The tavern breathed like a thing waking slowly from a long night; the laughter that had filled it yesterday now seemed like an echo from someone else's memory. Lantern light pooled across the floorboards, catching on the rim of a cup, the curve of a spoon, the dull brass of a coin. Shadows leaned into corners and settled; the room itself seemed to be listening.
Clive sat with his shoulders curved inward, a hunched figure at the head of the table. A steaming bowl of stew cooled at his elbow, untouched. His fingers had been restless all evening—fingers that had once been quick to seize, to defend, to strike, now slower to move; each small motion was measured, careful.
Opposite him, Lunafreya watched with an ease that belonged to someone who had learned to wait. The light drew thin silver lines through her hair, and her face was the same quiet harbor it always was. She reached across once, not to clasp his hand but simply to rest the tips of her fingers against his wrist—an anchor, a small kindness.
"Clive," she asked, voice soft enough that it might have been only a thought. "You've been cautious all evening. More than usual. Are you… well?"
He met her eyes, for once unable to hide the small weather inside himself. It shuttered across his face before he answered: a look of someone who had followed a shadow into a maze and found shifting walls instead of doors.
"I followed him," Clive said at last, the syllables blunt as metal. "The hooded man from yesterday."
A silence that was almost sound brought the table to attention. The clatter of cutlery died away; an old man in the corner paused mid-sip; even the fire seemed to huddle inward.
Auron set his cup down with the slow deliberation of a man who could sense the way tensions ripple. His single eye pinched. "And?" he asked, voice like a stone tossed into still water. "You found something."
Serah and Vivi, who had been leaning together across from one another trading small jokes and nervous glances, went still as if a gale had struck them. Mog drifted above the table, pom-pom skittering in agitation.
Clive's voice dropped, steady and low. "They've been watching us. Not casually. Not the interested kind. They've been watching with purpose—cataloguing where we go, how we sleep, who we speak to. They don't trust our faces. They don't trust our pasts. To them we're strangers. Maybe spies. Maybe worse. They're waiting to see if we become a danger."
The words fell like stones into the stale air. Plates clinked softly when hands moved, but no one ate.
"Spies?" Serah's voice broke. "After we helped them? After we fought off the wolves, after the Alpha, after Vulturo? They'd call us spies?"
Vivi's small form trembled. The boy's usual buoyancy turned thin and edged. "We saved them," he said, the sentence a small, urgent plea. "Doesn't that mean anything at all?"
Auron snorted—the sound was short and expressionless, the kind of noise that meant he understood danger and found words unnecessary. "Hmph. Princess," he said, and the barb carried no malice, only a resigned humor.
Lunafreya's fingers tightened minute fractions on Clive's wrist. "Amalia," she said quietly for the name came weighted with a history none of them could ignore. "She will have eyes everywhere. She will listen to any rumor that might feed the Resistance's need for certainty."
Clive nodded. The movement was small. "They will tell her everything," he said. "Every odd look, every late conversation. She'll decide what we are ally, neutral, threat. And that decision will shape what stands between us and safety."
Mog let out a tiny growl, puffing up as if size could cloak anger. "Kupo! If they mess with my friends, I'll smack them—" He stopped himself with a small squeak, cheeks pink. "Kupo. Not good. Not nice. But I will defend!"
Before the word could thicken into a plan, their trinkets those small, magical links bound to Sirius flickered. A soundless hum threaded the air and the familiar voice they'd all come to recognize folded into the silence like a hand across a candle.
"No," Sirius said, and the single syllable landed with the weight of iron. "Do not interfere with them. This is the start of their own fate. You cannot alter it."
Mog spun in midair so fast his little bell jingled. "Aaarghhh!" he cried, a tiny frenzy. "Kupo! Why? Why let them call us spies? We can go explain! We can—"
Sirius's tone smoothed like water around rock: placid but immovable. "Because this is their burden. Their suspicion belongs to them, not you. Leave their judgment be."
The moogle's frustration simmered into an impotent sputter; his small fists clenched and unclenched like a child caught between defiance and obedience. Serah's jaw set. Her eyes, which had always looked for ways to stitch wounds, now watched the room in hard focus.
