Seravelle Continent, Solmara Region
Present time
The territory had changed.
Anyone who had seen Solmara a year ago and walked its roads today would have struggled to reconcile the two. The infrastructure had advanced at a pace that defied reasonable expectations.
New roads laid with dwarven hands, buildings rising along planned grids, the outer fortifications doubled in depth and refinement. The demihumans had brought competence with them, and competence had compounded quickly.
But the optimism that should have accompanied all of it was nowhere to be found.
The people moved through the improved streets without lifting their heads. Conversations in the market square were brief. The soldiers drilled in the mornings, but it was clear that their usual spirit was missing.
The lord had been gone, and Solmara felt it in the same way a body feels a missing limb.
*
Lord's Castle, Administrative Office
Alice set down the pen and pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose.
Around her, organized documents were scattered. Reports filed in one stack, pending decisions in another, correspondence in a third. She had restructured the administrative workflow twice in the past six months, and it still generated twice as much work as it had when Ashen was here.
Lucia sat across from her, moving through a separate set of reports. Neither of them had spoken in the last hour.
Alice finally exhaled. "How long have they been gone now?"
Lucia didn't look up. "A little over six months. 192 days, to be precise."
"Damn it."
'Come on. Where are you.'
She had known, intellectually, that Ashen was the administrative center of this territory. She had helped him build the system. She knew every moving part.
What she hadn't fully understood until now was that administration was not what he was actually doing.
The reports, the decisions, the allocations… those she had absorbed without difficulty. What she couldn't replicate was what he was without trying.
His presence had been a stabilizing point for the whole region. The soldiers trained harder when he trained with them. The citizens made complaints they would have swallowed to bureau officers because they trusted he would listen. Even the Inquisition had moved differently under his eye.
Ashen just stirred a confidence that comes from knowing someone with genuine investment is watching the same problem you are.
She couldn't replicate it. In their eyes, she would go back to the Ashbastion at the first sign of danger since the reason for her staying was absent, so the first foundation of trust was missing from the start.
So what was missing wasn't the lord's administrative function. It was the lord himself.
"The demihumans still haven't shown any visible concern," Alice noted, picking up the pen again.
"No."
"Which is suspicious."
"Obviously so," Lucia agreed, turning a page. "Their oracle would have known. He likely still knows."
Alice had reached the same conclusion weeks ago. Under any other circumstances, she would have moved on them directly. She would have gathered information, applied pressure, and extracted what they knew. Their presence overlapping with Ashen's disappearance was too convenient to be a coincidence.
But she knew about the Beholder's Eyes. She also knew what it did and where it sent him. She had no leverage here because the most likely explanation for why the oracle was unsurprised was simply that he had seen it coming and had decided the outcome was survivable.
She also believed that, too, and she did not need any oracles for it. In her mind, Ashen's death was a foreign concept after all.
Or maybe her rational mind avoided it with all its might in order to protect her sanity.
Her stream of thoughts was interrupted by a knock at the door.
"Come in."
Braun entered with an unhurried posture. He had a report folder under one arm.
"Lady Sinclair. Lady Evernight."
The way he addressed them had nothing to do with how he spoke in private. Friendship and work were best kept separate. Alice knew that too, and that was why she didn't correct him.
She gestured to the chair across from her. "Report."
He sat and opened the folder, but he had clearly already read it enough times to not need the pages.
"The territory's holding. The dwarven construction projects are on schedule, even ahead in some places. Trade with the empire's outer settlements has been consistent." He paused. "The rest of it is less clean."
Knowing his previous occupation, Alice had assigned him the role… of observing and reporting alongside his job as a soldier.
She had to find a way to combat the people's distrust, and this was her temporary measure.
"Go ahead."
"The soldiers are restless. He used to train with them at least once a week, not in any formal capacity, just alongside them. They noticed when it stopped." He set the folder on the desk. "I've been rotating senior officers through the sessions to maintain the rhythm, but it's not the same, and everyone knows it. Questions about where he is come up every few days."
"I guess the excuse of being sent by the Wrath Lord in a secret mission is approaching its expiry date?"
"Unfortunately. They accept it because they respect the chain of command, but acceptance isn't the same as confidence."
