“Who’s she?” I asked Oplar as I put my bag down next to the small table. The room was small, but large for an inn in this region. Oplar having paid for an inn was surprising enough; she typically slept on the road in the wilderness when she needed to, but finding a young girl in it that I didn’t recognize was even more alarming.

She was sleeping in the bed, and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to wake even as Oplar shut the door, a tad loudly, then went to grab something out of a large bag resting in the corner.

“I found her for sale down south. The craziest part is not only had the one’s selling her not known what she was, she didn’t either,” Oplar said as she handed me the letters she procured from the bag as she went to sit down at the table.

Didn’t know either…? I slowly made sense of Oplar’s meaning as I studied the sleeping girl. She was dead asleep, even as Oplar and I spoke a few feet from her. The room had only one bed, which told me Oplar had likely gotten the room for her. She looked relatively healthy and fine, though I could only see the upper half of her head and face. She didn’t have any obvious trait, but she did have…

Was she a salt-water creature…? She smelled like the sea. Too deeply to just have been from the sea, as in born upon it and having grown and lived upon it. This smell was of a creature from the sea, not one who subsided on it. It was just a tad too strong.

She was some kind of deep-water fish. Maybe even… a shark? I’d need to see her teeth to be sure, but it seemed so.

“She didn’t know she was one of us,” I said as I understood. If she didn’t have any very obvious traits, nothing too visible, then it made sense. She’d just look like any girl anywhere.

“Weird huh? But if you don’t know your parents, and no one notices or tells you, and you don’t ever see yourself in a mirror or anything… it can happen, I guess,” Oplar said.

Mirror, huh? Must mean she did have a trait or two. Likely her teeth, then. Maybe. I slowly sat down in the chair across from Oplar, and was a little sad that Renn wasn’t here. She’d have been perfect to entrust this girl to. “What’s her name?” I asked as I glanced at the letters Oplar had just handed to me. There were four.

“You won’t believe it.”

Looking up from the letters, I frowned at the bear who had a huge grin on her face. “Renn?” I asked.

Oplar blinked and her smile disappeared. “Darn. That’d have been funnier, huh? No. It’s Celine.”

Oh. “She’s not a saint,” I said as I glanced at the girl. I didn’t need to actually look at her to confirm it, but I did just in case I had somehow missed it.

“Nope, just a full-blooded predator. Something so rare the whole of the Society became gossip ridden for over a year thanks to Renn. Though maybe it won’t be as neat anymore, what with those idiots coming back finally? I’ve heard there’s a few amongst them like Renn and this shark.”

Shark. So I’d been right.

I nodded as I went to open one of the letters. I chose Landi’s first, since it was the thinnest. “There are. A wolf, for one, is now in Lumen. She’s going to be a problem, but likely for my wife more than anyone else,” I said.

Oplar groaned. “I’ve been missing out on so much…!”

She had been, but that was her job. Or rather, this was her job.

I’d lucked into her as I finished up Martin’s request. Oplar was finishing her route, and then was going to head back north to Telmik, and we had just so happened to bump into one another. It’s been many years since this had happened, but it was not so rare that I found it odd anymore. After all we both basically traversed the same routes, half the time going opposite directions as we did. Running into each other like this was more of an inevitability than not.

“Odds are by the time you get back to Telmik, Renn will already be on the road again,” I said. If not I’d have given her a letter for Renn, but I highly doubted it’d happen. Renn might even already be on the road north as we spoke.

“Then I’ll just need to head that way after. I’ve been wondering though, with so many people showing up… I might need to employ some more help, won’t I? Over five hundred came back with Light and now another six? I’m not sure if I should weep in joy or stress over the new workload,” she said with a chuckle.

“I’m doing both myself,” I said as I unfurled Landi’s letter. It was written in the language of the south, so it took me half a second to remember what the first few words meant and…

My eye twitched as I realized this letter had been for Renn, not me.

Had Oplar done this on purpose? Probably not. Landi might have just said my name when handing it to Oplar, thinking Renn would open it for me since we were usually together. Still I read it in full, just in case, and almost regretted doing so.

“Landi’s leaving the south,” I said as I folded up her letter. I’d keep it and deliver it to Renn.

“She’d said she plans to, next year, yes. I uh… asked about what she plans to do with the kingdom and all, she didn’t really seem to care to answer.”

“Because she doesn’t care. The kingdom only existed for one purpose and that purpose was fulfilled,” I said. Or well, partly. She wasn’t pregnant yet, made obvious by her intentions to join us all up north as to manhunt the new men that were now available. The ones who had returned from beyond the sea.

I’ll need to put Renn in charge of that. Not only did I not want to get involved at all, I didn’t want to deal with the aftermath either. And I’d inadvertently have to with Renn dealing with it all… But other than Renn I had no one else to ask for help concerning such a thing. Landi was banished from more places than Lilly was for crying out loud.

