Restwell Village.
Ethan Ashford, white cane tapping along the dirt path, had grown restless from sitting indoors and headed out to pick up some groceries.
The village wasn't large, but it had everything it needed — a market, a few eating houses, and a tavern that stayed open well past dark.
"Young Ethan! Out shopping again?" Elder Grey moor, hunched into his village chief posture, greeted him with a wheeze of a laugh.
Ethan tilted his head, then said with mild surprise:
"Elder Grey moor? Haven't seen you in a while. I figured you'd found yourself a quiet ditch somewhere to count down your remaining days in peace."
Grey moor let out a few dry laughs. "What nonsense. These old bones are still going strong."
"Hard to say."
Without further preamble, Ethan reached out and pressed two fingers to the center of Greymoor's forehead, his expression going still. His other hand shifted into a precise gesture at his side.
— The Bone-Reader's Touch.
A Heaven-grade technique capable of reading a person's fate through nothing more than touch — calculating the threads of fortune woven into the body itself, reading destiny in the structure of bone and skin.
Greymoor went rigid. His eyebrow twitched. He suppressed, with visible effort, the urge to remove this insolent young man from the street entirely.
Ethan spoke, genuinely puzzled:
"Your fate is complicated, old man. It's like a Fortune Star fell straight onto your head at birth. By rights, you should be sitting in a high council seat somewhere, or retired in comfortable obscurity as a landed noble. How are you a village elder?"
He couldn't use spiritual sense — that was sealed away — but the Bone-Reader's Touch didn't need eyes or inner perception. All it required was the palm against a face: feel the structure, build the picture in the mind, and the rest followed from there.
Greymoor reached up to stop him, smiling tightly. "Young Ethan, if you could just lower your hand—"
Ethan grabbed him by the nose. "Hold still."
"Your fate is wrong. There's darkness ahead of you — and a faint trace of blood in it. That means danger, and soon. Not illness, not age. Someone means to harm you."
Greymoor, nose firmly in hand, finally ran out of patience. He pushed Ethan off and said with some heat: "Keep your hands to yourself!"
Ethan let go without complaint, then patted him on the shoulder with the gravity of a man delivering truly important news:
"I'm telling you as a favor. Watch yourself the next few days. Whether you come out the other side depends entirely on you."
Having said his piece, he felt he'd done his part.
Good advice only goes so far. Whether the old man heeded it was his own business.
Beside them, the Captain of the Royal Guard — currently behind the counter of the wine stall next door — turned away and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. He had never imagined he'd see the day when the most powerful Chancellor in the realm stood in a village lane getting his nose grabbed by a blind man.
Passersby were tripping over their own feet trying to get a better look. Admiring glances followed Ethan down the lane.
The man had just told the Chancellor — who even the Queen stepped carefully around — that he was going to die soon.
Blunt didn't quite cover it.
Greymoor stood still for a moment after Ethan moved on, thinking.
"He reads faces, then," the Captain said, sliding over with poorly concealed delight. "He said your fate was complex — that you should be sitting on the High Council! Remarkable. Completely blind and still accurate."
Greymoor looked at him sideways and said, quite evenly: "Which would suggest the part about the bloody disaster is also accurate."
The Captain's expression froze.
On the other side of the village.
Ethan moved through the market at a comfortable pace, already familiar with the layout after two weeks of daily errands. He had learned the rhythm of the stalls, the position of every vendor, the smell of each corner.
The market.
Lord Gareth Dunmore, dressed plainly as a vegetable farmer, crouched behind a produce stall and turned over in his mind for the hundredth time how best to stoke unrest within the Kingdom of Goldmere.
A voice interrupted his scheming.
"Excuse me — do you have any garlic shoots?"
Gareth didn't look up. He waved a hand irritably. "Are you blind? Look for yourself."
Ethan pointed two fingers at the black ribbon over his eyes. "Actually, yes."
Gareth glanced up — and went cold.
It was him. The one he most envied and despised. The face he had spent days fantasizing about removing from the picture entirely.
His expression locked up.
"Yes," he said flatly. "How much?"
"Three bunches should do."
Gareth bagged the vegetables with all the warmth of a man packing his own execution papers, then threw them across the stall. "One copper."
