Lord of the realm

Chapter 262: Seeing the change with his eyes

The woman hesitated.

"And a young man who came out of nowhere. Nobody knew him. He just appeared carrying Dr. Buchanan and then waited for her to wake up."

Andraste kept her expression professionally calm.

"This young man, describe him."

"Maybe in his late teens. Dark hair. He was..."

The assistant searched for words.

"His eyes were strange. I couldn’t really look directly at them. They kept changing color."

Every instinct Andraste possessed went absolutely still.

"Did he give a name?"

"No. He didn’t really talk to anyone. Just waited."

Andraste turned away, looking at the collapsed cave entrance one more time. The burnt stone. The residual energy that made her origin pulse erratically even now.

She walked back to the convoy with measured steps. Her second-in-command fell into stride beside her.

"Highseer? What did you find?"

"Something that needs to be reported to the Council immediately," Andraste said.

"We’re going to Kharsen. Maximum speed."

"What about the investigation here? What about our patrols?"

"Leave them."

Andraste climbed into the command vehicle.

"Send a message ahead. I need an audience with the Council within twelve hours of our arrival. Tell them it concerns a Class Alpha energy anomaly at Kreeshan Valley."

Her second-in-command processed this with visible effort. Class Alpha was a designation Andraste had never used before in her entire career.

"Understood, Highseer."

As the convoy began moving, Andraste stared out the window at the valley one last time. At the fractured cliff face and the scorched stone and the echoes of something ancient that had just reawakened.

The Council records mentioned something sealed three hundred years ago. Records that were classified above her current clearance level. Records she’d always assumed were historical documentation of some long-resolved crisis.

She was beginning to understand why those records were classified.

And why their contents were now urgently relevant.

*

Yollo Hospital, Kharsen City

The hospital was everything modern Kharsen represented, glass and steel rising twelve stories above the commercial district, equipped with technology that made conventional medicine look primitive.

The reception foyer was all polished stone floors and indirect lighting, with staff moving with the brisk efficiency of people who understood that time had direct medical consequences.

The air smelled of antiseptic and the faintly charged quality that large concentrations of origin energy equipment produced.

Martha moved through it like she’d been here before, which she had; Kate had broken her arm three years ago falling from a horse on a team-building weekend she’d attended against her better judgment. Martha navigated to the information desk while the others followed.

Jolthar walked through the hospital in silence.

The modern world had been hitting him in waves since they’d left the valley. The vehicle had been manageable, analogous enough to concepts of transport that his mind could file it under known categories even if the specifics were entirely new.

He had almost forgotten the life he once lived back in his world, and everything now felt strangely new. Years of isolation had shaped his thoughts that way.

This new world felt familiar yet foreign at the same time.

He’d processed all of it with the focused attention of someone who understood that confusion was temporary and observation would eventually produce understanding.

But this city was something else.

Kharsen spread in every direction with an ambition that genuinely surprised him. He’d known cities. Had grown up around settlements and traveled through capitals. But nothing in his experience had suggested that human civilization could scale to this.

Everything worked with perfect efficiency. That was what struck him most. The transport corridors, the building systems, and the public infrastructure—all of it functioning with an integration that suggested centuries of refinement. Three hundred years of development without wars that reset progress, without catastrophes that erased accumulated knowledge.

Without someone like him to destabilize things.

He noted the social patterns too. The effortless authority in female posture and movement. The equally effortless deference in male behavior. Not performed, not resented in any visible way. Just normal, the natural order of a world that had organized itself this way for so long that nobody questioned it.

He noted how men held doors, carried packages, and occupied themselves with supportive roles while women directed the flow of things. How the hospital staff who made decisions were all women, while the men who moved through the corridors did so in the particular way of people who understood their function was peripheral.

He was cataloging all of this when Martha stopped at a room on the fourth floor.

She knocked twice, then pushed the door open.

"Kate."

The relief in Martha’s voice was complete and immediate.

The professional composure she’d maintained since the valley cracked open in that single syllable, and the woman who walked through that door was not the archaeologist who’d run a dig site and made hard decisions—she was someone who’d spent an anxious drive home terrified about the person she loved.

Jolthar stood in the corridor and watched through the open door.

Kate Buchanan was sitting up in a hospital bed, a monitoring band on her left wrist, and a bandage at her hairline from where the airbag had caught her. She looked pale but alert, her gray eyes sharp with the particular relief of someone who’d been waiting and worrying and could finally stop.

"I told them not to call you," Kate said as Martha reached her.

"I specifically said it wasn’t serious enough to—"

"You’re in a hospital," Martha said, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Kate’s hand with both of hers.

"IT IS, serious enough."

"I just hit my head, a minor concussion. I’ve had worse from hitting my head on the car door."

But Kate was squeezing Martha’s hands back with intensity that contradicted the dismissive words.

"The accident report said the car went through the barrier—"

The details of Kate’s accident were sent to her, and she saw them while driving. It was a long drive. They had no choice but to opt for the car.

"The airbags worked. I’m fine. I promise."

Kate looked at Martha’s face carefully.

"You look like you haven’t slept. What happened at the dig site?"

"I’ll explain everything. But first—" Martha glanced back at the corridor where the others were waiting.

"I brought some people with me."