The town of Carath arrived just when the sun finished its descent.
It did not announce itself grandly. There were no banners, no ceremonial gates wreathed in flower garlands. Only the gradual thickening of buildings along the road — timber frames pressed close together, smoke rising from chimneys, the distant sound of a marketplace still refusing to quiet despite the hour. The sky above held the last bruised remnants of orange and violet, and beneath it, the column of refugees moved forward with the mechanical patience of people who had long stopped expecting comfort.
Aarav walked among them and said nothing.
He had learned, over these past days, that silence was its own kind of armour.
---
The soldiers directed them toward the Permanent Checking Point before they had even fully entered the town's boundary. The instruction came in the local tongue — sharp, clipped, with the authority of men who repeated the same words dozens of times each week. Aarav did not understand the words. But he understood the gestures. The pointed fingers. The direction of movement.
He went along with the flow.
And while he walked, he thought.
Another check. Of course there will be another check.
His eyes moved briefly to the treeline bordering the road. A cluster of thick bushes sat just beyond the ditch — dense enough, dark enough. He did not slow his pace. He did not draw attention. But when the moment came, when the column shifted and the soldiers looked elsewhere, Aarav stepped aside just long enough to press his bag deep into the undergrowth.
Then he returned to the line.
With what remained, he fashioned something rougher. Dirty cloth folded over itself. A few pieces of firewood tucked inside. The kind of hanging bag every other refugee carried — heavy with nothing, meaningful only as a symbol of poverty. He slung it over his shoulder and rejoined the others without a word.
If they were going to search, let them search this.
---
The building they were led into was administrative in the way all administrative buildings were — functional, slightly cold, bearing the smell of ink and old paper. They passed through a corridor and emerged into a wide courtyard where torches had already been lit along the walls. Soldiers organised them into lines again.
Aarav stood in his and waited.
At the front of each line sat a desk, and behind each desk sat a woman in the uniform of a civil officer. She moved with practised efficiency — asking questions, recording answers, pressing fingers against a pad of ink, handing over small parcels. Coins. Cards.
Aarav watched the exchange repeat itself several times before his turn arrived.
He stepped forward.
The woman looked up at him. Her expression was neither warm nor unkind — simply that of someone performing a task for the four hundredth time.
"So what's your name? What kind of skills do you have? Do you have any other family members? What's your age? Any connections to Silva Spies?"
Aarav heard the words. He recognised the rhythm of a question. But the meaning dissolved somewhere between her mouth and his understanding.
He caught one thing.
Name.
"Name Arlan," he said.
The woman studied him for a moment. Then, without irritation, she raised her hand and gestured to a guard standing near the wall. A brief exchange followed. The guard disappeared through a side door and returned carrying what appeared to be a collar — leather, thin, fitted with a small mechanism at the throat.
The woman held it toward Aarav and mimed the motion of wearing it around the neck.
Aarav hesitated for only a moment. Then he took it and fastened it in place.
"Can you understand me now?"
He could.
The words arrived in his mind with perfect clarity, as though they had always been in a language he knew. He blinked once. The woman was watching him with the patient expression of someone accustomed to exactly this reaction.
"Yes," Aarav said. "I can understand."
"Good. Then let us begin again." She lifted her pen. "Name?"
"Arlan."
"Skills?"
"Physical labour."
"Family members travelling with you?"
"None."
"Age?"
He paused for a fraction of a second.
"Twenty."
He was twenty-three. But twenty felt safer. Younger. Less suspicious, perhaps. He was not entirely sure why he lied — only that something about the question made him unwilling to hand over every true thing about himself.
The woman wrote it all down without looking up.
When she finished, she set her pen down and folded her hands.
"So your name is Arlan. Listen carefully, because I will say this once." Her tone shifted slightly — not warmer, but more deliberate. "You are currently a refugee in Eloria. There are laws that apply specifically to your status. They are not harsh laws, and you may review them at your convenience. Within those boundaries, you are permitted to do nearly everything a citizen of Eloria can do. The Kingdom considers all Silva refugees to be people deserving of dignity. Do not lose your identification card under any circumstances."
She reached into a drawer and withdrew a card and two small coins, sliding them across the desk.
"You will receive two Drel. From this point, finding employment and shelter is your own responsibility. No further assistance will be provided by the state." She paused. "You likely do not know our currency. Drel is the base unit. Fifty Drel makes one Venn. Twenty copper Venn makes one silver Solun. Ten silver Solun makes one gold Solmark."
Aarav committed it to memory in the span of a breath.
"That is all." She nodded once, as though closing a door. "May the God guide you. Return the translator before you leave."
---
He stood to the side and waited while the checking continued.
At some point, one of the guards approached the woman's desk and leaned in close. "Madam. We have checked every bag. No weapons."
"Good," she said, and returned to her work.
Aarav glanced down at his empty hanging bag and said nothing. But inside, something that might have been satisfaction settled quietly beneath his ribs.
Of course they checked. It would have been strange if they hadn't.
He removed the collar and returned it to the desk.
As he walked toward the courtyard exit, a single thought drifted through his mind with the lightness of someone setting down a heavy object.
Magic. There is actually magic in this world.
He had understood it intellectually — had known it, even, since the moment of his arrival in this place. But knowing and experiencing were two different things entirely. The collar had translated a foreign language directly into comprehensible thought. That was not technology. That was not any science he knew.
I will need to look into this more carefully. Later.
He found a spot near the courtyard wall and stood with his arms folded, watching the remaining refugees filter through. It did not take long before he spotted the familiar shapes of Rajan and Veer emerging from the lines.
They reached him at the same time. And they both began speaking at once about a collar that had allowed them to understand the local tongue.
Aarav allowed himself a small smile. "The same thing happened to me."
