Chapter 3 — New Names, First Direction

The square wasn’t grand—more a knot where streets tied themselves together around a worn stone fountain. Water slid from a cracked spout in a slow, steady braid, the kind of sound that vanishes if you don’t listen for it. Sunlight lay in warm patches on the cobbles; shadows of pennants shivered across them whenever the wind changed its mind.

Rei stopped at the edge and let the shape of the place settle around him.

Timber fronts leaned companionably, whitewash flaking under the weight of years. Shop windows were small, leaded with uneven panes that turned the world into soft mosaics. A brazier hissed somewhere nearby—meat fat snapping in the heat—and a baker’s door was propped open with a flour-sack, letting the smells of yeast and scorched crust drift out. A smith was at work down a side street: each hammer blow walked through the stones and up through Rei’s boots. Horses clopped. Someone laughed; someone swore; a bell counted the hour without any hurry.

He flexed his fingers inside black gauntlets. The plates moved too easily, anticipation sliding along the hinge before his will reached it. The weight of the armor sat wrong in small ways—lighter at the shoulders, a different pull across the hips—so every step felt like a habit he hadn’t learned yet. When he cleared his throat, the sound caught low, then ran forward against the faceplate and came back to him changed.

The armor drew eyes. Its dark metal wasn’t the dull work-iron he saw on guards nor the shining parade-plate of folk with money. It held a muted sheen, as if it remembered the forge. Angles met in clean planes that caught light like facets of stone. The visor was the thing people stared at longest: a long, split ridge from crown to chin, with narrow sight slits that suggested eyes without offering any. From some angles it looked like a raptor’s beak; from others, a judge’s mask. Either way, it asked for distance.

Rei cupped his hands near the mouth of the visor and called, “Makoto? Tatsu? Maki? Kengo—are you here?”

Heads turned. A child with a sweet-sticky chin pointed. Two watchmen near the fountain glanced at one another, then let their hands slide a quiet inch closer to their spears.

“Rei?” The voice came from a lane where the sunlight gave up. A broad figure stepped out—armor strapped tight, bandaged hands, eyes searching fast. Relief loosened Makoto’s shoulders when he saw the helmet, the sword hilt, the stance. “You’re—good. You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Rei answered. The word sounded different, carried forward by steel.

Bootsteps, light and even, crossed the square. Tatsu came at a measured pace, staff balanced in his palm as if it weighed nothing at all. His new ears—longer, finer—twitched once when the bell chimed. He took in the square the way a man reads an unfamiliar rulebook: slowly enough to be certain, quickly enough to live.

“It’s real,” he said, not quite to them and not quite to himself. “The air… the drift… everything.”

“Don’t run off without me,” called a third voice, too loud for the distance. Maki shouldered past a delivery boy and arrived with cloak flared, shield edge bright, sword knocking his thigh with each confident step. He grinned instinctively, then pressed his lips flat when the watchmen’s attention snagged on them as a group.

A fourth figure didn’t arrive so much as appear where eyes weren’t looking. Kengo leaned against the stone curb of the fountain, like a cat that had found the last warm place. His gaze made a slow circle: guards, alleys, rooftops, reflections in glass. Satisfied, he let his stance soften a fraction.

“All present,” he said.

For a breath they stood, letting the quiet truth of it catch up: the attic’s dust; the weight of old paper in their hands; the bright, wrong light that had filled the room; the moment the floor had fallen sideways; the taste of cold iron in the air—and then this square, this water, these watchmen who were trying not to stare.

Makoto spoke first, because silence let the world tell too many stories. “So we’re actually…”

“Here,” Tatsu finished, then frowned toward a doorway where little charms of braided straw hung. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

Rei flexed his fingers. The gauntlets murmured, metal answering metal. “We shouldn’t stand in a knot,” he said softly. “We’re drawing attention.”

He didn’t have to explain. It lay over them like a cloak: the sideways looks, the way conversations dimmed as they passed, names whispered after them. Not only because they were strangers, but because they were strangers with the wrong sounds in their mouths—Makoto, Tatsu—syllables that struck the ear of this place at odd angles.

“Don’t use our real names,” Rei said. He kept his voice low, and the faceplate turned the sound into something flatter, calmer than he felt. “Not out loud. The names from the sheets. If we’re going to blend at all, those will sit right in the air here. Ours won’t.”

Makoto nodded first, jaw setting. “Rhydor,” he said. The name settled in the space like a weight in the right drawer.

Tatsu rolled his staff slightly in his fingers, as if timing a thought. “Vaelith.” The word draped itself over the new lines of his face and belonged.

Maki tipped his chin, aiming his answer at the guards without looking at them. “Zerath,” he declared, and a pleased breath escaped him despite himself when it felt like a good fit.

Kengo’s mouth skewed wry, but he didn’t make a joke of it. “Nerith.”

Four gazes met the visor slit. Rei could feel the attention through the steel. He flexed his fingers again before he realized he was doing it. Once. Twice.

“Ciel,” he said.

The square adjusted around the sound. The watchmen let their knuckles lose a little color on their spear shafts. A woman tugged her child away without hurry. The name sat in Rei’s mouth cool and certain, not his and his all at once.

