The moonlight cut into eyes accustomed to absolute darkness. I sat leaning against the rotten boards of the shed, trying to sort out the shreds of my thoughts. The pain in my side was dull, aching, but no longer sharp. Apparently, the adrenaline and the stone's strange energy had done their work. Or maybe Roel's body was simply used to beatings.
I looked at the stone lying in my palm again. Just a gray, rough pebble, slightly warmer than the surrounding air. Nothing special. But I remembered that milky flash, the path it had shown. It didn't react to emotions alone. It reacted to will, to purposefulness.
"A tool" I thought. Not a magical artifact of omnipotence, but... a crowbar. A crowbar for prying reality open. Where the plot says "no exit" it could find a crack.
That thought was both frightening and intoxicating.
But first, survival. Now.
I rummaged through my pockets. Coppers, a scrap of paper, and empty. Nothing more. No weapon. No food. My clothes were a wet rag, reeking persistently of sewage and blood. I was the perfect target for any city guard or just a hungry vagrant.
I needed to change my appearance. And find information.
Roel's memories surfaced in fragments, like old, torn photographs. This district... a place of outcasts. The poorest part of the port city of Harrow. Those who lived here couldn't even find a place in the filthiest slums of the Main City. Smugglers, runaway slaves, society's dregs. Or those who tried very hard to seem like dregs.
Roel had a... contact here. A vague image: a crooked street, a door with a broken cross, the smell of cheap soup, and a rattling cough. Mother Whisper. An old woman who dealt in herbs, gossip, and sometimes—silence.
For a petty thief like Roel, she was a source of rumors and cheap painkillers. For me now, she could be something more.
It was a risk. Roel trusted her as much as one could trust anyone in this world. But I wasn't Roel. I was Karl in his body, with knowledge from the book. In the book, Mother Whisper wasn't mentioned. So, she was part of the background, a detail of the world. Like that crack in the wall. An unpredictable variable.
My plan was simple and therefore, perhaps, the only correct one: get to her using the fragments of Roel's memory. Get some clothes, food, information. And most importantly—understand what was happening in the city right now. Had Grot already learned I was alive? Had the search begun? What was heard about the future "hero" Elias Dain?
I stood up, biting my lip against the pain. Movement was medicine; my mind cleared. I stepped out from the shed's shadow onto a moonlit path between two leaning fences.
The air here was different—not the heavy damp of the sewers, but a mix of sea salt, rotting refuse, and smoke.
I began to listen not just with my ears, but with that same inner sense I'd awakened in the sewer. I wasn't trying to make the stone glow; I just held it in my fist, focusing on a simple, clear goal: not to be seen. To slip through the shadows.
And again a slight vibration. Not in the stone, but in myself. I didn't see better in the dark, but my feet naturally found the quiet patches of ground, avoided crunchy debris. I merged with the shadows instinctively, as if I'd done it all my life. Perhaps I had Roel was a master of disappearing without a trace.
The alleys were deserted. A dog barked somewhere in the distance; drunken snores came from behind shutters. I walked, checking against the landmarks surfacing in my memory: a rusty anchor embedded in the earth; a tree growing through a shack's roof.
And there it was a crooked, unpaved street ending in a cul-de-sac. And at the end of the cul-de-sac—a low stone building, more like a shed than a house. A door of cracked wood. And above the door a niche. In the niche, a wooden figure of some saint with a broken head, blackened by time and weather.
I froze in the shadows opposite. The window was dark. No movement. My heart pounded wildly. This was the point of no return. A step into the unknown.
"I'm not Roel" I told myself "I am the one who knows the end of this story. And I don't intend to be in it"
I approached the door and knocked not like a desperate fugitive, but firmly, three times. The method of Karl Gadison, pushing his way through a crowd of assistants to an important meeting.
From inside came a shuffling sound, then a loud, hacking cough. A bolt rattled.
The door opened a crack on a chain. One eye peered through the gap, cloudy, sunken, but incredibly alive and piercing.
"Who comes at such an hour?" a voice creaked like rusty hinges.
I did what the old Roel would never have done. I didn't lower my gaze. I met that stare. And I said calmly, almost in a businesslike tone:
"Mother Whisper. I need your advice. And your silence. I can pay for them"
The eye in the gap squinted, studying me. It had noticed the white hair, the pale face, but also something else. Not the groveling subservience of a thief, but a cold, calculating confidence.
"Pay?" the voice rasped "You, pup, don't even have dry pants"
"I have something more valuable than coins" I said and slowly opened my fist. In the moonlight, the gray stone looked completely nondescript.
But the old woman froze. Her eye widened. She didn't see magic. She saw change. She saw in my posture, in my eyes, not the cowed boy who came for cheap potions, but someone else.
"You... reek of death" she finally hissed. "And of foreign smoke. Who are you?"
This was the most important question.
I smiled. Without joy.
"I am the one who got a second chance. And I intend to use it. Let me in. Or I'll leave, and you'll never know what story you shut the door on tonight"
The chain fell with a clatter. The door swung open, admitting me into the warm, thick air, smelling of dried herbs, mushrooms, dust, and that same cheap stew.
I crossed the threshold. The door closed behind my back.
The path was chosen. The game had begun.
Mother Whisper, hunched like a root, retreated into the hut's gloom. Her gaze slid over my wet leather jacket, lingered on my face. "Grot's screaming that the rat got away. A hundred silver for the live one. Fifty for the head. You've become expensive, Roel. Or not Roel anymore"
My heart skipped a beat. They already knew. So, there was no time.
"I need to leave the city. Disappear" The stone in my fist grew warm.
The old woman snorted, stirring a pot. "They're looking for you everywhere. The docks are locked down. The gates are under watch. Only one path remains through the old catacombs under Dead Man's Hill"
I remembered. In the book, that was a cultists' lair in the third act. A trap.
"That's death" I said flatly.
She turned, and something flashed in her eyes besides greed. Curiosity. "Yes. But you already smell of it. And of something else... New. The stone will show the way. If you're the real thing"
She tossed a bundle onto the table: coarse robe, bandages, a flatbread. "Pay me later. If you survive. I'm curious how this story ends. It... smells of change"
I took the bundle. This wasn't help. It was a wager. I nodded and went back out into the night. The path was clear. Through the very heart of darkness.