---
They retrieved the hidden bag without incident — Aarav pulling it from the bushes while Rajan kept watch and Veer blocked the sightline from the road. A layer of dirty cloth draped over the outside, and it looked no different from any other refugee's luggage.
They tried the other refugees first, moving through the clusters of people gathered outside the Permanent Camp. But the information they received was vague, contradictory, or simply unhelpful. Everyone was asking the same questions. No one had answers.
So they went to the market.
It was still active — braziers burning at the stalls, merchants calling out the last offers of the evening. Aarav moved through it carefully, listening, watching, occasionally exchanging a word or two in the language he had not yet mastered but was already beginning to map in his mind. After an hour, they reconvened near the edge of the market square.
Rajan spoke first.
"A full meal costs about ten Drel. A single piece of bread is two. There are temporary jobs available to refugees — physical work, mostly. They pay fifteen Drel per day."
Aarav did the calculation immediately and did not like the result.
"Fifteen Drel," he said, "with ten going to a single meal. That leaves almost nothing."
Why do I suddenly feel desperately poor?
It was not an unfamiliar feeling, exactly. But in his previous life, poverty had always existed at a comfortable theoretical distance — something spoken about in reports, in news segments, in conversations he participated in but did not truly understand. Now the arithmetic of survival was being conducted in real time, with real numbers, and the numbers were unkind.
"What about shelter?" he asked.
Veer answered this one. "Two types. Private and shared. The cheapest private unit runs about six Venn — one room, kitchen, shared bathroom. For shared, there are three options: three-person, five-person, and ten-person arrangements. Ten-person is the cheapest, but the conditions are apparently poor. Three-person sharing comes to roughly four Venn and twenty Drel, with a bathroom shared between two groups of three."
"That one," Aarav said.
"We don't have four Venn," Veer reminded him.
A brief silence settled over the three of them.
It was Rajan who broke it. "Then tonight we sleep outside. Tomorrow we find work. The day after, perhaps we can afford the room."
Neither Aarav nor Veer argued. There was nothing to argue with.
---
The growling started from somewhere in the vicinity of Aarav's stomach.
He reached into his own coins and held both Drel out to Rajan. "Get some bread for the two of you. I have something in the bag. Package food. I'll be fine."
"But—"
"You spent the evening gathering information. That was work. Take it."
He watched them go.
Alone for a moment in the evening crowd, Aarav sat down on the edge of a low stone planter and looked at the town around him. Lanterns were being lit in the windows of upper floors. A cart rumbled past, pulled by an animal he didn't have a name for yet. Somewhere, children were arguing at a volume that required no translation.
How do we make more money?
His mind turned the question over carefully, examining it from different angles. Robbery occurred to him and was dismissed almost instantly with a kind of embarrassed internal flinch. Absolutely not, Aarav. Focus.
Rajan and Veer returned before his thoughts reached any useful conclusion. Veer was holding something leafy and pale.
"It's a vegetable," he said, before Aarav could ask. "Edible if boiled. We negotiated. Got it without spending coin."
Aarav looked at it for a moment. Then at both of them. "I told you I was fine."
"You're part of this," Rajan said simply.
Aarav accepted the vegetable.
"...Thank you," he said, after a pause that was slightly longer than necessary.
---
They slept in the street that night — tucked against the wall of a closed shop, their bags pressed beneath them. The stones were hard. The air carried the specific coldness of a night that had not decided yet how cold it intended to become.
Aarav slept anyway. Deeply, and without dreams he could remember.
What woke him was not the morning sun.
It was water — thrown directly onto his face from a bucket held by a furious shopkeeper whose establishment they had apparently been blocking since before dawn.
Aarav was on his feet before he was fully conscious, stammering an apology in words he wasn't certain were correctly pronounced, already moving aside, already pulling the others up. The shopkeeper continued yelling long after they had vacated the space.
"What a jerk," Veer muttered, wringing water from his sleeve.
"He had a point," Rajan said.
"He did not need to use a bucket."
They were still draining water from their clothing when a old man appeared.
He was perhaps sixty, with the look of someone who had spent a lifetime doing physical work and was now somewhat reluctant to stop. He studied the three of them for a moment.
"You three. Refugees?"
"Yes, sir," Aarav said.
"I need help moving some wooden logs. I'll pay thirty Drel."
The words had barely finished leaving the old man's mouth before Aarav answered.
"We'll do it."
---
The logs were heavy. They were, in Aarav's private assessment, unreasonably heavy. But thirty Drel arrived in his palm at the end of it, and he held the coins with a satisfaction that was entirely disproportionate to their value.
Our first income.
He was sweating. His arms ached. He was smiling slightly.
"Still not enough," Veer said, breathing hard beside him.
"It's a start," Rajan replied. "We keep moving."
They were making their way toward the bread stall — a specific one Rajan had identified the previous evening as offering the best value — when Aarav noticed the child.
A boy, perhaps eight years old, had decided that a particular tree near the road required climbing. He had made it roughly halfway up before his grip failed.
Rajan was moving before the boy had finished falling.
He caught him cleanly — one arm under the boy's back, absorbing the impact with a grunt. The child looked up at him with wide eyes, more startled than hurt.
Then the father arrived. Running, short of breath, voice tight with the particular fear that only parents experience.
"Are you hurt? Any injuries?" he demanded of the boy first.
"I'm fine," the boy said.
The man straightened. He looked at Rajan. Then at Veer. Then at Aarav.
He opened his mouth to speak — gratitude already visible in the lines of his face.
Just then Aarav tried to say something.
And then the world tilted.
Aarav felt it before he understood it — a slow revolution beginning somewhere behind his eyes, spreading outward through his limbs, unravelling his balance with a thoroughness that left no room for argument. The ground came up to meet him with a gentleness that seemed almost deliberate.
He touched the earth.