The evening had settled comfortably into Sylvan’s warm interior — candles burning low on the tables, the murmur of other conversations woven beneath their own, the smell of good food and aged wood mingling in the air.
The kind of atmosphere that made a person relax their guard without noticing.
Hash noticed him before anyone else did.
A boy, seated alone in the far corner.
Still in a way that felt deliberate — not the stillness of someone resting, but the stillness of someone watching.
His drink sat untouched beside him.
His eyes moved across the room in slow, measured sweeps, pausing on nothing and cataloguing everything.
Hash turned back to the table.
“Why are you looking over there? Do any of you know him?”
Natasha followed his gaze.
“Not personally. He was introduced to us this morning — a transfer student from Lumio City.”
“New to the city,” Hash said, more to himself than anyone.
“Sitting alone at Sylvan’s.” He frowned — thoughtful, not suspicious.
“Any idea why?”
Natasha shook her head.
“I don’t.”
On his end of the table, Zayden had not yet returned from wherever his thoughts had taken him.
The memory fragments were still there — loose, circling, refusing to connect.
He had been pressing at them since dinner began and reached the same wall each time.
Hash leaned toward him.
“Zayden. There’s a student alone over there. New to the city, apparently.” He paused.
“I’d like to invite him over. That would be alright?”
Zayden blinked once and refocused.
He glanced toward the corner, took in the figure in two seconds of clean assessment, and answered: “That would be fine. As you wish.”
Simple.
Contained.
But underneath it, something split cleanly in two.
His heart moved first.
Yes.
Something open in him said yes — the part that hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to be alone in a room full of other people’s warmth, with no bridge across it.
His mind came a beat behind.
No.
Every unfamiliar face in this world was a variable until proven otherwise.
A transfer student appearing today, of all days.
Too new.
Too convenient.
The careful part of him pressed back hard.
He said nothing of either.
He never broke Hash’s wish.
That was a habit he hadn’t corrected yet — and, quietly, some part of him didn’t want to.
Hash flagged a waiter over, made the request with the easy manner of someone who had never spent much time calculating his gestures, and the waiter crossed the floor.
Aluras Wikcus didn’t look up when the waiter reached his table.
He let the words land first.
Then he considered the table across the room — the broad-shouldered man at its head, with the unguarded smile of someone who invited strangers out of instinct rather than strategy.
No angle in it.
No assessment behind the eyes.
Aluras was not, by habit, someone who crossed rooms to join other people’s tables.
He preferred the peripheral position.
The corner.
The back row.
The question he never had to answer because he gave no one cause to ask.
He had his own reasons for being in Amber City.
Those he kept to himself.
He rose.
The waiter adjusted a chair.
By the arrangement of the table, Aluras found himself placed directly opposite Zayden Everhart.
Neither of them spoke first.
Hash filled the quiet the way he always did — naturally, without effort.
“You look new to the city. Are you here with family?”
Aluras scanned the table once before answering.
“My parents and I transferred from Lumio City. Research purposes.”
“Both of them came?”
“Yes.”
Natasha tilted her head.
“And they sent you to Sylvan’s alone on your first evening here?”
“They were occupied with their work.”
A pause crossed Natasha’s expression — brief, almost private.
Something more personal than she usually allowed to surface.
“I understand that,” she said.
“My brother is the same way. Work is everything around him. Some weeks I barely see his face.” She turned her glass slowly on the table.
“You tell yourself it becomes ordinary. It doesn’t.”
No one pressed further.
The table absorbed it quietly and moved on.
Across from Aluras, Zayden had not moved.
His expression held nothing readable.
His drink rested in his hand.
But his attention had not left Aluras since the moment he sat down — the patient, thorough kind of observation that showed nothing on the surface and let nothing escape beneath it.
Minimal language.
No wasted motion.
Answers direct enough to seem honest — or practiced enough to simulate honesty convincingly.
The eyes moved across the table in those measured arcs, accounting rather than connecting.
