Two days after the delivery, I was still turning it over in my head when they took me.
I'd been keeping to the edges of Southshore, sleeping rough, trying to stay out of sight. But I let my guard down for one evening. I stepped into a smaller inn on the outskirts, thinking I'd be left alone.
I never even saw them coming.
One moment I was lifting a mug of ale. The next, a bag was over my head and strong hands were dragging me out the back door. I struggled, got an elbow loose, caught someone in the ribs, but there were at least two of them, and they knew what they were doing.
A sharp pinch in my neck. Then darkness.
I woke up in a cellar.
Stone walls. A single lantern. A wooden chair beneath me, my wrists bound behind my back. The air smelled of earth and old hay. An abandoned farmhouse, maybe. Somewhere far enough from town that nobody would hear.
Two figures stood in the shadows. I couldn't see their faces clearly, but I could feel their attention on me like a weight.
One of them spoke. A woman's voice, calm and unhurried.
"The emblem. Where did you get it?"
My mind raced. Deny it? Pretend I didn't know what she was talking about? It would've been pointless. They'd already found me, already searched my things.
"A burned house in Elwynn Forest," I said. "Hollowed out. Looked abandoned for years. Found it at the bottom of a chest."
"And you've been carrying it ever since?"
"Didn't know what else to do with it."
A pause. Footsteps. She circled the chair slowly.
"Do you know what it is?"
"No."
"Do you know who it belongs to?"
"No."
She stopped in front of me. I still couldn't see her face properly, but I could feel her studying me.
"You expect me to believe you found it by accident, kept it for months, and never once tried to learn what it was?"
"I tried asking," I said. "The one person who might have known disappeared before I could get an answer."
A long silence.
Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Someone new entering the cellar. The woman stepped aside, and a figure moved into the lantern light.
I recognized him immediately.
No mask. No shadows. Just a man in his late twenties with dark hair, sharp features, and the same quiet intensity I'd felt in Klaven's Tower. He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded once at the woman.
"He's telling the truth."
She didn't argue.
He turned to me. There was no hostility in his eyes, just a kind of tired recognition.
"We need to talk. But not here."
He pulled a knife from his belt. For a split second I tensed, but he just cut the ropes around my wrists.
"You're coming with us. Someone wants to meet you."
