Kael made his decision two streets before Ash Row, and felt Starlight's surprise flicker behind his ribs the moment it understood what he intended.
You mean to confront them directly.
"I mean to stop pretending I haven't noticed," Kael said, low, ducking into a narrow alley between a cooper's storehouse and a shuttered tailor's shop — not a trap, exactly, simply a place quiet enough that whatever happened next wouldn't happen in front of a street full of witnesses. "If they wanted me dead, they'd have tried already. Someone skilled enough to tail a sensing-discipline novice without me catching it sooner probably wants information, not violence. I'd rather control when that conversation happens than keep pretending I don't know it's coming."
A reasonable risk, calculated honestly, Starlight allowed, after a beat of consideration. Though I would remind you, novice, that reasonable risks still occasionally go wrong. I will be ready to act if this becomes something other than a conversation.
The follower entered the alley's mouth a dozen heartbeats later — a slight, unremarkable woman in plain grey traveling clothes, perhaps thirty, her Spark signature settling into open visibility now that concealment no longer served any purpose. Third tier, Kael's sensing confirmed, Wind-adjacent but strange, threaded through with something that felt less like elemental force and more like pure, honed reflex.
"You're better than most novices at noticing a tail," she said, unhurried, stopping a careful ten paces off — close enough to talk, far enough to make clear she wasn't here to fight. "Most take three or four attempts before they catch on. You caught it inside an hour."
"Who sent you," Kael asked.
"Someone who's been curious about you since a scorched crater on the Wormwood road," the woman said, which told Kael, with a cold certainty, exactly whose network he was standing in front of. "My employer doesn't offer names easily, and I'm not authorized to give you hers even if you asked nicely. But she asked me to pass along a message, now that you've apparently gone looking for Aldric Penn's old survey and walked straight into the same puzzle she's been quietly working for the better part of a year."
Careful, Starlight warned, though its tone had shifted from alarm into something closer to focused attention. This is information freely offered. That is worth hearing, even if it's also worth doubting.
"I'm listening," Kael said.
"She says: you're not the only one who's felt what's under Corrigan's district. She's known about it longer than you have, and she hasn't gone digging it up herself, for reasons she thinks you'll understand once you're older and less impatient than you currently are." The woman's expression stayed carefully neutral, reciting rather than editorializing. "She also says: Baron Corrigan wants it opened for reasons that have nothing to do with defending anyone, and if you go anywhere near that structure without understanding exactly what you're dealing with first, you're more likely to hand him a weapon than find yourself one."
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
Kael's stomach tightened. "Why would she warn me at all, if she wants it for herself?"
The woman almost smiled — the first crack in her careful neutrality. "That," she said, "is a very good question, and not one I'm paid to answer for her. My guidance is simpler: keep investigating carefully, the way you already have been. Don't rush the door open. And if you ever decide you'd like a conversation with someone who actually knows what she's talking about instead of a hired go-between standing in an alley, leave word with Aldric Penn. He knows how to reach her, whether he'd admit it to your face or not."
She was gone before Kael could ask anything further, slipping back out of the alley's mouth with the same unhurried, professional ease she'd entered it, and Kael stood a long moment in the quiet afterward, turning the strange half-warning over with a growing sense that Thornwick's shadow war had just gotten considerably more complicated than three parties circling one buried secret.
She told the truth, as far as I could sense it, Starlight said finally. Which is its own kind of unsettling, novice. An enemy lying to you is simple to guard against. Someone genuinely warning you, for reasons of their own that may not align with your best interests at all, is a far harder thing to navigate cleanly.
Sister Meredine's shop above the chandler's on Ash Row smelled of tallow and dried herbs, cluttered with the particular organized chaos of someone who'd spent decades accumulating exactly what she needed and discarding nothing else. The witch herself was younger than Kael expected — perhaps fifty, sharp-eyed, her hands stained faintly grey-blue from years of working dyes and inks — and she studied him for a long moment after Coale's name opened the door without further question.
"Guild business, or the other kind," she said, more statement than question, settling into a worn chair across a small reading table. "Coale doesn't send me novices for simple bottleneck readings unless she's genuinely worried. And you don't carry yourself like a boy worried about a training plateau."
Kael unrolled Penn's map across the table without preamble, watching her expression shift from professional patience into something considerably sharper the moment she saw the marked location.
"Bones," she murmured, tracing the symbol at the map's center with one stained finger. "I wondered when someone would finally bring this to my door instead of leaving it buried in old paper." She looked up at him, assessing. "You've felt it yourself, haven't you. Not read about it. Felt it."
"Yes."
Meredine was quiet a long moment, then rose, crossing to a locked cabinet and withdrawing a thin, brittle-paged book bound in cracked leather, its cover marked with symbols that made Starlight go suddenly, sharply alert.
That text, it said, urgent. I recognize fragments of that binding. Ask her where it came from.
"This came down through three generations of witches before me," Meredine said, answering the question before Kael could voice it, laying the book open with careful reverence. "Fragments of the old prophecy texts — not the famous one everyone half-remembers about a King and pods and a boy, though this touches the same well. This concerns what the old builders left behind, scattered across the world in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, for the ones who'd come after and need them." She turned several pages, stopping at a hand-copied diagram that made Kael's breath catch — a structure, sealed, marked with a resonance-signature disturbingly close to what Starlight had described. "Caches. Seven of them, according to this text, though only two have ever been confirmed by later generations of witches comparing notes across the regions. One, apparently, sits beneath a city called New Haven, far across the sea. The other—"
"Is under Thornwick," Kael finished.
"Is under Thornwick," Meredine agreed, quiet and grave. "And every account I've inherited agrees on one thing plainly: these caches do not open for force, or coin, or even patience alone. They open only for someone the old builders intended them to recognize — and recognition, according to this text, requires two things together. A wielder of the specific nature the cache was built to answer." Her eyes lifted to his, sharp and searching. "And an anchor. A second presence, bonded to that wielder, capable of vouching for what he carries from somewhere outside his own body entirely."
An anchor, Starlight repeated, very quietly, and Kael felt something cold and vast move behind his own ribs — not fear exactly, but the particular vertigo of a puzzle piece sliding, unbidden, into a shape far larger than he'd been prepared to see.
Novice. I do not think that word, in this context, is a coincidence.