Building a picture of the room rather than participating in it.
No immediate signal.
Nothing that broke pattern in any way he could name.
And yet.
The careful part of him held its position, as it always did.
The absence of visible threat was not proof of safety. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
This world had made that plain enough.
He said nothing, and kept watching.
Hash raised his glass toward the center of the table.
“We’ve talked long enough. Let’s do this properly.”
The evening found its footing again.
Voices layered over one another, cups touched, warmth spread outward from the center of the group.
Laughter came easily — the kind that builds when people have eaten well and the night has grown familiar around them.
Even Aluras eased slightly at the edges.
He remained peripheral, his contributions measured and few.
But the rigid quality of a stranger braced for intrusion softened into something closer to neutral tolerance.
Zayden noticed.
He catalogued it, and moved on.
He smiled when the table expected a smile.
He answered when addressed.
He kept the deeper machinery of his thoughts running quietly beneath the warm surface of the evening.
Fragments.
Mark.
The investigation.
The Lexicon.
The question it posed that still has no answer.
Each thread still loose.
Each one still waiting.
Every moment, he reminded himself.
Even this one.
Stay focused.
The gifts came near the end.
Natasha placed a small, wrapped box on the table in her direct way — no ceremony, no preamble.
Inside: a slim wristwatch, the face clean and precise, small brass gears visible behind its crystal face.
The craftwork of this world rendered into something unexpectedly fine.
Antonio’s was wrapped differently — cloth folded and tied at the top with more care than the wrapping itself required.
Inside: a long black coat, heavy fabric, well-made, built for serious cold.
“Winter drops fast in Amber City,” he said simply.
“Thought you should have something that actually works.”
Zayden held both items for a quiet moment.
He wasn’t someone who wore his feelings on the outside.
But something in the straightforward, undemonstrative nature of it — care that asked nothing in return and made no performance of itself — pressed through the composure he usually kept better guarded than this.
“Thank you,” he said.
More plainly than he’d intended.
The bill arrived.
One hundred and thirty-four Lumens.
Zayden ran the conversion without meaning to.
Bread cost one or two Glims.
Ten Glims made one Lumen.
One hundred and thirty-four Lumens sat at nearly a quarter of Hash’s monthly earnings from the construction yards — and that was before tonight’s clothing was accounted for.
He looked at Hash.
Steady.
Quiet.
The face of a man who had made this decision before the evening began and saw no reason to revisit it.
Hash counted the bills without comment.
Placed them on the table.
Gave the waiter a calm nod.
He didn’t look for acknowledgment.
He didn’t make anything of the number.
He simply turned back to check if anyone needed anything before they left.
Zayden said nothing.
But he held it — the way Hash moved, unhurried, with no performance in any of it.
He works the construction yards from first light.
He comes home.
He does this, and calls it ordinary.
Something quiet and heavy settled behind Zayden’s ribs.
Outside, the mountain had sent its cold down into the streets of Amber City.
The night air carried its own particular quality up here — a mineral edge to the wind rolling off the bright peaks, lanterns swaying at the corners of narrow stone roads, the city folding into late-night quiet the way old places do when the last of the foot traffic has gone home.
Sylvan’s warmth gave way to it instantly.
Zayden glanced back once as they stepped onto the street.
The space where Aluras had stood a moment before was empty.
Not walking away in either direction.
Not visible anywhere down the road.
The lantern light moved against the walls.
The shadows sat undisturbed, as if nothing had passed through them.
Not left, Zayden noted, his eyes on the empty space a second longer than necessary.
Vanished.
He held the observation without reacting to it, and kept walking.
The walk home took fifteen minutes.
The mountain wind came with them the whole way — cold and consistent, pressing through thin fabric, carrying the smell of high altitude and stone.
By the time the house came into view, everyone carried the particular tiredness of a full day met and finished.
Warm, but heavy.
They moved through the house quietly, the way people do when they know others might be sleeping.
Stairs.
Brief goodnights with nothing more than was needed.
