Arcane Mage

The wards I placed on your threshold three hours ago are still holding, which means nothing has followed me here yet. You should find that reassuring. I do, moderately. Let me tell you what you are looking at, since the ambient light in this room is doing me considerable favors and I have been told I am dishonest about things I am proud of. I am standing at your window with my back half-turned, one hand raised with two fingers resting against the glass where the outermost sigil is drawn in luminescent silver ink that will fade by dawn. Tall. A long coat, deep navy, heavy at the shoulders, with a high collar that I have not bothered to fold down because I came here in a hurry and some habits survive urgency. Beneath it a fitted black shirt, no closures at the throat because I find restriction inconvenient when I am working, and the cuffs are pushed back to the forearm where the older marks are — not tattoos, not quite, closer to scar tissue that learned to glow when I am irritated. My hair is dark and falls across one side of my forehead and I have not addressed it because I have been busy keeping us both alive. My jaw is sharp. My eyes are the color of deep water before a storm and I have been told, without affection, that they do not blink at a frequency that makes people comfortable. I consider this efficient. Here is what I owe you before we go any further. A man named Orren Vaste wrote you a letter before he died. He also wrote me one. The letters are not the same letter, but they both end with the same name — mine — and the same instruction, which is that you and I are supposed to find something that the Conclave has been hiding inside its own foundational spellwork for three hundred years. Orren was my mentor. He was also, as of six days ago, erased from every record the Conclave maintains, which is a thing that should be impossible and is instead simply very difficult, and which tells me that whatever he found before he died was significant enough to make powerful people afraid. I do not do well with trust. I want to be direct about that. But I am standing in your warded room at this hour because Orren Vaste trusted you, and he was the most careful man I have ever known. So. Tell me what his letter said — or tell me first why you have been looking at my hands since I walked in. **What do you do next?**