Alice nodded once.
"The Narkals are the bigger problem." Braun's voice didn't change pitch, but his face tensed. "The outer settlements are complaining about increased pressure at the borders. We've fought them multiple times already, and it's small probes for now; scouts and advance parties mostly, but the frequency is climbing. Two weeks ago, a forward post on the eastern edge reported a formation of roughly three hundred. That must've reached your desk, so I won't go into detail."
Lucia looked up from her papers.
"What I wanted to convey…" Braun continued. "Three hundred is not a scouting party anymore." He leaned forward slightly. "The citizens are feeling it despite their ignorance. There's a sentiment circulating… the Wrath Sin Lord herself didn't dare colonize this entire region. Who are we to hold it with no lord present?"
'Should've considered that before coming here,' she glanced at the culprit behind the coming of those citizens. Lucia's only answer was a shrug.
Alice set her pen down. "The morale numbers from last week's survey?"
"Down by more than eleven percent from the previous month. Civilian and military both."
A quiet sigh left her.
"Thank you, Braun. That's all for now."
He nodded, left the folder there, and stood. "It's my duty, my lady."
***
Braun walked the corridor at his own pace.
He remembered walking these same halls six months ago and feeling like an imposter. A man who had spent the better part of his life perfecting the art of surviving by being useful to people with more ambition than himself.
…Never the one to plant a flag, always the one to carry someone else's.
That Braun had understood that the most reliable way to stay alive was to make yourself small enough that nobody decided you were worth removing.
The path that had led him here had not been chosen so much as fallen into. But somewhere in the past six months, it had stopped feeling that way.
It had started small. The first time he stood at a border post at three in the morning because the patrol was understaffed and nobody else was there to fill the gap. The first time he talked a soldier down from a panic spiral before it spread through the unit. The first time a family from one of the outer settlements looked at him with relief rather than wariness when the Solmara guard arrived.
He was not a complicated man about it. He didn't bother analyzing the transformation. He just kept showing up, and showing up, until showing up stopped being an act of will and became who he was.
From the Wanderer who survived by staying unseen to the Sentinel who held the perimeter when it mattered, then the Bulwark when the walls needed someone willing to not move, and now, in his fourth step, the Shield of Solmara.
Step by step, embodying each epithet forced him to shed his cowardly self, escapist self, and then finally, his slippery, sly self to be reborn as a man of valor.
Today, the man who survived by throwing others to their deaths in his place is no more. Today he was… the Shield Of Solmara.
The epithet had come with the step, registered by the system in its usual flat manner, but to him, there was nothing flat about it.
Yes, that's right, was the first thought that occurred to him when he got it. It was only fitting.
His pride, which had spent most of his life buried under pragmatism and self-preservation, had become the land's protection. He didn't know how that had happened exactly. He suspected it had something to do with the fact that for the first time, he had something worth being proud of.
His daughter was safe. Ashen had seen to it personally, passing the information along without ceremony. That alone made it far easier for him to throw himself into this without holding back. Braun had thanked him, but he knew words were cheap.
The debt wasn't something he counted. He didn't plan to pay it back in any specific way. He simply intended to do his job so thoroughly that if Ashen ever came back, the answer to what he had been doing in his absence would be worth giving.
Ashen was younger than him by more than a decade and had somehow become the kind of person that Braun had spent years telling himself didn't exist… someone whose capability matched their integrity… whose strength didn't make them contemptuous of the people around them….
He was someone who stood as a pillar of support simply because that was who they were.
He didn't think he was worthy of standing beside people like that. Alice's devotion, Lucia's perceptiveness, Seraphine's relentless warmth, Sabrina's loyalty… all of them operated at a level he was still working to approach.
But they believed he could. And Braun had decided that if remarkable people looked at him and saw someone worth believing in, the least he could do was make them right.
Besides… this was the least he could do for a man whom he considered a true friend, a friend whom he respected the most …and a friend who his newfound pride refused to let down.
He pushed open the outer door and stepped into the afternoon light.
'Come back soon, young friend… though even if you don't, there's no need to worry. My shield will buy you all the time you need. You have my word.'