It's only when the heavy tower doors settle behind, a low groan of stone and steel, that Beinsho turns back to her and Ruben, his face grave.

"Fae Urilong and the Smith-caller have not been found yet?" he says, his tone brusque.

"We have not heard from them yet," Allayria answers, the pit in her stomach somehow growing heavier at the reminder. "General Grismen assured us his men would continue to search the area."

"Hans Urilong will not be happy," Beinsho says, the dark line of his mouth tautening as they begin to climb the stairs. "Nor will Hai Sofo."

"Caj is an accomplished survivalist," Ruben interjects softly. "There is still a chance they are alive."

No one answers because it is what everyone hopes, but there are heavy doubts. Allayria remembers the chill of the forest, and what little Tara and Hiran have said of their own ordeal makes her imaginings of Caj and Fae's experience bleak.

There's still hope, she tells herself, even if she doesn't feel any.

They break bread in a narrow mess hall and then others fall away, branching off to their assigned quarters or in search of drink. As the hour climbs toward nightfall it's only Beinsho and Lei who remain, climbing further around her, until they reach the plain, brown door on the topmost level.

Allayria reaches to her breast pocket for the gray book tucked away there, safe. It is the only thing brought back. The only thing they have to account for.

But then she hesitates, pulling along her neck instead, as if she is sore from riding.

"Brezkin?"

His voice echoes across time, mocking and hard, jaded with a lesson hard learned. "If they have guts they'll have strung him up over city hall. But grand men in high towers never let their equals feel the consequences of their actions. It will be a nice clean cut on a nice clean board by a nice clean man in a nice clean courtyard... away from the rabble."

Allayria drops her hand.

Beinsho's gaze flickers to Lei before settling on her.

"The Dynast is in here," he says. "He is expecting you."

He glances back at Lei again, adding: "I think you should go in too, Lieutenant."

Lei's brows twitch, a barely concealed expression of surprise, but he only nods, watching as his commander begins the slow descent.

The rooms of the Dynast of Halften are not a vision of opulence, filled with sprawling silks and shining gold; instead, they are filled with instruments. Thin, delicate things dangle on long tables, the flashing rays of their glass sparkling in the streaming sunlight; long, scrawling rolls of parchment that spread across walls and sit in ledges, covered in vast, detailed diagrams and scurrying writing. A map of the stars stretches wide above the dining table, and some strange machine whirls in the corner, all levers and smoke.

The man himself sits by the window, fiddling with a magnifying glass, and he is as long and lean as the spindly things twirling on the shelves. He is, Allayria would guess, somewhere in his thirties, deathly pale and a sallow-faced, blinking, his expression fixed, slightly scrunched but removed. He's the sort that, while others look to the stars, he goes beyond and wonders at the secrets that sit far out there, in the dark, nebulous void.

He glances up at their approach, his light brown eyes flitting on her and then fastening on Lei before returning to the small item in hand.

"Lei," he greets in a vague, almost surprised tone. "You're late."

"We were delayed, Your Grace."

"Grismen said he was flying you over on that wonderful invention," he muses, tinkering again with the small thing. "Did he do so? Was it magnificent?"

"It was... an experience, Your Grace."

"Tell me: was the flight smooth? We were worried about the quantity of gas needed for altitude changes. I thought perhaps the numbers we settled on were a touch too high..."

"The winds could be challenging, but it was no worse than a ship in rough seas."

The Dynast sets the item down on the ledge and finally turns to them.

"You've always been such a straightforward boy," he says. "It's what's made you such a good technical reporter, but it has, alas, limited your inventive aptitude."

Allayria glances over, wondering slyly how Lei feels about being called a "boy." She stows this away for later.

But Lei only turns, arms folded behind his back, and inclines his head toward Allayria.

"Your Grace," he says, "may I present the Paragon?"

That's when the Dynast looks at her fully, and she takes in the wide, but oddly penetrative stare.

"Your Grace," she murmurs when he says nothing, inclining her head toward him.

