Nobody slept well.
Elham knew this because when Mireh brought bread to the table in the morning none of them reached for it immediately. Caleb sat with his hands wrapped around a cup he wasn't drinking from. Asher had the sword across his knees — not sharpening it, just present with it, the way you are present with something that has changed and you haven't finished understanding how.
Mireh read the room and left them to it.
Caleb spoke first.
"Tell me what you know about what they are," he said. "The things inside people. What they want. How they work."
Not a grieving question. A strategic one. He had done his processing in the night and arrived at the table ready to understand rather than to feel. Elham recognized it as both a strength and something to keep watch on.
Elham told him what he knew — which was not everything, and he said so from the start.
Demons hid inside people. Not ghosts, not shadows — something with will and intent that found a person, entered them, and worked through them the way a puppeteer works through a puppet: using what was already there, amplifying it, bending it toward a purpose that served something other than the person being used. They were drawn to discord. To weakness. To people who were already turned slightly wrong, or to people who were simply alone and unguarded at the wrong moment.
They reported to something. Organized under something. Elham knew this not from scripture alone but from what he had seen: the woman at the crossroads had left and gone north when he confronted her. The man in the alley had been sent — waiting on a specific street at a specific hour for a specific target. That kind of coordination didn't happen by accident. Something above the individual demons was directing them.
"…What that something is," Elham said carefully, "I don't fully know yet. I have pieces. Not a picture. And I won't claim more than I've seen."
Caleb looked at him. "You're being careful about what you claim."
"…A prophet who says more than he knows is just a loud man," Elham said. "I've seen two demons, one attack aimed at you, Malchiel a false prophet, and potentially another false teacher gathering people to the north. That is what I know. The rest I need to find out."
"How," Asher said.
"…The temple in the market quarter. Places like that collect information naturally — not because anyone plans it, but because people pass through. Priests hear things. Scribes track what's changing in the community. If something significant is drawing people away from the houses of God, the temple will have fragments of it." He paused. "And I need to understand what it's offering. What the argument sounds like. Because if it's pulling good families — people who know better — then it's using the language they already trust. It won't look like a lie from the outside. It'll look like a better version of the truth."
That sat at the table for a moment.
Then Caleb said, quietly: "Oren."
The name landed the way it had since last night — with weight, with the particular heaviness of something that had been suspected a long time and was only now being said aloud in full daylight.
"…What about him," Elham said.
"He went north five years ago." Caleb's voice was controlled in the way that cost something. "He comes back. He sits at my father's table. He asks about me." A pause that was very full. "My brothers died over six years. One by one."
Elham did not say: yes, Oren is responsible. He believed it. He believed it with the full weight of everything he had seen and sensed. But belief was not knowledge, and saying it before he could stand behind it fully would break something in Caleb that couldn't easily be repaired — the difference between a man who knows a hard truth and can act on it, and a man who has been told a hard truth and is not yet certain enough to trust it.
"…There is a connection," Elham said carefully. "Between what's in the north and what happened to your brothers. I believe that. But I need to understand the full shape before I say more than that."
Caleb held his gaze. He was not a man who needed things softened. But he could also tell the difference between someone being evasive and someone being honest about the edges of what they knew. He nodded. Once. The nod of a man who would wait, because waiting was the right thing, even though it cost him.
"Then find out," Caleb said.
"…I will. Tonight — you go home. You sit at your father's table. You are exactly who you have always been. Nothing has changed, as far as anyone watching you can tell."
"Can you do that?" Asher asked.
Caleb looked at him with something almost dry in his expression. "I've been doing it for six years without knowing what I was doing it against." A pause. "Knowing makes it easier. Not harder."
· · ·
The Temple of Dothan sat at the northern edge of the market quarter — old stone, heavy doors, the smell of incense drifting into the street before you even reached the entrance. It had been built to last rather than to impress, and had done both through stubbornness rather than design.
Elham heard the argument before he reached the door.
Voices overlapping — two, then three — in the rhythm of men who had been disagreeing long enough to stop listening and start waiting for gaps. He stepped inside.
Four scribes around a long table covered in open scrolls. An older priest sitting to one side with the expression of a man conserving his energy for the outcome. Oil lamps on the walls. The particular smell of old parchment and candle smoke that Elham associated, in his bones, with the years he had spent bent over a copying table.
The argument stopped when he entered.
They looked at the white robe. The staff. The ink stains on his fingers — the kind that never fully washed out, that marked someone who had spent years with quill and scroll rather than someone who had simply dressed to look the part.