirant Trials. That has been my destination since before I arrived on this continent."

  Joran nodded once.

  "And you?" His blindfolded attention was on Tunde.

  Tunde thought about the question, about what was true rather than what was strategically useful.

  "I have nowhere to go," he said.

  "I have things I need to find out. Those things require strength I don't have yet. So right now I need to get stronger, and I need to find the information that tells me what I'm getting stronger for."

  Moros made a sound.

  Celia looked at Tunde with the dangerous soft smile and said nothing.

  Joran was quiet for a moment.

  "A person with no destination and a purpose they cannot yet fully articulate," he said.

  "In a different context, that would be a liability. In the current one," he left the sentence incomplete in a way that suggested completion was not the point,

  "It is something the Lord will assess."

  "He may find them entirely unsuitable," Moros said.

  "He may," Joran agreed.

  "That is his prerogative."

  He snapped his fingers once.

  The doors opened. Rhyn entered, bowed, and waited.

  "Return them to their cell," Joran said.

  "See that they are given food and water. They are guests until the Lord decides otherwise."

  Rhyn raised an eyebrow at Tunde, a small and contained expression of surprise, and bowed to the elders and led them back through the door.

  Tunde walked beside Elyria through the corridor of the ship, the engines humming beneath their feet, and felt the particular relief of a person who has been in a room where their life was being discussed and has left it with the same number of limbs they entered with.

  It was not the same as safety. It was not the same as resolution. It was simply the next moment, which was more than the moment before it had guaranteed.

  He took it and kept walking.