"Ruben has said a lot about you," he says slowly. "Not much, but a lot."

He then turns, moving quicker than Allayria had expected as he looks at Lei.

"I disassembled my bell pull a couple hours ago and haven't gotten around to putting it back together," he tells the Nature-caller. "Would you go down and order some tea for us, Lieutenant?"

Lei melts into the dark corridor outside and then they are alone. The Dynast returns to his trinket, bending low to peer into its small machinery, one eye narrowing and the other shutting entirely.

"Would you close the door?" he requests, polite and vague, and she presses the heavy wood grain shut, hearing it click with all the little levers inside. It makes her think of Solveigard City, of jumping down onto Brezkin's balcony under the darkness of the night and trying the door.

He's still playing with the thing when she turns back, his graying brown hair turning the color of straw against the orange hues of the sunset, which paint a warm glow along the hunch of his shoulders.

"Did you like the ride in?" he asks, a strange and curious thing to say, even for such a strange and curious man.

"No."

He glances over at her, his glasses catching a glare in the light, shielding his eyes from her for a moment.

"You can tell a lot about a person from their face, the way their features hang across it, the way it shifts and turns in the light."

He pauses, pressing a knuckle up at the rim, sliding the spectacles up further along the bridge of his nose.

"People are animals," he tells her. "Not just biologically, but spiritually. I'm probably an owl: nocturnal, better in the air than on the ground. You're a fox: you hunt alone in the dusk and dawn. You hate being out in the open."

She leans back on the ledge behind her, letting her legs stretch out before her.

"Foxes eat owls."

He smiles. "Only when they can catch them."

And then he looks away, out through the window to the slow creep of twilight across the cityscape.

"I don't really like people," he says conversationally. "The idea of them. Individuals, yes, but as a whole... we are fickle creatures."

She doesn't know what to say to this, and he seems to know it.

"You must think I am a terrible ruler," he muses, something wry curling along his lips. "I try not to be. I try to give those beneath me the best world I can, though perhaps it is not the one they deserve."

He fiddles with the trinket now, twirling the levers so it trills in his hands.

"You see, we're inherently destructive," he says, his voice quieting even further, a low lull in contrast to the violence of his words. "We destroy to survive. We destroy to thrive. We destroy because we like it."

And then he looks back at her again, but this time there's something keen in his expression, a calculated, methodical gaze quite different from the airy, flighty quips and glimpses from before.

"You're a fox that needs to be a warhound," he says, his voice still low and even, but now with a hint of a knife, a certain knowingness in its tenor. "You're going to have to put all our destructive tendencies to good use now, Paragon, because there are no more holes to hide in, no more shadows to slink inside. Death did not let you go for nothing."

And she watches his face, this man made out of the ghost of words and ideas, a translucent phantom of thought, slowly fading into the purple twilight, and she wonders at how his words sound like warning.

"And what about you?" she asks, her voice dipping into a whisper too. "What will you become?"

He blinks, all tawny eyes in the moonlight.

"I'll be your sight," he says simply, and he twists, the trinket breaking apart in his fingers. "I've always done better in the clouds."

A/N: Hi all! Long(ish) time, no write. I hope all my American friends enjoyed the 4th, and all my Canadian friends the 1st. Throw Bastille Day in too and we've got lots of liberation happening in July, apparently. Personal aside/health update: I'm doing a lot better—almost alarmingly better, I'm not sure I quite realized how bad off I really was these past few weeks. Long complicated story much shorter, we figured out what was going on with some handy blood work (ugh). It's nothing awful, I'm taking medication and am symptom-free. I'll see a specialist in a few weeks just to confirm, but I'm hoping it was just kind of a freak thing. As one of my professors helpfully pointed out, getting old is not for the faint of heart.

Some chapter notes this week: Allayria picks up the gray book with the list of names in Partisan's "The Flesh That Shivers." The remembered quote from Ben was first uttered in Paragon's "Believe" chapter, while Allayria breaks into Brezkin's manor in "Into the Darkness."