He told no one.
That was the first decision — made at two in the morning, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the Prussonian Pass fortress, staring at the wall opposite him while the rest of his unit slept. He had weighed it for six hours. Run it against every argument his training could produce.
· You are a sergeant in a coalition forming against this man.
· You have no orders to approach the capital.
· You have no intelligence objective, no extraction plan, no backup.
· You are twenty-three years old and Rank 4, and the man in Byzantium killed a Rank 4 Emperor in eleven seconds.
All of that was true.
He went anyway.
Not because he was reckless — Ervalen had never been reckless in his life. Every risk he had ever taken was a calculated one, weighed against potential return, executed with a plan and a contingency. This was calculated too, just with a different denominator than his training recognized.
He needed to see him.
Reports were abstractions. Survivor accounts were filtered through fear, which made them unreliable in specific ways — the things fear distorted, the things it exaggerated, the things it quietly omitted because the mind refused to hold them. Straze was building a counter-strategy from those abstractions, and Ervalen was going to be at the front of whatever Straze built, and he needed better data than frightened soldiers provided.
That was what he told himself.
He was mostly honest about the other part too: he needed to know if the thing in those reports was real. Because if it was real — exactly as described, exactly as impossible — then the strategy Straze was building had a specific flaw that no amount of preparation could fix.
---
He packed light. Civilian clothes. His Soul-Brand suppressant wrap — a tool for undercover work, dampening the visible output of his amber mark. He left his military identification in his bunk.
He was three kilometers from the fortress before dawn.
It took him four days.
He moved the way he'd been trained to move through occupied territory — trading caravans as cover, garrison checkpoints navigated with the credentials of a merchant's assistant he'd borrowed from a trader heading south. The roads were alive with movement — not military, civilian. People recalibrating. Goods flowing back into the capital now that the first wave of panic had settled into the second wave, which was the longer, quieter kind where people had to decide what they were going to do about the rest of their lives.
The further south he moved, the more normal it looked.
That was the wrong thing. He had expected disruption — the visible aftermath of conquest, the raw edges of a forced transition. Instead he saw markets functioning. Garrison soldiers standing their posts in the same formations with the same equipment under slightly different administrative authority. A courier relay system running on its standard schedule.
He stopped in a village a day north of Byzantium and bought bread from a woman who had, by her own casual accounting, lived through three emperors and intended to live through several more.
"Is it bad?" he asked. "In the capital?"
She shrugged. "Different." She wrapped his bread. "The tax office sent a new assessment. Lower than last year, actually." She paused, the way someone pauses when they are examining their own opinion and finding it inconvenient. "I don't know what to do with that."
Ervalen pocketed the bread and kept walking.
---
Byzantium was not burning.
He stood at the northern entrance — a minor merchants' gate, no divine stone, no ceremony — and looked at a city that had been the seat of the Latium Empire for four hundred years and was currently going about its morning with the slightly dazed determination of someone who has received very unexpected news and decided that breakfast still needed to happen.
He spent two hours in the city before he went near the palace.
Walking. Listening. The way his first commanding officer had taught him — the city tells you what the reports don't, if you know how to let it talk. He heard arguments in a market dispute resolved by a palace administrator who had apparently been doing rounds since dawn. He saw a temple wall with fresh graffiti — WE WILL NOT BE OWNED in paint that hadn't fully dried — and directly beneath it, the same phrase in smaller letters, with a question mark added.
We Will Not Be Owned?
Someone had done that last night. Someone working something out.
He stopped in front of it for longer than he meant to.
Then he went to the palace.
---
The main gates were open.
Not ceremonially. Not for a procession. Just — open. Palace guards at their posts, citizens moving in and out of the outer courtyard on what appeared to be ordinary administrative business. A petition queue along the left colonnade. Three traders' representatives waiting on a bench near the fountain.
Ervalen walked in with a group of six civilians carrying what looked like a harvest yield dispute and got as far as the inner courtyard before a guard stopped him.
Young guard. Focused. "Administrative appointment?"
