The road toward the Maelstrom thinned from forest track to bare, cracked stone within a single day's walk, and it was Akira who finally said out loud what all three of them had clearly been circling for hours.
"Remus," she said, stopping at the edge of a wide, wind-scoured plain, the Maelstrom's own dark shape already visible far ahead as a bruise on the horizon that seemed to swallow the light around it rather than merely block it. "We need to talk to you."
"I already know what's coming," Remus said, not unkindly. "Say it anyway."
"It's the Maelstrom," Vantor said, blunt as ever. "Nobody the Council or the Masters have ever heard of has gone in and come back whole. I've calculated the odds every way I know how, and none of the numbers favor three more of us going in beside you."
"We've come this far together," Akira said, quieter, "and I don't say this lightly. But I can't in good conscience walk into something built specifically to break minds, not for a debt I already consider paid."
Remus felt something in his chest sink lower than he expected it to, some old, familiar ache that had nothing to do with the Maelstrom at all and everything to do with a road outside Autumnshade and a brother's retreating back on a horse he hadn't looked back from once.
"I expected some of you to say no," he said. "I didn't expect it to land like this."
"We're not turning back," Akira said quickly. "We're staying here, at the edge, as long as it takes. If you're not out by the time the moon's full again, we ride for the Forge and tell Corvin everything, so at least someone knows where you went and why."
"I'll go in with you as far as the ambush line and no further," Mira offered, already half a step forward before Vantor's hand landed on her shoulder.
"No," Vantor said, and something in his flat certainty this time carried a weight none of his earlier bargaining had. "Not because I don't trust your courage, Mira. Because I've already done the arithmetic on how many of us the Maelstrom needs to claim before the trip stops being worth it, and the answer is one. Just him. He's the only one of the four of us it actually wants."
Remus turned the shard's sealed case over in Akira's careful grip, thought of everything Corvin had warned him it might do to whoever carried it too long, and held out his hand.
"Give it back," he said. "That's the deal I made you, and I intend to keep it, whatever else changes today."
Akira pressed the case into his palm without argument, her fingers lingering a half second longer than the handoff strictly required.
"I'll miss all three of you," Remus said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he meant it more plainly than he usually let himself mean anything out loud.
"We'll be here," Akira said. "And Remus. If this takes longer than we think, I'm sending word to Corvin myself, and Corvin will send it on to the Elders. Whatever's on the other side of that storm, you're not going to simply vanish from every record on this island the way outsiders sometimes do. I won't let that happen to you."
"Try not to die of boredom waiting," Mira said, grinning despite the wet shine in her eyes that gave the joke away. "And if you do come back, you owe me a story worth the wait."
"Fair terms," Vantor said, holding out one clawed hand, and Remus shook it, surprised by how firm the grip actually was underneath all the earlier bargaining. "Come back, Draymoor. Preferably with something worth the risk you're about to take."
He walked on alone after that, the three of them shrinking behind him into small, still shapes against a plain that swallowed sound the further he went, and didn't let himself turn around a second time.
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