The caravan moved steadily over rough roads, every bump a minor irritation easily ignored beneath the heavy folds of his cloak. He kept his head down and his face in shadow, letting the rhythmic creak of the wheels and the murmur of travelers surround him like their own cloak.

  He never spoke unless spoken to, never asked questions, and rarely responded to anyone. Just another faceless passenger on a long journey to the capital.

  He hailed from Eldros, though no one on this caravan knew it. His mission was simple to observe. Watch the old tower in Vaelthorn. The one no one had entered in two centuries. It was dead stone, they said. Dormant. Forgotten. But Eldros didn’t forget. Eldros waited. And sometimes, Eldros sent eyes to places where the world had stopped looking.

  He hadn't been told why the tower needed to be monitored. That was beyond his role. Only that if it flickered, glowed, hummed, breathed, or did anything other than crumble, he was to report immediately. The crystal hidden in the leather pouch near his ribs would send the signal back home. No voice. No visuals. Just a pulse.

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  Across from him, a young woman dozed with a child resting on her shoulder. Next to her sat a young man, lean, quiet, yet alert. He held a red-haired woman in his arms, her head nestled against his shoulder, her hair falling like a veil across his chest. Something about him tugged at the cloaked man’s instincts. Not his build. Not his face. It was the way he stayed still, like someone listening for danger only he could hear. The kind of stillness that didn’t belong to an ordinary traveler.

  The cloaked man cast a subtle identification spell. Nothing. No class, no echo, not even resistance. Just absence. He blinked once. The spell hadn’t failed; it had returned null.

  Very few things yielded nothing.

  Earlier, at a roadside stop near a grain outpost, he had overheard rumors and idle chatter exchanged between guards and drivers. Something about a fight. Two men were beaten in seconds by someone who moved in ways no one could explain. “No blade, no fire, no chant,” one driver had said, “just brought hurt down on them with his hands.” The watcher had asked quietly, but no one had seen it firsthand. All hearsay. Still, now, staring at the young man across from him, quiet, still, unreadable, he began to wonder if rumor and reality had shared a wagon all along.

  He slowly leaned back, the bench creaking beneath him, and looked out through the canvas slit. A High Scryer could see through the veil, but not him. Still, he would remember the young man’s face.