The dried leaves danced across the valley floor in lazy, unhurried circles, carried by a wind that had nowhere particular to be. The village below moved at the same pace — merchants trading in their stalls without, children chasing each other between houses, elders sitting in doorways watching the town's noon beauty the way old people watch things they have seen many times and still find worth looking at. It was the kind of quiet that made you forget, briefly, that the world beyond the valley existed at all.
In the chief's house — modest by the standards of Cang City but respectable enough for a village of this size — Anoki ducked through the low doorframe and straightened inside. The chief met him near the entrance, the kind of man who had learned not to ask too many questions about guardians who arrived unannounced.
"Sir Anoki." He dipped his head. "He's in that room." A gesture toward the back corridor. "He's been... the same."
Anoki nodded once and moved through.
The room was dim. A single window let in a blade of mid day light that fell across the bed and the man lying in it. The smell of medicine and something older, something that belonged to illness that had settled in and decided to stay, hung in the air. The man on the bed was thin in the way that happened slowly — not from starvation but from something eating at him from the inside, taking its time. His face had drawn inward until you could see the shape of the skull beneath the skin. His breathing was audible.
But when Anoki entered, the man's eyes moved to him. And something in them sharpened.
He turned his head slightly on the pillow.
"What are you doing here, brother."
It wasn't quite a question. The voice was dry but the edge in it was familiar — the edge of someone who knew Anoki well enough to be suspicious of an unannounced visit.
Anoki pulled a chair to the bedside and sat, unhurried. A slight smile settled on his face — the particular smile of someone who had prepared for this exact reception.
"Can't I visit my brother once in a while?"
The man on the bed — Kaido, his elder brother, the one who had always acted as though being older by a few years entitled him to an opinion on everything — let out a sound that started as a scoff and became a laugh. A real one. It moved through him visibly and you could tell it cost him something, the way his face tightened for a moment before the laugh won out.
"Anoki, you brat." He shook his head against the pillow. "Did I call for you? You always act like you're the older one. Always have. You're just an amateur brat who never learned his place."
"Well," Anoki said, reaching for the cup that had been left on the small table beside the bed, "if you behaved like you were older, maybe I wouldn't have had to."
Kaido laughed again — harder this time, and again the pain moved through it, but he wore his smile over it like a man who had decided a long time ago that he would not let the illness have his laughter too. Anoki joined him, quietly, and for a moment the dim room held something warmer than the medicine smell and the thin light.
Eventually the laughter settled. A pot of sake was produced from somewhere — Anoki suspected the chief kept it ready for these visits — and they sat together the way brothers sit when they have run out of things to argue about and are left only with the comfort of each other's company.
Kaido watched him over the rim of his cup.
"What mission are you carrying out that brought you all the way out here to this part of the continent?"
Anoki sipped. Let some of it roll to the corner of his jaw before wiping it with the back of his hand. Then he set the cup down.
"I'm investigating the murder of the monarch of Ondira."
"Ah." Kaido considered this. Then something shifted in his expression — something that wasn't quite pride but lived next door to it. "Regent of Cang's guardian forces, carrying out a grand investigation. Not a small feat, you know. Not a small thing at all, where you've gotten to."
Anoki looked at him. "I took on a squad."
Kaido's eyebrows moved. "Finally."
"Four rookies."
The laugh returned. Kaido shook with it, one hand pressing to his side. "Four rookies. You, with four rookies. How long did you last before wanting to leave them on the roadside?"
Anoki set his cup down and looked at the window. The blade of light had shifted slightly.
"They're spinny little brats," he said. "I genuinely hope they don't die in our first real battle."
Kaido laughed loud enough that it probably reached the chief in the next room. The sound of it filled the small space and spilled through the window and the wind took it out over the valley, where the leaves were still turning their slow circles across the ground and the village was still going about its morning and everything was, for this particular moment, unhurried and ordinary and fine.
---
Over the valley, in the neighboring town where Anoki had told his squad to wait — they were not waiting quietly.
Sora had been leaning against a tree near the spot where they had caught him, arms folded, jaw set, watching them the way a cornered animal watches something it is calculating the odds against. The squad had gathered around him with the particular energy of young people who had just caught someone doing something wrong and had not yet decided what to do with that power.
Peiren looked him up and down with the detached assessment he applied to most things. "You're a pickpocket."
"Brilliant deduction," Sora said flatly. "Someone get this boy a prize."
"How long have you been doing this?" Hori asked.
"None of your business."
"You're not very good at it," Peiren said. It was not said cruelly — just stated, the way Peiren stated most things.
Sora's eyes moved to him. "Excuse me?"
"He caught you without looking." Peiren nodded toward Kei. "That's not a skilled thief. That's a sloppy one."
"Oh that's rich, coming from a bunch of pampered capital kids on a field trip—"
"We're on a mission," Hori said.
