The inn was easy to find.
Everything in this town seemed easy to find — the streets were straightforward, the buildings were clearly signed, and the people who caught his eye on the way through the market smiled in the uncomplicated way of somewhere that didn't have much reason for suspicion.
He went inside and got a room and paid without incident.
The innkeeper was a round-faced man with kind eyes who asked no questions beyond what was necessary, which Max appreciated more than he could have articulated.
He put his things down, sat on the bed, and let himself exist quietly for a few minutes.
Then he came back downstairs.
The bar area was calm — a few locals, a traveler or two, nothing demanding. The innkeeper was wiping down the counter with the particular rhythm of someone whose hands knew the task well enough that his mind was somewhere else entirely.
Max sat at the counter.
"I'm looking for someone," he said.
The innkeeper looked up.
"What kind of someone?"
"Someone who knows about old things. History. Things other people have forgotten or stopped caring about."
The innkeeper considered this without hurry, his cloth still moving across the counter in slow circles.
"Ancient things specifically?" he said.
"Yes."
"How ancient?"
"Four or five hundred years at least. Maybe older."
The innkeeper nodded slowly, the nod of someone accessing a specific file rather than searching generally.
"There's a man," he said. "Lives up in the Seran Mountains. East of town, maybe half a day's climb." He set the cloth down. "His name is Elder Soo. He's been up there longer than anyone in this town can remember. People go to him when they want to know things that the libraries don't have."
"Does he answer?"
"Depends on whether he thinks you're worth answering." The innkeeper picked his cloth back up. "Most people he sends back down the mountain. Some he talks to for days."
"How do you know which category you'll be?"
"You don't," the innkeeper said simply. "That's the point."
Max sat with that for a moment.
"How do I find him?"
"Follow the east road until it stops being a road. Then follow the water upward. There's always a stream going up — just follow it." He paused. "Don't go today. The mountain path gets dangerous in the dark and you look like you need a proper night's sleep before you do anything else."
Max almost argued.
Then he recognized the man was right and didn't.
"Thank you," he said.
"Dinner is in an hour," the innkeeper replied, already moving toward the kitchen. "Lily fish stew. Better than it sounds."
It was better than it sounded.
Max ate alone at a corner table while the inn filled gently with evening activity — locals coming in after their day, conversation running at the comfortable volume of people who had nothing urgent to say but enjoyed saying it anyway.
He listened without participating.
Just letting the normalcy of it land on him like sunlight on skin that hadn't seen much sun recently.
Vista appeared in the chair across from him halfway through his meal, manifesting quietly enough that nobody noticed.
She looked at his bowl.
"Lily fish stew," he said.
"I know what it is," she said.
"Do you want some?"
She looked at him with the expression she used when he said things that revealed he hadn't fully thought through the logistics of her existence.
"Right," he said.
She watched him eat.
"Elder Soo," she said after a while.
"You heard."
"I'm always listening," she said. "Even when I'm not here."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
"It's supposed to be accurate," she said. "Whether it's reassuring is your interpretation."
Max ate another spoonful.
"Do you know who he is?"
"I know of him," Vista said carefully. "Old even by my standards of old. The Lily Kingdom produces people like that occasionally — sui energy running deep enough through a person's whole life that it extends things beyond normal parameters."
"Extended how?"
"You'll see tomorrow," she said.
Which was her way of saying she knew but found it more useful for him to discover directly than to be told.
He'd learned to accept this about her.
He finished his dinner and went upstairs and slept without difficulty, which itself felt like evidence that the Lily Kingdom was doing something to his nervous system that the past weeks hadn't managed.
He left at dawn.
The east road was exactly as described — clear at first, then gradually less maintained, the paving stones giving way to packed dirt giving way to a path that was more suggestion than infrastructure.
Then the path stopped.
He found the stream without difficulty.
It moved upward through the mountain with the particular confidence of Lily Kingdom water — as if direction was a choice it had made rather than a law it was subject to.
He followed it.
The climb took most of the morning.
Not difficult exactly, but consistent — the mountain requiring steady attention rather than dramatic effort, each stretch of terrain slightly different from the last, the stream always there beside him providing both direction and, when he needed it, drinking water that tasted cleaner than anything he'd had in weeks.
Around midday the trees thinned.
He came out onto a rocky plateau where the stream emerged from a crack in the stone face above, and where a small structure sat with its back against the mountain as if it had grown there rather than been built.
Simple. Stone walls, a roof that had been repaired many times in many different materials, a door that stood open.
An old man sat outside on a flat rock, eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun.
Very old.
The specific quality of age that went past what Max had learned to expect from elderly people not frailty, just depth, the sense of someone who had accumulated so much time that it had changed the texture of them entirely.
He sat with the stillness of someone who wasn't asleep but wasn't exactly awake in the normal way either.
Max stopped a respectful distance away and waited.
After perhaps a minute the old man's eyes opened.
They were clear.
Whatever age had done to the rest of him it hadn't touched his eyes, which were sharp and present and looked at Max with the immediate focused attention of someone who'd been expecting him.
Not specifically. Just generally. The look of someone who expected that whoever arrived would arrive for a reason.
"Sit," the old man said.
His voice was quiet but carried easily.
Max sat on a nearby rock.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"You came from the north," Elder Soo said.
"Yes."
"You're carrying damage."
"Yes."
"And you want to know something."
"Yes."
The old man nodded slowly, the nod of someone confirming what they'd already assessed.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
Max looked at him directly.
"Everything you know about the Worio clan," he said.
Elder Soo was quiet for a long moment.
The stream moved beside them, going wherever Lily Kingdom water decided to go.
Then the old man smiled — small, genuine, the smile of someone who had been waiting a very long time for a specific question and had just heard it.
"Finally," he said quietly.
He stood from his rock with the ease of someone whose body had made peace with its age rather than fighting it.
"Come inside," he said. "This will take more than one day."
End of Chapter