"I'm here to see the administrator," Ervalen said.
"Name and purpose?"
He said the first name that came to mind. Not his own. "Gian. I'm — I have information about the Macedonian garrison situation."
The guard looked at him. The pause that followed was the specific pause of someone running a quick assessment and deciding whether the situation warranted escalation. Ervalen kept his face neutral. The Soul-Brand suppressant wrap was doing its job — no amber light visible, nothing to read on the surface.
"Wait here," the guard said.
He waited.
The guard went inside and came back in four minutes. "Follow me."
That was too easy, Ervalen thought, and then immediately understood that it wasn't easy at all — it was deliberate. The open gates, the petition queue, the administrator receiving anyone who claimed relevant information. It was a collection mechanism. A net.
He was walking into it voluntarily.
He kept walking.
---
The administrative office was smaller than he expected.
He didn't know what he'd expected. Something that communicated power more obviously — the throne room, the grand gallery, the spaces emperors used because scale was itself a message. Instead he was shown to a working office: a desk covered in organized documents, a strategic map on the side table, morning light coming through a window that looked out over the central plaza.
The white-haired man was at the desk.
Ervalen had four seconds to look at him before Yogiri looked up.
He used them.
The reports had said young and handsome and calm in that order, and all three were accurate and all three were insufficient. Young the way a drawn sword was young — the age was irrelevant, the edge was the point. Handsome in a way that made the word seem like the wrong tool for what it was trying to describe. And calm with the specific quality that Ervalen had spent four days traveling south to assess.
It was not the calm of someone who had suppressed fear. It was not the calm of someone performing confidence.
It was the calm of someone for whom the current situation contained nothing that required a different emotional register.
That's the thing the reports couldn't convey, Ervalen thought. He's not suppressing anything. There's nothing to suppress. He is completely, genuinely, absolutely at rest inside this.
Yogiri looked up.
Golden-green eyes. Not surprised. Not alarmed. The evaluating attention landed on Ervalen the way it had apparently landed on everything else this man encountered — fully, precisely, without drama.
"Rank 4," Yogiri said. "Soul-Brand suppressed. Military posture — Macedonian training pattern, I'd guess, based on your stance. You're not here about the Macedonian garrison situation." He set down his pen. "You're from it."
The room was very quiet.
Ervalen did not move. Did not reach for anything. He had come without weapons — another calculated decision, because if the reports were accurate then weapons were theater, and theater was dishonest, and he had not traveled four days to be dishonest.
"Yes," he said.
Yogiri looked at him for a moment.
"Sit down," he said.
Ervalen sat.
---
"You came alone," Yogiri said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Without orders."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Ervalen looked at the man across the desk — at the golden-green eyes that had watched a Rank 4 Emperor's combat output dissolve without blinking, at the black-and-white flame moving in its slow orbit — and gave him the honest answer, because dishonesty seemed both pointless and disrespectful.
"I needed to know if the reports were accurate," he said. "I needed to see you myself."
Yogiri was quiet for a beat.
"And?" he said.
"They're accurate," Ervalen said. "More than accurate. The thing the reports couldn't capture is that you're—" He stopped. Found the word. "—settled. You're not at war with anything internally. You're just — here. Doing this."
Something shifted in Yogiri's expression. Not warmth exactly. Closer to the particular attention you gave something that was behaving unexpectedly.
"You came four days on foot through occupied territory," Yogiri said, "to assess my psychological state."
"To assess the accuracy of available intelligence," Ervalen said. "The psychological component was the most important data point."
"Because?"
"Because a man who can be rattled has limits that can be found. A man who cannot be rattled—" He let the sentence end there.
"Has different limits," Yogiri said.
"Has limits that require a different approach," Ervalen said.
They looked at each other across the desk.
Outside, the plaza was filling with the morning's business. Someone in the petition queue was arguing in a raised voice about water rights. A merchant's cart had gotten a wheel stuck in the colonnade's drainage channel and three guards were helping push it free. The ordinary world conducting itself beneath an extraordinary circumstance.