They breathed easier. Only a little.

Rhydor folded his arms across his chest and looked down the nearest street, past the stand where a man shaved curls of cheese from a wheel and onto a board etched with prices. The numbers were strange, but understandable—marks and bars that meant copper and silver without needing translation. “We need to figure out how to get home,” he said. No bravado in it; just the tired truth.

“Agreed,” Nerith said. His eyes tracked the rhythm of the watch patrol as if counting the beat of a song. “And we do that by asking questions somewhere people aren’t suspicious of questions.”

Vaelith nudged his staff toward a noticeboard nailed to a post—parchments layered three deep, some new, some gone to curls. A sketch of a boar with too many tusks. A warning about a toll rising on the south road. A small, careful hand advertising “Storm-blessing at dusk—bring clean cloth.” He squinted, then relaxed when the characters on the page resolved into readable sense. “We can read,” he murmured, almost pleased. “Good. That could’ve been… awkward.”

Zerath ran a hand over the ridge of his shield, eyes snagging on the little daily rituals of the place: the way someone pressed two fingers to a breastbone when passing the fountain; a baker trading coin for a plait of straw to leave in a niche set into the wall. “We’re guests,” he said, and for once his voice had none of its swagger. “Let’s try not to act like we own the street.”

Rei flexed his fingers. The habit had become a tick; the tick had become a way to check that the hand inside the glove was still his. He found, with a small, unwelcome start, that he was measuring his gait to keep it even. The armor wanted to move differently. He made it obey.

“First step,” Nerith said, and the words landed louder because they were simple. “Find a way back.”

They all nodded. Agreement didn’t feel heroic; it felt like checking the windows before you slept.

Rhydor rubbed the back of his neck, then let his hand fall with a small, embarrassed huff. “This is going to sound stupid,” he said, “but I’ve seen this in an anime once.” He glanced up as if prepared to be teased and found only attention. “If you need information in a place like this… you go to an adventurers’ guild. Jobs. Rumors. A desk where the clerk hears everything twice.”

Vaelith’s mouth twitched. “Fiction or not, that’s a reasonable model.”

“Also,” Zerath added, angling his chin toward a busier run of street, “if there’s anywhere people won’t blink at five armed strangers holding a meeting, it’s a doorway built for armed strangers.”

Rei—Ciel—let his palm rest on the sword’s pommel. The touch steadied him more than the weight of the armor did. “Then we start there,” he said.

They didn’t rush. They let the town teach them how to move through it: eyes forward, pace purposeful, no gawking. They passed a stall where green pears still wore leaves; a cobbler’s bench with awls like a bristling hedgehog; a shrine set into a wall, a thumb-smoothed stone figure behind glass, a ring of straw and a single copper left with care on the ledge. Past a woman in a buff coat carrying a bundle of javelins on one shoulder. Past two men in leather arguing cheerfully about the distance to a place Rei had never heard of. The air changed as they went—closer, louder, flavored with the tangle of sweat and oil and old wood.

“You notice that?” Vaelith murmured without looking, the staff’s ferrule ticking softly against stone. “There’s a… current. Not wind. Underneath.”

“Magic?” Zerath asked, half skeptical, half hungry.

“Maybe,” Vaelith said, eyes flicking to a rivulet of blue chalk that someone had sketched across a threshold. “Or habit.”

Nerith gestured with his eyes toward a row of signs: a painted anvil; a boar’s head; three interlocked rings; a green shield. “Businesses mark with pictures, not just words. Good if we need directions from children or drunks.”

Rhydor stopped himself from testing his new strength on the nearest stacked barrel and settled for tapping his wrapped knuckles against it. “Solid,” he said, and grinned despite the situation when the thud came back satisfying.

They found the guild because the town made it easy to find. A broad facade of oak and beam pushed proud into the street; a sign swung on iron scrollwork, painted hunter-green and bearing a crest: a gauntlet clutching a sheaf of scrolls. Little plaques hung under it on hooks, chalked and re-chalked through the day: Parties Register Within, Job Rates Standardized, No Weapons Drawn Past the Line. A long bench sat by the door, worn shiny along the edge where a thousand nervous hands had gripped it while waiting.

Sound pressed from the seams: layered voices, a chair scraping, the clink and soft apologetic thud of coin on wood. Someone laughed—the round, relief sort of laugh that follows the words it’s only a slime this time. The door wore the polish of a thousand sleeves, a smear of old varnish along the grain where shoulders had leaned.

Zerath’s breath left him in what might have been a laugh. “That’s it.”

“Feels right,” Rhydor agreed.

Nerith scanned the eaves, the windows, the gutter angles, and the pattern of faces without seeming to do any of it. “And busy enough,” he said, which sounded like a compliment from him.

Rei flexed his fingers one more time. The plates whispered. The habit steadied him. He set his palm to the door—not yet pushing, just feeling the warmth of sun-soaked wood and the pulse of a place where stories started because they had nowhere else to go.

He looked at the others. No speeches. No vows. Five shadows shaped to one threshold.

“Then we should start there,” he said.

They stood a heartbeat longer in the sound and smell of a town that had not asked for them and would measure them anyway. Then, together, they reached for the handle.