"Good for you." Sora's voice had taken on a harder edge now. "Mission. Listen to yourselves. Playing guardian in your nice uniforms with your nice weapons that someone else paid for, coming out to the real world for the first time and acting like you belong here."
"Where did you learn to pick pockets?" Hayatte asked, genuinely curious more than mocking — though the question still landed wrong given the context.
"Oh, are we doing an interview now? Should I sit down? Would you like tea?"
"We're just asking—"
"I don't remember asking for your questions." Sora pushed off the tree and took a step, but he wasn't going anywhere — just repositioning, the way people do when they feel cornered and have no actual exit. "Get out of my face. All of you. Go back to your mission and your capital and your grandlord who you all worship like he's actually doing something for people like me—"
"Hey." Kei's voice was quiet. Not sharp — just present. He had been standing slightly apart from the others, watching. He had asked a question or two, small ones, and then mostly listened.
Something in the single syllable made Sora stop.
Kei looked at him — not with pity, not with the performed concern of someone going through a motion, but with the particular attention of someone who was actually seeing what was in front of him.
The silence stretched.
And then, without any warning that it was coming, Sora's face changed. The hard set of it didn't collapse dramatically — it just... loosened, somewhere around the eyes. He looked down. His shoulders, which had been pulled up toward his ears since the moment they caught him, dropped slightly.
He started to cry.
Not loudly. Just gradually, the way crying comes when you have been holding it back for a long time and something small finally finds the crack.
"Come on, guys," Kei said, still quietly. "Give it a rest."
The squad went still.
"I am an outcast."
Sora said it to the ground. Four words, dropped into the quiet like stones into water.
Nobody spoke. The word landed differently when it came from a real person standing in front of you.
Hayatte said, carefully: "An outcast?"
"Yes." Sora looked up. His eyes were wet but his voice had steadied into something that sounded almost like relief — the particular relief of someone who has finally said a thing aloud that they have been carrying in silence. "I steal so I can eat. I don't like it. I have never liked it. But what choice do I have?"
He looked at them — really looked at them, taking them in one by one.
"You pampered jerks from the capital won't understand. You're living your comfortable lives behind your walls, training in your nice academies, and you don't even think about what the rest of the world looks like. You adore your grandlord. Oh, the highest and mighty grandlord of Cang. Meanwhile out here—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Out here people are just trying to survive."
"Sora." Kei said his name — they had learned it in the first few minutes after catching him, one of the only things he had given them freely. "Why are you saying all of this?"
"Because I've held it in for years." His voice cracked slightly on the last word and he let it. "And you're the first people who've stood still long enough for me to say it."
The squad stared at him.
Sora looked back at them and something moved across his face — the dawning awareness of how much he had just said, and to strangers. He exhaled. Ran a hand across his face.
"I'm... sorry. That wasn't—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "Things have just been very hard. For a very long time."
Nobody rushed to fill the silence. Kei didn't move. He just waited.
And Sora, perhaps because of that — because of the waiting, because no one jumped in with a response or a dismissal or a solution — kept going.
"My father was a guardian. From the Sandlands, in Cryosia." He said it the way people say things they have rehearsed in private many times but never spoken aloud. "He found his way to this village sixteen years ago. He'd escaped death by a narrow chance and decided he was done — done with fighting, done with that life. He settled here. Married my mother. Had me."
A pause.
"I was around five when I ruined it. I told a friend that my father was from the Sandlands. I didn't know what it meant. I was five." His jaw tightened. "The village chief had my father killed. My mother and I were driven out."
The wind moved through the space between them, gentle and indifferent.
"My mother raised me on the outskirts alone. She trained me. Taught me what she knew. She was..." He stopped again. Pressed his lips together. "She passed away a year ago. From Illness."
Hori's hand moved slightly at her side, an involuntary gesture toward him that she stopped before it completed.
"I despise the people of this village," Sora said. The words were flat and absolute. "More than I have ever despised anything." Something changed in his expression then — a tightening, something that came from a place deep and old. "But I cannot bring myself to let them die."
Die.
The word fell into the group like a stone and everyone felt it land.
Hori said it first, because the question was too large to leave unasked. "Die?"
Sora looked at the distant peak visible just beyond the village roofline. The faint thread of smoke rising from it that most people had learned not to look at.
His expression, when he turned back to them, had the particular gravity of someone carrying knowledge they have had no one to give to.
"I know something," he said. "About that mountain."
And the wind turned, soft and slow, carrying the smell of something ancient from the direction of the peak.
The leaves scattered across the ground in the valley below. Anoki's laughter drifted from the chief's house and dissolved into the morning air. And in the space between one breath and the next, everything about this stop on the road to Ondira became something more than a rest point.
It became the beginning of something that Sora had been waiting, without knowing it, for someone to arrive and start.