The road to Kaldrath cut a lazy, winding path across three days of terrain I could have crossed in under a minute if I'd let myself. I didn't. Partly out of respect for Aria's advice about not assuming I already knew everything the world could throw at me, and partly because — I admitted to myself somewhere around the second day — I genuinely liked walking through a world that still had things left in it to discover.
The forest gave way gradually to rolling farmland, dotted with small hamlets that made Eldoria look positively cosmopolitan by comparison. I passed through two of them without incident, buying bread and cheese I didn't strictly need to eat, mostly because the simple act of handing over coins for food felt like the most normal thing I'd done since dying in a car on a Tuesday.
On the second evening, I came across a merchant caravan stopped dead in the road, three wagons pulled into a defensive circle, torches lit despite the fact that dusk hadn't fully settled. A dozen or so travelers stood clustered near the lead wagon, weapons drawn, staring into the tree line with the particular stillness of people who'd heard something they really didn't want to hear twice.
"Trouble?" I called out, approaching at an unhurried, deliberately unthreatening pace.
A heavyset man near the front — clearly the caravan master, judging by the quality of his coat versus everyone else's — turned with obvious relief at the sight of another armed traveler. "Wolves, maybe. Or worse. Something's been circling us for the better part of an hour, staying just out of torchlight."
I appraised the tree line out of habit and immediately caught six overlapping signatures — not wolves. Direwolves, according to the crystal's knowledge, a step up from the mundane variety, pack hunters that had learned to specifically target isolated caravans on this stretch of road.
"I can help," I said, and meant it as the understatement it was.
What followed took less effort than tying my own boots. I walked to the edge of the torchlight, let my presence — carefully, deliberately throttled down to something resembling a genuinely talented but entirely mortal swordsman — bleed out just enough to make six overconfident predators reconsider their evening plans. Two of them charged anyway, testing. I redirected them, non-lethally, with the flat of the Beautiful Katana and a speed just barely beyond what "Swordsman, Level 56" should have been capable of. The remaining four decided, wisely, that easier meals existed elsewhere in the forest.
The caravan master insisted on paying me, and insisted hard enough that refusing outright would have been ruder than accepting, so I did, mostly to avoid the conversation. It bought me dinner and a spot by their fire that night, along with an earful of exactly the kind of information I'd been hoping to stumble across.
"Heading to Kaldrath yourself?" the caravan master, whose name turned out to be Boren, asked over a bowl of surprisingly good stew.
"That's the plan," I said. "First time. Any advice?"
"Big city, bigger egos," Boren said, with the weary affection of a man who clearly did business there often. "Watch yourself around the noble houses — House Drenmoor especially, they've got more coin than sense and a habit of treating anyone useful like property. Guild's honest enough, if you're looking for work. And keep an ear out — there's talk of the King announcing some kind of grand tournament soon. Whole continent's buzzing about it already."
A tournament. Filed away, quietly, for later consideration.
"Anything stranger than usual?" I asked, careful to keep my tone idle. "Old stories, odd sightings, that kind of thing?"
Boren considered that around a mouthful of stew. "Funny you ask. Couple of the other caravan drivers mentioned shadows moving wrong out past the eastern border last month — not attacking anyone, just watching. Guards chalked it up to bandits scouting, but bandits don't usually vanish the second torchlight hits them." He shrugged. "World's a strange place lately. Feels like it's holding its breath for something."
I looked up at the stars, unfamiliar constellations scattered across a sky I still hadn't fully learned yet, and thought about a crown broken in half, and a debt three hundred years overdue.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I think it might be."