Ethan paid, picked up the garlic shoots, and brought them to his nose.
"That's the particular smell of Ashenvale soil," he said, genuinely curious. "Did you bring these all the way from the duchy?"
"What does it matter? You talk too much for a man buying vegetables." Gareth's jaw was tight.
Ethan lowered his voice, as if sharing a confidence:
"You're from Ashenvale, then..."
"I'll tell you something, since you seem like an honest man. Pack up your family and leave the duchy. Don't go back."
Gareth stared at him. "Why?"
"Because the Duke of Ashenvale is about to raise a rebellion. His son — Lord Gareth Dunmore — has traveled all the way to the capital precisely to stir up trouble and create chaos here, so his father can move in the moment Goldmere is distracted." Ethan said it with complete confidence, as if reading from a page.
The color left Gareth's face entirely.
His hand found the hilt of the blade tucked under the cabbages.
Every instinct in him screamed to flip the stall, draw steel, and solve the problem immediately.
He hadn't even begun his plan. How did this man know?
And the detail — the accuracy — it matched. Almost exactly.
Reason held, barely. Gareth kept his hands still and his face as neutral as he could manage, but cold sweat was already running down his back.
He thinks I'm a farmer. Gareth's mind moved fast. He has no idea who I am. He'd have no reason to trick a random vegetable seller.
And Ethan was blind, no cultivation — completely unable to read his identity by any conventional means.
So then—
Gareth's eyes went wide.
There was only one explanation: word of the Duke's rebellion had already spread through the capital's upper circles. His mission here was already known.
"How," Gareth said, his voice controlled with effort, "do you know the Duke of Ashenvale plans to rebel?"
Ethan smiled, slow and mysterious.
"Because I am a prophet."
Gareth nearly choked on the words rising in his throat. He managed — barely — not to spit them out.
"Get away from me," he said instead, voice dropping to something dangerous. "Walk away, right now. Otherwise—"
A scent reached them before she did.
Gareth looked up.
A woman in red moved through the market with an ease that drew every eye without appearing to try. She walked unhurried and precisely, as though the crowd naturally made room, which it did.
It was Queen Vivienne — out of her royal robes, accompanied as always by Lily.
Every thought in Gareth's head collapsed into a single cold understanding.
She had heard him.
"You're here." Ethan turned his head and smiled, relaxed, in her direction.
He hadn't heard her footsteps — not above the noise of the market. But he had caught the edge of her scent on the air, and that was enough.
Vivienne kept her distance from Ethan, her tone light. "Just passing through. I happened to run into you."
Then her eyes — calm, precise, and carrying a temperature slightly below the air around them — settled on Gareth.
"You were saying," she said pleasantly, "that the Duke of Ashenvale intends to rebel? I'd love to hear more about that."
The market went quiet.
Not dramatically — no one drew a blade or raised a voice. But every vendor and passerby went still, their attention shifting all at once toward the small produce stall.
Beside the Queen, Lily lowered her head and let her fingertips rest on the hilt of the blade at her inner thigh. Threads of cold killing intent spooled outward and wrapped around Gareth like wire.
Gareth felt the shift.
He breathed.
There's no proof. A blind man with no standing had said words. Words weren't evidence.
"It's nothing," he said, with a managed smile. "The King-Consort claims he can see the future. He told me the Duke was planning a rebellion, and that I should take my family and flee the duchy." He shook his head. "Pure nonsense, obviously."
The tension in the market eased. A few people quietly rolled their eyes.
The man was saying bold things about a Duke. Rather reckless, really.
Among the disguised Officials, however, several sets of teeth were grinding. A ripple of private communication moved between them:
"We move to censure the King-Consort at tomorrow's court session. Recklessly accusing a Duke of treason — even the King-Consort cannot be above consequence."
"Agreed. Dangerous speech left unchecked spreads like rot. He needs to be reined in."
"Better yet — use this to remove him entirely. He was never fit for the title."
Vivienne nodded, apparently unconcerned. "I see."
Ethan, however, shook his head.
"Who said it was nonsense?"
He straightened up, his expression settling into something unhurried and certain.
"I'm in a good mood today. Let me explain it properly — to all of you."