Aarav woke up breathing hard.
For a moment he just lay there on the floor, chest rising and falling, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up, reached for the water beside his bag, and drank. Long and steady until the coldness of it settled something in him.
He sat in the dark and the moonlight and breathed.
Then he made the mistake of trying to recall the nightmare properly.
The barren land. The dead trees. The fog pressing in from every direction. The blood coming from the chapel door in slow dark lines, finding every crack in the ground, spreading toward him. The door opening and that darkness beyond it that felt occupied. The murmurs.
A cold shiver ran through him from his neck downward. He felt the coldness in the summer night.
He sat with it for a moment and tried to think clearly.
It was the body he told himself. You saw something horrific tonight and your brain processed it badly. That's all this is.
He held that thought. Then he let it go because it wasn't convincing him.
The nightmare had nothing to do with that body. The body was terrible but it was a human thing, a real and present horror that belonged to this street and this borough. The nightmare was something else entirely. A different category of wrong. The barren land, the chapel, the blood with its specific patience, the darkness behind that door. None of it connected to a murdered woman on a street corner. It had its own logic and its own source.
Then the mocking surfaced.
He had sat in the Cathedral pew and mentally picked apart every mechanism behind the service. The cynical recruitment through night classes. The invented goddess. The carefully engineered warmth of it all. He had done this thoroughly and with some satisfaction.
Disrespect toward knowledge in any form is disrespect toward her directly.
The Bishop had said that. Aarav had filed it as a useful line and moved on.
He clasped his hands together in his lap.
If you are real. If that was you. I apologise. I should not have mocked what I don't understand. I will read the Bible sincerely. I promise.
He sat there after saying it.
Then he began to think more carefully.
The mocking. Was that really what caused it? How many people mocked gods and beliefs every single day across this city, across this entire world? Cynical men in every borough who had heard the sermons a hundred times and felt nothing. Did all of them have nightmares?
Almost certainly not.
So it probably wasn't the mocking alone. But mocking her inside her own Cathedral, in the middle of the service, while the Bishop was still speaking. That was a different thing. He had walked into her house and spent the entire time mentally dismantling it.
Don't mock knowledge. Especially not there.
He filed that as a rule.
But then something larger settled into place.
If the Goddess of Knowledge could respond to something that happened in her Cathedral, then every other deity in this world could do the same in their own domains. Every temple, every shrine, every place of worship was not just a building but potentially a direct point of contact with something real and listening. The depth of magic in this world, the connection between people and gods, was not decorative. It was structural. It went all the way down.
He had been treating this world like a place with magic as an interesting feature. That was wrong. In these domains, in magic and faith and whatever connected people to forces larger than themselves, he was a complete amateur. He had been walking through it with the confidence of someone who had read about swimming and assumed that was sufficient.
Then the old woman surfaced in his memory.
The frantic old lady from the early days after they arrived. He had written her off as confused, rambling, saying things that didn't connect. He hadn't paid proper attention.
What if she wasn't rambling?
What if she had been saying something genuinely useful and he had filtered it out because it didn't fit the framework he was carrying at the time?
He stared at the ceiling and felt the specific discomfort of realising he had been less careful than he thought he was.
The thoughts kept coming. He tried to set them aside and sleep. He couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes the barren land sat at the edge of his mind, not vivid, just present and patient.
After perhaps twenty minutes of this he gave up.
He sat up quietly, opened his bag without making noise, and found the small zippered pocket where he kept the medicines from home. His fingers found the strip of fever tablets which had the side effects of sleepiness. He pressed one out, drank the last of his water with it, and lay back down.
Within a few minutes the edges of his thoughts softened. The ceiling stopped being something he was staring at and became something he was simply near.
He slept.
---
The hand on his shoulder pulled him out of a dreamless sleep.
Aarav opened his eyes. Rajan was crouched beside him, already dressed, looking alert in the quiet and complete way he always looked alert.
For a moment Aarav thought it was past eight. Then he looked at the window. The light coming through was pale and thin, early morning light that hadn't fully decided what it was yet.
"What's up?" Aarav said, voice still rough. "Waking me up early in the morning."
"There were sounds outside. People talking. It broke my sleep so I woke you up."
"People talking," Aarav muttered.
He lay there for one more second. Then he stood up, ran a hand through his hair, and opened the front door.
---
Sean was near the top of the stairs saying goodbye to two men. Both heading down, taking the steps with the easy unhurried movement of people so not to wake others. They didn't look like factory workers. Something about the way they carried themselves was different.
Aarav leaned against the doorframe and watched them go.
"Good morning," he said to Sean. "I heard some noise from outside."
Sean turned and saw him. "Sorry for waking you up."
"No no it's fine." Aarav nodded toward the staircase. "Who were those people?"