"How old are you?" Yogiri asked.
"Twenty-three."
"You have a Rank 4 Soul-Brand at twenty-three." Not impressed. Noting. "How long?"
"Four years."
"What's your ability?"
Ervalen said it simply. "DIVINE LANCE SOVEREIGNTY. I manifest a soul-force spear. Currently capable of penetrating Rank 4 defenses reliably, Rank 5 with sustained output."
Yogiri was quiet.
Then he said: "In ten years you'll be Rank 6."
The certainty in it — not encouragement, not prediction, just statement of fact, the way you noted the trajectory of something in motion — landed strangely. Ervalen had heard assessments of his potential his entire military career. None of them had sounded like that. None of them had sounded like someone reading data.
"Is that why you're not going to Macedon right now?" Ervalen asked. It came out before he calculated it fully. He didn't pull it back. "Because you've assessed the current opposition and it doesn't meet the threshold?"
Yogiri looked at him steadily.
"I'm in Macedon's files as the eighteen-year-old who held off a Hyperborean raider unit for six hours alone," Ervalen said. "You've read Straze's service record — I know you have, because you'd read everything available. You've read mine too."
"Yes," Yogiri said.
"And you've determined that the current resistance is interesting but not urgent."
"The current resistance," Yogiri said, "is Straze building something with insufficient materials. When he has sufficient materials, it will be worth addressing." He picked up his pen. "You came to find out what you're dealing with. You found out. Now you'll go back and tell Straze what you saw."
"Yes," Ervalen said.
"Then go," Yogiri said. He returned to his document. "You're wasting both our time sitting here."
---
Ervalen stood.
He moved to the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame.
"The woman in the plaza," he said. "Yesterday morning. The one who said it was terrible comfort." He didn't turn around. "You agreed with her."
The scratch of the pen continued.
"It was accurate," Yogiri said.
"Why did you come out?" Ervalen asked. "You could have sent a statement. Used the network again. You didn't need to stand on those steps."
The pen stopped.
A pause that was two seconds long.
"Because nine thousand people standing in a plaza means nine thousand people who haven't decided yet," Yogiri said. "I don't waste undecided people."
Ervalen walked out.
---
He was a kilometer from the palace before he realized his hands were shaking.
Not from fear. He catalogued it carefully — not fear, not adrenaline, not the physical aftermath of proximity to something lethal. Something else. The specific shaking of a person who has confirmed a thing they hoped was wrong and now has to carry the confirmation back.
He walked north.
He thought about the golden-green eyes. The absolute settled calm. The voice that said in ten years you'll be Rank 6 the way you described rainfall.
He thought about: I don't waste undecided people.
He thought about nine thousand people standing in a plaza with mixed signs, and a woman who said terrible comfort with a steady voice, and someone who wrote We Will Not Be Owned? with a question mark added.
He thought about Straze's line — minds can be countered — and tried to apply it, and found that he believed it, and found that believing it and feeling it were currently not the same thing.
He walked.
By midday the capital was behind him and the road north was open and cold and he had four days to assemble what he'd found into something Straze could use.
He started with what he knew for certain.
· The reports were accurate.
· The calm was real.
· The intelligence gathering was active and thorough — the man had read his file, had known his rank and its duration and his ability, had assessed Straze's timeline independently and arrived at the same estimate Straze had.
He started with that.
Then he started on the harder thing. The thing that had no tactical application and no place in a military report.
The man in that office was not performing anything.
Which meant there was no gap between who he was and what he did.
Which meant that every action — every decision, every burning, every mercy, every impossible calculation — came from exactly the same place.
Which meant understanding one of them meant understanding all of them.
Ervalen walked north through the autumn afternoon and worked at the shape of a man who was not at war with anything inside himself, and who had told a twenty-three-year-old soldier with a shaking hand to stop wasting their time.
---
Four days north, Straze was waiting.
Ervalen had a report to give.
He just needed to find the right words for the part that didn't have any.