[Morning – Khar’Seth]
The investigation started without anyone officially declaring it.
It simply happened.
Kira left early, before the rest had finished breakfast, and returned an hour later with a ntal list of who had been under Matthias’s control the longest, who rembered the most, and who was in a condition to talk.
That was what an informant did.
---
The first was a bear-man nad Duren.
Fifty years old. Broad shoulders that now carried sothing that wasn’t physical weight. He sat down with the group in the back room of the tavern with his hands clasped on the table and the expression of soone trying to rember a dream that was slipping away.
"It wasn’t sudden," he said. "That’s what’s hardest to explain. It wasn’t sudden."
"What was it like?" Emily asked.
"Gradual. Like when cold air seeps in under the door and you don’t notice exactly when you started feeling cold." Duren looked at his hands. "One day you were following all your routines, but sothing inside was no longer yours. You still thought. You still felt. But every decision passed through a filter you didn’t put there."
"Did you rember who you were?" Alex asked.
"Yes. That was the worst part." A long pause. "I knew exactly who I was. I just couldn’t do anything about it."
Silence in the room.
"What do you rember about Matthias?" said Kira. A practical voice, not softening the question too much. Duren knew her. He knew how she worked.
"Rituals. At night, in the abandoned temple. Not all of us went in, only the ones he chose for that night. There were symbols on the floor I didn’t recognize." He frowned. "And he talked. He was always talking. Quietly, to himself. Sotis he ntioned nas."
"What nas?"
"I didn’t retain them all. But one was repeated." Duren looked at the table. "The Heralds. He said the Heralds needed ti. That he was buying them ti."
Alex and Raven exchanged a look.
"Did he say where they were?"
"No. Just..." Duren closed his eyes. "Once he said sothing about the fourth seal. That the fourth seal was almost ready. That those who wait beneath the earth were almost awake."
Those who wait beneath the earth.
Alex felt the Fragnt move. Not push. Just pay attention, like an animal raising its head at a familiar sound.
"Anything else?" Kira asked.
"Nothing that makes sense." Duren opened his eyes. "I’m sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for," said Emily.
Duren looked at her. Then at the whole group.
"Did you kill him?"
"Yes," said Alex.
The bear-man nodded once.
He didn’t say thank you. It was too much to sum up in one word.
He stood up and left.
---
They spoke with five more throughout the morning.
A young fox-woman who rembered seeing maps in the temple but not the details. An adolescent Beastfolk who rembered carrying sealed boxes without knowing what they contained. A pair of wolf brothers who rembered fragnts of conversations between Matthias and outside visitors who arrived at night.
The pattern was consistent.
Matthias wasn’t alone. He had regular contact with sothing or soone external. People arrived, not creatures, people, with cloaks that hid their insignias. Matthias received them in private. They spoke in a language the controlled Beastfolk didn’t recognize.
And always, at so point in the night, soone ntioned ti.
How much longer. If the schedule holds. If the next move is confird.
"They’re coordinated," said Raven when they ca out from the last testimony. "Matthias was a piece, not the origin."
"We knew that," said Alex.
"Knowing it and confirming it are different things."
She was right.
---
[Tavern – noon]
They ate at the tavern at noon.
It was Kira who spoke while they served, as if the conversation were a natural continuation of the investigation.
"You have a question you haven’t asked," she said.
"What?" said Alex.
"How so many people know about the Fragnts." Kira broke her bread. "Matthias knew. The Heralds know. The Abandoned Circle knows. I knew before I t you."
It was true. Alex had thought about it, vaguely, at different tis. He had never articulated it.
"The Temple says the Fragnts are a myth," Kira continued. "And in the official channels, in the approved libraries, in the guild records, in everything the Temple controls... they’re right. Nothing exists. No record, no reference, no na."
"They erased them," said Emily.
"They’ve been erasing them for centuries." Kira drank. "The Reaper was sealed so long ago that most official history doesn’t even have the gap where the record should be. It’s just clean."
"Then how—" Alex began.
"Because the Temple doesn’t control everything." Kira looked directly at him. "It controls the official channels. The approved trade routes, the certified libraries, the registered guilds, the licensed markets. Everything that exists within the system they built themselves."
Pause.
"But there’s another system."
Raven raised her cup with sothing that might have been a smile.
"The underworld doesn’t have certified libraries," Kira continued. "It has knowledge markets that operate in basents and on ships and in border towns where the Temple arrives late or not at all."
Alex gave this information his full attention.
anwhile, Grim sat on his lap, still in his 80-centiter sub-form, listening.
"It has networks of informants who share information because information is currency and no one pays for records they already know." She took another slice of bread, bit into it, then continued.
"It has ruins that the Temple didn’t get to in ti to empty, oral traditions from peoples who lived near the places where the Fragnts were sealed, books that circulate without covers so they can’t be identified."
"And outlaws," added Raven. "The Circle has been collecting exactly that kind of information for twenty-five years."
"Exactly." Kira nodded. "People who follow the Temple’s rules don’t know anything about the Fragnts. Not because they’re ignorant. Because the system they trust was designed for them not to know."
"And people who don’t follow the rules," said Alex.
"Know everything." Kira looked at him. "Or enough to be dangerous in one direction or another." A brief pause. "I’m an informant. Khar’Seth is a Beastfolk village that existed for centuries near ruins where the Temple never fully arrived. There are traditions here that my grandparents learned from theirs about things that shouldn’t exist according to official records." Her amber eyes didn’t blink. "My job is to know what the Temple doesn’t want you to know. It’s literally my profession."