"Friends of mine. Awakened adventurers."
Aarav kept his expression easy. "Oh, adventurers. Wait, awakened?"
"Yes, awakened." Sean looked at him with mild surprise.
Aarav shook his head slightly. "I don't think I know that term properly."
Sean was quiet for a moment. His expression shifted, not quite confusion, more like he was recalibrating. Then it settled. Silva Kingdom where people have poor education because of the lack of money. He had clearly arrived at the conclusion on his own.
"People who have use magic resonators to awaken their magic abilities," Sean said. "They are called awakened."
"Magic resonators?" Aarav asked in surprise.
"A type of device. It helps a person access and activate their magic ability. Without one most people can't use magic at all even if they have the potential for it."
"I feel like I've heard something about this before," Aarav said. "But thank you. That clears it up."
A white lie. Sean accepted it with a small nod.
Aarav thought a great deal of it. He had known magic existed from the first day. But how people actually used it, what the mechanism was, whether someone like him could access it at all, those questions had been sitting unanswered. Now he had the beginning of an answer. Magic resonators. Awakened. He drilled both into his memory and moved on.
"By the way," Aarav said, keeping his tone casual. "Is it normal to have strange nightmares? I had a bad one last night."
Sean looked at him with the expression of a man connecting two obvious things. "Don't tell me it was after seeing that body."
"Something like that."
"I'd say that's expected." Sean shrugged. "A nightmare after what we saw last night is perfectly normal."
Aarav nodded and said nothing about the chapel or the blood or the murmurs that were identical to the ones at the Cathedral threshold. He kept that neatly behind his teeth.
"I'll just get some psychological treatment from someone I know," Aarav said.
"Oh you know someone here already?"
"Her name is Ysolde."
Sean went still for a half second. "Ysolde." He said it slowly, like he was confirming he had heard correctly. "Old lady Ysolde Dunsby? The legendary healer of Carrath?"
Aarav looked at him. "Legendary healer?"
"You really don't know." Sean let out a small breath. "She was a military healer. One of the best in the entire region from what people say. Served for years, apparently saw things on those campaigns that most soldiers don't survive. She's very well known in Carrath City, especially among people who've been around long enough to remember."
"I had no idea," Aarav said.
He had anticipated that Ysolde was someone with a history. The authority she carried in Nick's house, the way people deferred to her without question, that hadn't been the weight of an ordinary old woman. But a legendary former military healer was considerably more than he had estimated. He also found himself wondering how Sean knew this, and more than that, how Sean had connections with awakened adventurers on a factory worker's life.
"How do you know all of this?" Aarav asked. "And how do you have connections with awakened adventurers?"
Sean smiled slightly. "I used to be an adventurer myself. When I first arrived here my factory income was very low. To make more money in less time I chose adventuring. I did it for about a year in this region."
"Why did you leave? If the money was better?"
"That's because—"
Gong! Gong! Gong! ...
The church bell rang.
A single deep resonant gong rolling out across the borough, then another. One. Two. All the way to eight.
Sean looked up sharply. "Damn. I have to go." He was already moving toward his door. "We can talk about this later."
His door opened and closed. Footsteps inside, quick and purposeful.
Aarav stood in the corridor for a moment.
Why did he leave adventuring if it paid more?
The bell finished its count and went quiet. He went back inside.
---
Rajan looked up immediately. "Did you find anything?"
"It's fine. It was Sean and his friends. They were talking outside."
Rajan nodded. "It's already eight. Wake Veer. And today we go to Ysolde's clinic."
"Fine by me," Aarav said.
Veer was on his hay mattress with his hand covering entirely his face in the specific configuration of a person who had achieved deep and comfortable sleep and had no plans to leave it.
Rajan wakes him up.
Veer made a sound and tried to sleep again.
"It's eight o'clock, wake up already," Rajan said.
Veer lay there for a moment with his eyes open and the expression of a man receiving information he found personally offensive.
Then he sat up.
They got washed and changed. While Rajan and Veer were getting ready Aarav opened Rajan's bag and took out the guns. He checked one, tucked it into his hip belt, and pulled his shirt over it. Put on his washed cloth. Flat and hidden. Then he held out the second one to Rajan.
"Take this. Keep it covered. It's better to get caught by the police than to be the next victim."
Rajan took it without comment and secured it the same way.
Aarav looked at Veer.
"You're carrying the knife today."
Veer looked at the knife Aarav held out to him. Then he took it and put it in his pocket without saying much. He already knew preparations were necessary. Police won't help them.
Aarav checked the apartment once. Hay mattresses. He picked up the key, stepped out, and locked the door behind them.
"Let's go to Ysolde's clinic," he said.
They started walking.