So… Before next summer. I had half a year basically before Landi showed up to cause chaos. Could I secure Renn and her new home by then…? Probably.

“That’ll send the south into chaos, Vim,” Oplar said.

“Yes, but it is her choice. Her kingdom. Unless someone wants to take it over,” I said. The matters of the nation had nothing to do with the Society. Nothing beyond the typical concerning Landi, at least. Though I did hope she was going to at least attempt to leave it in proper hands, amongst other things.

“You’re so callous sometimes,” Oplar said lightly as she went to pour herself a drink.

“I have to be,” I said simply as I went to open the next letter.

Oplar hummed at me as she took a deep drink and I read a letter from Mordo the head of the camel family. It too was a shorter letter, just expressing his and his family’s support for my cause concerning the vote, but there was another couple pages. Another letter from his granddaughter, addressed to me and Renn. She was asking for permission to travel with us next time we came by, as to find a mate.

Renn would like that.

“Speaking of heading north… can I ask a favor, Vim?” Oplar then asked.

I lowered the letters from the camels and nodded with a frown. Why was she asking like that? She sounded almost hesitant.

Oplar gestured to the sleeping girl with a shrug. “She’s not going to be accepted in Telmik. She’s a pagan,” she said.

“Most are. She’s young enough they’ll convert her,” I said.

“Again, you’re being callous. Renn’s going to make that orphanage with the rest of them, right? Can I send her up there? I need to head north once I’m back anyway; I can drop her off on the way.”

Oh. Right. I nodded slowly. “My first instinct is to say yes, of course… but remember, although Renn is going to be involved it is not permanent. She’ll likely be there for a few years, but odds are it won’t be much longer than that. So she’ll have to be under Randle’s purview and the rest,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to go into much more detail on who was going to show up there or not, since I really didn’t know yet. People might be thinking of moving north, but that didn’t mean they were actually going to.

“Randle at least won’t ostracize her just for her faith. So that’s fine. I just don’t know where else to take her,” Oplar said.

I was about to ask why she’d not considered Lumen, but realized it was likely because of Light and her people. Oplar was probably now, in a way justifiably, seeing Lumen just as she did Telmik. She wasn’t wrong to think so, honestly. Even if it’d take years, maybe even decades, for it to get that bad… it was an inevitability. Such a thing was part of the reason Merit had left.

Sighing softly I nodded. “Depending on what I’ve left to do, you may or may not beat me there. I’d offer to take her myself, but I have a stop that won’t allow it,” I said as I folded the camel’s letters up and went to open the third.

“Right. It’s fine; she’s actually a quiet girl. Not an issue at all… So… Vim.”

“Hm?” I slowly opened the letter from Corvo, who I’d not seen in a few years. My last few trips south had not led me through his route.

“Any gossip, Vim? You have no idea how terribly distraught I’ve been to hear only faint rumors so far. How’d it go with Light? Who came back? Who’s Renn traveling with? Is she pregnant yet? What about…”

I smiled gently at the bear and shook my head at her, interrupting her torrent of questions. “Most of those I’ve met are new faces. People I’ve not met before, like Martin’s son. But there are a few familiar people, such as Less, Jennifer, Kapni and Tressi…” I then nodded. “And concerning Light, for now we’re… copacetic I suppose. A little too much, if I’m being honest. She and Renn became fast friends,” I said.

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Oplar giggled at that. “I figured that’d happen!”

“Renn’s heading up north to help Randle and Angie, as you just mentioned… I dealt with a prophecy, Light’s, and plan to head back north once I handle one more thing down here. Light and all her people are busy building their new cathedral in Lumen, so although are being annoying aren’t really causing any issues just yet,” I said as I tried to give her a summarized version of recent events.

“Gah, you’re omitting all the stuff I want to hear…! What about this wolf you spoke of? Have you and Renn done it yet? What about the baby she’s supposed to be having? What’s Brandy think of Light taking over? And…”

I shook my head and sighed at her. “One thing at a time, Oplar,” I said as I went to read Corvo’s letter.

It too was a short one, but it was asking me to visit him. He had a request, though he didn’t say what it was.

Should I just deal with this now then? I wasn’t too far from him. But he did say in the letter it wasn’t pressing… which meant it was something that could go years without being addressed, since such letters sometimes took that long to reach me.

“Fine, first the wolf. What’s she like?”

