By the time the Anchorage’s artificial lighting cycled toward its evening dimming, Rohan had learned exactly one useful thing: legitimate work on a station this size required documentation he had no legal way of obtaining, which meant his only realistic path forward ran through exactly the kind of informal economy Odris had warned him about, or through finding something — anything — of tangible value he could convert directly into the kind of resources that didn’t ask questions about who he was or where he’d come from.
’Which brings me back to Bryan’s packet. It might be the only real currency I actually have.’
He found the alcove behind the shuttered market stall shortly after, exhausted, hungry, and no closer to a plan than he’d been that morning, and folded himself into it the way he’d once folded himself into the gap beside the Gilded Heron’s coolant housing, spear across his knees, trying not to let the scale of everything he didn’t know about this universe crush the fragile hope he’d carried off Cael Athis.
It was there, hours later, exhaustion finally pulling at him, that he felt it.
A faint, familiar pressure, low and constant, settled somewhere behind his sternum — the same quiet, directionless ache he’d carried with him every single day since waking in Hestia’s temple, so persistent and so unremarkable that he’d long ago stopped consciously registering it at all. He’d assumed, in the rare moments he’d bothered to examine it, that it was simply homesickness given physical shape — the low hum of grief for a world he might never see again, dulled by necessity into background noise.
Tonight, for the first time in seven months, it felt different.
Not stronger, exactly. Not painful. Just — closer. The way a sound heard through a wall changes when a door opens somewhere down the corridor, still muffled, still indistinct, but undeniably nearer than it had been a moment before.
Rohan’s eyes snapped open.
That’s new. That is definitely new.
He sat perfectly still, spear forgotten across his knees, and turned his attention inward with the same careful focus he used when reaching for Molten Assimilation — not manipulating anything this time, simply listening, trying to isolate the sensation from the noise of exhaustion and hunger and the general ambient hum of a station full of ten thousand strangers.
There. Fainter than a heartbeat, but present. A pull, low in his chest, oriented toward something he couldn’t consciously name a direction for, but which nonetheless felt — for lack of any better word his mind could produce — aimed.
[Great System Note: Anomalous resonance detected.]
[Analysis: Signature consistent with residual Origin Realm connection.]
[Note: Signal intensity has increased relative to previous baseline reading (Cael Athis system).]
Rohan stared at the notification until the words blurred slightly from how hard he was trying to make sure he wasn’t imagining them.
Increased. Relative to Cael Athis. That means —
He sat up straighter, ignoring the ache in his cramped legs, ignoring the distant clatter of the market stalls beginning their nightly shutdown routine somewhere beyond his hiding place, and forced himself to think through the implication with the same careful, methodical patience Bryan had once drilled into him during their long hours preparing petitions and negotiations.
Hestia told me the anchor point would be somewhere in this universe, attached to something meaningful, the way the dungeon’s entrance had been attached to the ruined town back home. She said I was probably the closest thing to a living map they had — traces of both systems tangled up inside me. What if that tangle isn’t just a curse? What if it’s also, in some small way, a compass?
He’d never tested the theory, because he’d never had a second data point to test it against. On Cael Athis, the pull — if that was even the right word for it — had simply existed, constant and unchanging, a single reading with nothing to compare it to. A compass needle held perfectly still gives you nothing but the fact that it exists.
But a compass needle that moves when you change position — that told you something. That told you a great deal, if you were patient enough and clever enough to read it properly.
’I’ve changed position. I’ve crossed an entire star system’s width of space, minimum, just getting from Cael Athis to here. And the pull got stronger.’
Rohan felt something rise in his chest that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in longer than he could remember — not the grim, gritted determination that had carried him through the Ashen Marches, not the desperate calculation that had gotten him aboard the Gilded Heron, but something closer to genuine, unguarded hope.
The anchor point is closer than I thought. Closer than Hestia ever suggested it might be. I moved toward it without even trying, just by getting off that ash-choked rock and coming here.
He laughed, once, quietly, into the dark of his hiding place — a short, disbelieving sound that startled even himself.
Okay. Okay. Don’t get ahead of yourself. One stronger reading doesn’t tell you a direction. It just tells you that whatever direction you happened to travel in wasn’t entirely wrong. You need more than that. You need a real comparison — a proper before and after, mapped against something solid.
He thought of the star chart Odris had projected above his data slate during their final conversation aboard the Gilded Heron — Cael Athis marked as an isolated glyph at one edge of the field, the Halcyon Span some distance away, connected by a single curving transit line. A crude, incomplete picture, shown to him for exactly as long as it took to make a point and no longer.
’If I had a proper map — a real one, showing the actual positions of both systems relative to each other and to the wider spread of human territory in this universe — and if I compared how the pull felt at each location, I might actually be able to work out a direction.’ Not the exact spot. But a direction. A place to start looking instead of just waiting around and hoping.
For the first time since arriving in this universe, Rohan Roy had something more valuable than survival to chase.
He had a plan.