Alex looked at the table.
It made sense. More sense than he would have liked, because it ant the threat was larger than it seed from the inside. It wasn’t just the Temple looking for him. It was an entire ecosystem of forbidden information circulating in the shadows, and he and his Fragnt were the hottest topic in that ecosystem.
"How many people in the underworld know about specifically?" he asked.
"Enough that Matthias recognized you without much effort." Kira was direct. "Fragnt 1’s energy is distinctive to anyone who knows what to look for. Matthias knew. The Heralds know. Any forbidden practitioner with enough experience knows."
"And the Temple?"
"The Temple knows more than anyone, that’s why they arrested you on the day of the celebration, see? I wasn’t there and I knew because that information is worth money. They don’t know exactly what or exactly where yet. But the margin is narrowing."
Silence at the table.
Grim, who had listened to everything without moving from the floor beside Alex’s chair, spoke.
"Then move fast. Always."
"Yes," said Kira. "Basically."
---
They spent the afternoon in the village.
Not investigating. Just being.
There was sothing the team needed to do with Khar’Seth besides extracting information, and it was simply to witness what remained.
Walk the streets while the Beastfolk slowly began to reclaim their routines.
See the badger-woman from the tavern receive the neighbors who ca to ask her what exactly had happened and answer them with the patience of soone who had already answered the question twelve tis and would do it twelve more.
Kira guided them without calling it a guide.
"That’s the blacksmith," she said, pointing to a workshop where a rhino-man worked with hunched shoulders and the movents of soone rebuilding their own rhythm. "He spent three months without rembering why he did what he did. He just did it because Matthias required it. Now he’s rembering he does it because he likes it."
"How long will that take?" asked Emily.
"It depends." Kira watched the blacksmith for a mont. "The body rembers before the mind. He’s already back in the workshop. That’s the body. The mind takes longer."
They passed in front of the abandoned temple where Matthias had operated.
Soone had already started erasing the symbols on the ground.
Three young Beastfolk with rags and buckets of water, working in silence, thodically erasing each stroke.
No one was watching them. It was work they wanted to do without an audience.
The group kept walking.
---
At the end of the afternoon, Kira took them to the central plaza.
There was a fountain. Dry. Matthias had cut off the water supply at the beginning of the control, according to one of the morning’s testimonies. But soone had started cleaning it. The mud at the bottom removed, the stones scrubbed, the intake channel cleared.
Still without water. But ready for when it ca.
"The village is going to be fine," said Kira. Not as an optimistic prediction. As a professional assessnt. "Beastfolk are resilient out of necessity. We’ve always been on the margins of everything."
"Of the Temple, of the kingdoms, of the guilds. You learn to recover without anyone helping you because no one cos."
"We ca," said Emily.
Kira looked at her. Sothing in her expression shifted, barely.
"Yes," she said. "You ca."
---
The sun was setting when they sat on the steps of the plaza.
The five of them. Grim among them, eighty centiters, his ribs still cracked, his left arm at that wrong angle.
Alex looked at the sky and thought about what Duren had said.
I knew exactly who I was. I just couldn’t do anything about it.
The Fragnt murmured softly from its corner. Not threatening. Just present.
Alex thought he understood a little better what Duren had described.
It wasn’t the sa. It was different in important ways. But the concept of knowing who you were while sothing external pressed from the inside... that he understood perfectly.
"You need real rest," Kira said suddenly.
"We are resting," said Raven.
"You’re sitting. It’s not the sa." Kira looked at them one by one. "I an real rest. Days. Not hours."
"The team has a lot pending," said Alex.
"The team has a Fragnt vessel at 82% corruption, a core with an unusable left arm and fractured ribs."
Her gaze shifted to Emily this ti.
"A healer who used magic from a critical state this morning."
Emily lowered her head.
Raven was the next to be nad.
"A blood practitioner who has been functioning on little sleep and adrenaline for two days."
Kira was completely direct.
"Those aren’t pending tasks. Those are conditions that will worsen if not addressed."
No one responded because no one had an argunt.
"There’s a place," Kira continued. "In the mountains. It was your original destination before Matthias complicated everything, wasn’t it?"
"The Crystal Mountains?" said Emily.
"That’s where the Ishi Hot Springs are."
"Only the na. I’ve never actually been, but soone ntioned it to when I returned to Khar’Seth."
Kira continued. "They’re half a day from here, north of the Crystal Mountains. Natural hot springs with properties that..."
She chose her words.
"They aren’t exactly magic. They’re older than the magic we know. The spirit that guards them has been there longer than any record tells."
"What kind of properties?" asked Raven.
"Purifying. For corrupted energy, for magic forced beyond its limits, for damage that normal healing doesn’t reach." Kira paused. Then looked directly at Alex. "For certain dark energy problems that don’t heal on their own with ti."
Alex held that gaze.
The Fragnt didn’t murmur. It just waited.
"How many days?" Alex asked.
"As many as needed." Kira stood up from the steps. "Ishi isn’t in a hurry. It’s been there for centuries. A few more days don’t change anything for it."
Raven looked at Alex. Alex looked at Grim.
"Go," Grim said simply. "Left arm needs more than ti."
First ti he admitted it out loud.
Alex stood up.
"We leave tomorrow. If we have to go before transportation arrives there, we’ll go," he said.
Kira nodded.
Behind them, in the central plaza, the dry fountain waited for the water that would eventually return.
So things took longer than others.
But they ca back.
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