“Tundra is a young girl, like that one,” I started with gesturing at the shark with the letter. “She reminds me of Lilly’s youth… or well… actually she’s a bit better. She has that predator personality, but Light has instilled in her the idea of penance. Whenever she does something wrong, and people point it out, she panics and weeps and runs off to earn forgiveness. She starves herself and stuff to apologize. Rash and extreme, but it seems to be working. She tried to move into the Animalia Guild but they voted not to allow her, she had scared some of them somehow. So now she wants to live with Renn, but Light won’t let her leave until a prophecy concerning her is fulfilled,” I gave her all I knew as I folded Corvo’s letter, then went to open the last one. This one was likely the most important, it came from the Crypt.

Abel’s letter felt a tad too thick to be normal. It worried me as I opened it.

“Hm… It’s been a long time since we’ve had someone like that. Is she cute at least?”

“Renn thinks she is.”

Oplar chuckled at that. “Renn thinks everyone is.”

“And no, Renn’s not pregnant yet. But we’re pretending she is, to avoid drama. Light and the rest of her ilk believe she is, and I’ve enabled that misconception for now,” I said.

Oplar was quiet a moment as I unfolded the many-page letter from Abel, and realized the reason it was thicker was because it wasn’t just his letter but multiple letters from others as well. A quick glance showed one from Sharp, then one from Frett.

“You trust me enough to know that, Vim…?” Oplar then asked.

I glanced away from the letters and frowned at the bear. She was sitting up in her seat, and looked… a little odd. As if I’d just said something that had shaken her to her core.

“Why not? You’re Renn’s friend.” Merit and Lilly had known too, told by Renn herself. I saw no reason to think Renn would not trust Oplar the same way. Oplar was one to gossip, but she was not one to share secrets. She’d die before she did. That was her ethos, as much as free-will was mine.

Oplar held my gaze for a moment, and then she slowly nodded at me. I tried not to notice the way her eyes glistened a little and went back to focus on my letters. Before I did though I made sure the shark was still asleep.

She was.

As I read Abel’s letter first, I ignored Oplar as she masked a sniff with deep drink.

Abel informed me the Crypt was doing fine. As was the human, Elisabell, who we’d left there. For most the letter I assumed it was just a typical update, but near the end he got to the point.

“A ghost…?” I whispered as I read the last bit of his letter again.

“Hm? Ah. Yes. At the crypt. They all seem very serious about it being real. They say they see it out of the corner of their eyes at night, wandering the halls,” Oplar said, sounding excited to talk about it.

To her it was likely an interesting form of gossip. But to me…?

Right now the last thing I needed to hear was something like this.

Ghosts did not exist. Not in this world. But there were things that could be made to look like them. Or rather, there were things that could be mistaken as one to unknowing eyes.

Monarchs. Gods. Their creations. And with the recent events…

I sighed as I put Abel’s letter aside. It seemed, whether I liked it or not, I’d be going there soon. Hopefully it was a wasted trip and they were all just hyping up something someone had seen while half asleep or something.

“Didn’t see it myself, which is too bad. I stayed there a couple extra nights on purpose to do so,” Oplar said with a sigh.

Hopefully that was a hint that they weren’t actually being haunted. But…

“Anything else odd happening? Anywhere else?” I asked as I went to read Frett’s letter next.

“Other than typical stuff? Like me finding Celine, or Landi’s plan to leave her kingdom? Not really.”

That was something at least.

Frett’s letter also included the ghost, or spirit as she called it. She too was requesting my presence to deal with it, claiming it was giving people nightmares. The rest of her letter was just asking of Renn, and wishing us well.

I went into Sharp’s letter hoping for a grounded semblance of surety, and instead found something worse.

“The ghost is real,” I whispered as I read Sharp’s letter.

“Is it…? How do you know?” Oplar asked.

“Sharp says so, I was just reading her words,” I said as I finished reading her short letter.

A ghost that gave nightmares, could be seen in the corner of the eye at night, and made metal cold…? Sharp’s comment on it making handles to doors and such cold at night was odd.

If it was a monarch, or a god’s creation, what was it doing…? What purpose did it have? If it was a monarch it’d have hurt someone by now. Unless it had other orders…

What if this was their attempt to distract me? To get me to keep a distance from Renn, and to head there post-haste? But these letters were dated before I’d even killed Stance…

“I had just been near there. I should have went,” I said with a sigh as I put Sharp’s letter aside with the rest. She only had a few words for Renn, which I’d deliver later.

What a pain.

The world really was getting noisy again. And now each and every little thing was going to make me worry and panic, wasn’t it? Every oddity will be one I need to now be on guard of, in case they’re sourced from my enemies.

Nothing will be simple again.

I was now at war again, wasn’t I?

And…

Before I could finish my thought, the chair I was in snapped.

Steadying myself, I stood as the chair broke beneath me. It did so rather loudly and as such it was not a surprise that the girl who had been sound asleep shot upward in shock over it. She even let loose a weird sounding yelp as she did. One that made me flinch where the breaking of my chair hadn’t.

