Word spread through the village quickly once Eldrin confirmed I'd be leaving for Kaldrath. By the time I'd packed what little I actually needed — which, given my abilities, amounted mostly to habit rather than necessity — half of Valoria had found some excuse to stop by and wish me well.
Garret would have been proud, I thought. Innkeepers and village leaders apparently ran on the same fuel: an almost physical need to send travelers off properly fed and properly warned about everything that could possibly go wrong on the road.
Aria found me last, near the village gate, the morning sun just starting to burn the mist off the valley floor.
"You're really doing this," she said. Not a question.
"I have to. If I'm going to protect this place — really protect it, not just react every time something knocks on the door — I need to understand what we're actually facing." I hesitated. "That, and apparently there's an entire Court of Heaven I didn't know existed until yesterday, which feels like the kind of thing a person should look into."
That got a small, tired laugh out of her. "You say that so casually. 'An entire Court of Heaven.' Most people would still be lying on the floor processing that sentence."
"I died once already and woke up in a training facility for a trillion years," I said. "My bar for 'things that require lying on the floor' is a little higher than most people's."
She was quiet for a moment, looking out past the gate toward the tree line, where the road eventually cut north toward the wider world. "I don't like this," she admitted finally. "Not because I doubt you can handle whatever's out there. Because Valoria has spent three hundred years learning how to survive without anyone's help, and in less than a season, we've all gotten dangerously used to having yours."
"I'm not abandoning Valoria," I said. "Eldrin has the token he gave me — if anything happens here, I'll know within the hour, and I promise you, nothing on this continent moves fast enough to stop me from getting back in time."
"That's not actually what worries me." Aria turned to face me fully, silver hair catching the early light. "What worries me is that whatever's out there interested enough to send Malakar after a single village's relic clearly has resources we can't even guess at yet. I'd rather you went in expecting to be surprised than expecting to win easily just because you always have before."
It was, I realized, genuinely good advice — the kind that came from someone who'd spent her whole life preparing for threats rather than simply overpowering them, which had always been my default and, until recently, my only setting.
"I'll be careful," I said. "I promise."
She studied my face a moment longer, like she was checking whether the promise would actually hold, then reached into a pouch at her belt and pulled out a small, plain silver ring. "Take this. It's not magic, before you ask — just metal. But it was my mother's, and I want it back eventually, which means you have to come back to return it."
I turned the ring over in my palm, absurdly moved by how deliberately small and human the gesture was, next to everything else that had happened to me since the accident. "I'll come back," I said. "I promise that too."
"Good." She stepped back, some of the earlier weight lifting from her shoulders, replaced by the familiar dry humor I'd gotten used to over our weeks of training together. "Because if you don't, I'm hunting down whatever ancient banished god did it and making them regret ever hearing the name Valoria."
"Somehow," I said, smiling, "I actually believe you could."
Eldrin met me at the road proper, pressing a small carved wooden token into my hand — etched with the same broken-crown-and-mist symbol the Heart had shown us, though carved here in careful, deliberate lines rather than smoke. "If Valoria is ever in true danger, this will grow warm no matter how far you've traveled. Use it, and use it the moment you feel it, not an hour later out of stubbornness."
"I promise," I said, for the third time that morning, and found that I meant every version of it equally.
I looked back once as the village finally slipped from view behind the tree line — smoke curling from familiar chimneys, the Heart's chamber just visible at the center, Aria still standing at the gate with one hand raised. Then I turned north, toward Kaldrath, toward the Court of Heaven, toward whatever answers were waiting for me out past the edge of everything I currently understood.