"Then what do we do, Sirius?" Clive asked. The question came from somewhere stripped of bravado solid, honest. "Do we sit here and let rumors shape us? Do we wait while people make decisions on whispers?"
"No," Sirius answered, not with impatience but with a clarity that left no space for doubt. "You move forward. Bhujerba is next. The Lhusu Mines are crawling with monsters and aether anomalies. Hunt there. Test yourselves. The Resistance will watch you. Let your actions speak."
The trinkets dimmed after that; the hum retreated until the small room felt emptied of an invisible presence. Only Mog's frustrated wings made a small buzzing sound and Serah's breath came out in a slow, sharp pull.
Clive stood, fingers finding the hilt of his sword with the kind of automatic certainty that comes from long habit. "Then we go to Bhujerba," he said, and the resolve in his voice tightened the air into motion.
One by one, the others rose. Auron checked his gear with mechanical calm, grinding the edge of his temper into practicality. Serah gathered their maps and supplies while Vivi dashed about like a small comet, stuffing leavings and snack-wrappings into pockets. Lunafreya's face was composed, but there was a steel in her that did not need to roar.
They moved through the inn like a practiced group of survivors a handful of people who had learned the rhythm of each other's breath. They spoke in low, efficient tones.
"If the Resistance watches, let them see our method," Auron said, more to himself than to anyone else. "Keep steady. No showmanship."
"We'll need regulators for the trinkets," Serah offered. "If magicks are strong in Lhusu we can't afford static or stray signals". She brushed her fingers along the map's crease, tracing possible routes as if they were veins of the world.
Clive's mind clocked through a dozen risks: the watchful eyes, the possibility of ambush, the inscrutable diplomacy of resistance leaders hedging their bets. He thought of the hooded man how the figure had melted into the crowd, how the gloved hand had adjusted a hood with a movement practiced and slow. He had followed at a distance, through alleys stitched with shadow, and had seen the figure slip into a cluster of Resistance couriers who spoke in clipped codes about traitors and allegiance.
The fact of being watched was different from the danger of being hunted, and the difference lay in the hands that carried rumors into decisions.
At the doorway, the innkeeper gave them nothing more than a look part business, part curiosity, part the world's damned habit of asking questions and hearing no answers. Clive glanced back at the table for a second. The empty bowls seemed like small witnesses. Lunafreya's small, firm hand still rested on his wrist.
"Dawn then?" she asked.
"Dawn," he replied. The word felt like a hinge suddenly shifted into place.
They filed out into the night, the town's lamps winking like stars shorn close to earth. A few townsfolk watched them go faces lined from long summers and longer wars then returned to their own lives, folding the party's passing into the familiar pile of human detail. Clive thought of the old woman who had called them trouble earlier, and he felt a small, wry affection for her fear; it was easier to face suspicion than it was to change what people had learned to fear.
Outside, the air tasted of coming rain and distant sea; the sky opened a little and the world felt larger than the small room they had just left. A courier passed by bag slung, boots beating rhythm head down and eyes forward. Clive's heart hammered with the precision of a man preparing to run into an eye of a storm.
Sirius's voice touched them once again as they climbed into the carriage bound for the aerodrome. No lecture, no prophecy only a simple line delivered into the private channels of their trinkets.
"Let your deeds answer every whispered doubt," he said.
Clive felt Lunafreya's fingers tighten one last time around his wrist. He met her glance and saw not fear but a quiet promise. It steadied him like a hand along his spine.
They left the Kingdom behind with the sort of quiet patience that builds empires: step by step, decision by decision. Bhujerba's spires would rise against the sky, a city of machines and merchants where the air smelled of oil and rain. The Lhusu Mines would whisper into the earth and pull problems up like tangles in a net. They would go, not to prove themselves, but to be seen for what they were: a band of people who would answer the world's doubt with action, not argument.
Under the pale road of stars, as the carriage wheels turned and the town's lamps blurred into a string of tiny lights, Clive allowed himself one small, private resolve. If rumor would cast them as enemies, then he would meet that rumor with a life that no whisper could undo.