“Ah, Vim, gosh…!” Oplar groaned at me as she gestured out to the girl who was now sitting up on the bed, clasping the pillow and blanket she’d been using as if for dear life as she gaped at me. “It’s okay, Celine. This is Vim, the protector. I told you about him, remember?” Oplar said quickly.

The girl, if she even heard Oplar, didn’t do a thing. She simply stayed seated on the bed, staring at me with wide eyes.

“Sorry…” I apologized as I turned around to pick up some of the broken pieces of wood. I had no plans to fix it, but didn’t want to leave the sharp fractures all over the floor. The girl was barefoot, and even if a full-blooded shark that didn’t mean she couldn’t get hurt if she stepped upon them.

Plus my cleaning up eased the tension. I knew this from experience. Sometimes the best cure to a panicked heart was the absurdity of someone just… doing something so silly as typical housework.

“He’s a klutz, as you can see. Always breaking stuff,” Oplar said with a sigh.

“I’d argue I’m the farthest thing from clumsy, but that’s kind of hard to do when I’m picking up pieces of a chair I was just sitting on like a dork,” I said as I gathered the rest up.

“Protector…”

I nodded as I stood up, slowly and confidently, and went to dump the pile of wood pieces in an empty corner. “So I am. For now, at least,” I said.

Oplar scoffed at me as I dug out a few coins and placed them on the table near her, so she could pay for the damage properly and not soil her name with the innkeepers.

Turning to the shark, I gave her a gentle smile as I stepped forward and extended my hand to her. She sat up a bit straighter on my approach, but she wasn’t clinging to the pillow and blanket anymore.

“My name is Vim. Sorry about waking you, but if it’s any consolation you now get to hear all the stories Oplar has concerning my screw ups as you travel north,” I said.

“I have a bunch!” Oplar happily added.

The girl gave me a weak smile, one that barely showed any teeth… but even with only a few being shown I was able to verify Oplar was right.

Her teeth were sharper than Renn’s.

How had no one noticed…? She must be from a real backwater place.

“Celine…” the girl said as she carefully took my hand. Her hand was rough, as if full of calluses, but I knew better than to think it was form a life of hard labor. Her skin was rough not just on her palms but the back of it too. As we shook hands, I held back a small sigh of pity.

Was her whole body this rough? If so she was going to have trouble. Not only would humans find her odd, so would many of our kind.

Oplar was wrong. She should go to the Crypt. She wasn’t as bad as Sharp was, but was bad enough to be an issue.

“Um…”

I tilted my head at the girl as our hands separated, and she glanced down at them as they did. I noted the way her eyes lingered on my hand.

“I know people with far rougher skin than you, it’s no surprise,” I said simply.

Celine shifted a little… and then gave me a small smile. “Oplar had said the same.”

“Oplar is a gossip but she is not a liar, on any level,” I said as I glanced around. I already knew there wouldn’t be another chair in the room, but I looked again anyway.

“You can sit here, Vim,” Oplar said as she stepped around me. She sat down on the bed, roughly, and went to grab at Celine and pull her close. Oplar, being a thick-blooded bear, wasn’t bothered by the girl’s rough skin at all. “Well? You hungry yet? You’d not believe it, Vim, what with her being what she is, but the bloody girl’s never hungry! She doesn’t eat a thing!”

I frowned at that as I went to sit in the chair she’d abandoned. “I find that hard to believe,” I said. Celine looked troubled over Oplar grabbing her and pulling her close, but at the same time had a small smile hidden beneath the troubled expression. I could tell that she’s already lowered her guard around Oplar, but was still a little wary. Though that might just be because I was here.

Any young girl would be on guard in this region upon waking to find a strange man in their room.

“Aye it’s true! She’s only eaten twice since I’ve freed her from the jaws of slavery, and both times she barely ate a fist-full! Makes me mighty self-conscious you know?” Oplar said, teasing the girl slightly as she gave her a squeeze.

Studying the girl, I took into account her size and frame. She was a tad skinny, but all peoples were down south. She honestly didn’t look malnourished or sickly, let alone like someone who had just been in slavery…

“You might be some kind of planktivore,” I said. She might not be a shark at all, but some kind of whale or even a manta or something.

“I’m a… what?” Celine asked.

“Planktivore. A creature that eats very tiny food and algae found in the deep sea. There’s a certain shark, a whale shark, which is a filter feeder. It can go a very long time without eating under the right conditions… but that’d not really explain your sharp teeth. The bigger sharks can go a long time without feeding too,” I said, and as I explained I thought of Renn. I felt as if I’d just answered one of her questions, not someone else’s.

“Plank-a-what? Did you just insult her!? Just for that you’re paying for a feast tonight!” Oplar said loudly with a point at me.

Of course I was. But it’ll not be food that Oplar will be feasting on, but instead all the gossip I knew.

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