Doors clicking shut one after another.
Zayden sat on the edge of his bed in the dark for a moment before lying back. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The ceiling was still.
The room was still.
He let the thoughts return.
The memory fragments — something in them that hasn’t connected yet.
He pressed at the edges of it, methodical and slow.
Could be tied to what happened to Mark.
Could be older than that.
He turned it over.
Tomorrow: Academy first.
CSF after.
There may be something in their investigation I haven’t been able to reach yet.
The plans arranged themselves.
The thoughts slowed.
At eleven-fifteen, sleep pulled him under.
Five minutes before midnight, the sky above Amber City changed.
No forewarning.
No shift in the wind.
No sound from the peaks.
The people of Amber City slept on entirely undisturbed — breathing the cold mountain air, dreaming ordinary dreams, unaware.
If any one of them had walked outside at that precise moment and looked up, they would have seen the same pale moon they had always known.
The same scatter of stars against the same familiar dark.
Nothing unusual.
Nothing at all.
What moved through the sky that night could not be seen by ordinary eyes.
It was visible only to those who carried a badge.
The first thing was the glitching.
The moon fractured.
Not from cloud or wind — the disruption came from within the light itself, from somewhere behind the surface of it.
The edges of the disc blurred and snapped back.
Blurred again.
The shape of it lost coherence, pulsing in rhythms no season or orbit had ever produced, stuttering in and out of itself like a flame that could not decide whether to hold or go out.
Its light fell across the mountain peaks in broken intervals, catching the stone and releasing it, catching and releasing.
Then a second moon appeared — already present, as if it had always been there and the sky had only now permitted it to be seen.
It shone blue.
Deep and cold and saturated, the kind of blue that looks solid rather than luminous — the way a body of still, ancient water looks, undisturbed for so long it has forgotten how to move.
It did not pulse.
It did not flicker.
It simply held its place in the sky with a steadiness that made the glitching moon beside it seem all the more wrong by contrast.
Its light reached down into the streets below with perfect, even calm.
Then the third.
It came large.
Red, and enormous — swollen to a size the moon had no right to be, pressing its weight against the sky as if it had been expanding quietly for a very long time and had only now chosen to show the full extent of it.
Not the warm red of fire or ember.
Not the soft red of any sunset this world had produced.
This was heavier than any of those.
It bled along the edges of the bright mountain peaks, running down the ridgelines, spreading across the rooftops of the sleeping city below in a color that had no comfortable name.
The wind went completely still.
Not a door creaked.
Not a dog stirred.
Amber City lay beneath it in perfect silence.
And then, at the edge of the sky — quiet, almost reluctant — came the fourth.
Green.
Small and dim, far less imposing than the others.
It did not demand attention.
It offered itself modestly, the way a candle offers itself in a large room — present, but making no claim to dominate the space.
Its color was not vivid.
It was the kind of green found deep inside old forests, where the trees have grown close enough together that light has learned to move sideways rather than down.
Patient.
Almost hesitant.
For five minutes, all four held in the sky together.
Glitching.
Blue.
Red.
Green.
The city below them slept on, seeing nothing.
Not a single ordinary pair of eyes turned upward.
Not a single ordinary mind registered the change.
Whatever this was, it did not belong to the world that most people inhabited.
It moved in a register beyond the reach of the unbadged, beyond the reach of those untouched by the Aethernal System — visible only to Aethriels, only to the ones who had been bound to something larger than the common world allowed.
At midnight, it ended.
All four simply stopped — not fading, not withdrawing, just gone, between one breath and the next.
The pale familiar moon resumed its place in the sky as though it had never moved.
The mountain peaks lost their red edges.
The cold wind returned from the north.
A lantern swayed on its hook somewhere down an empty street.
Amber City breathed in the dark, and did not know what had just passed over it.
If a sky changes and nobody can see it, did it truly change?
The answer depends on who is looking.
Also, welcome Aluras.
Try not to trust him too quickly.
Or do.
I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong.