Breakfast at the inn was simple and generous — warm bread, some kind of thick, herb-laced porridge, and a hard cheese that Levi ate with the same unrestrained enthusiasm he'd shown the apples in Herinhon — and by the time Corin arrived at their door, the sun had already climbed well clear of the mountain ridge behind the valley.
"Ready?" Corin asked, though the question seemed more courtesy than genuine inquiry, the older guide already turning to lead them toward the temple's towering wooden doors before either of them had properly answered.
The courtyard beyond those doors opened into something Ragna hadn't fully expected — dozens of trainees scattered across open training grounds, practicing swordsmanship and spearwork and a handful of weapons Ragna couldn't immediately identify, the whole space alive with the same disciplined, purposeful energy he remembered from his very first day on Manachy's training yard, five years and a lifetime ago.
"I only need to see the Master," Ragna said, as they approached the temple's main entrance, the sheer scale of the building drawing his eyes upward despite himself. "Levi's here for the axe. He wants to train in it properly, if the temple's willing to teach him."
"The Master only wishes to see you," Corin said, nodding with a quiet, almost reverent certainty that made Ragna's stomach tighten slightly. "Your friend's training has already been arranged."
Ragna stopped walking. "Arranged how? We only decided that yesterday, on the road."
Corin's expression didn't change, the same calm, unbothered patience he'd worn since the gate the night before. "The Master saw to it in advance," he said simply, as though this explained everything rather than deepening the mystery considerably. "He tends to know these things before they properly happen."
Levi, beside him, let out a low whistle, equal parts impressed and unsettled. "That's either deeply reassuring or deeply terrifying, and I genuinely can't decide which."
"Both, usually," Corin said, the faintest hint of dry humor cracking through his composure for the first time. "Come, Levi. The training grounds are this way. I'll see you settled with the weapons master before I return for the young lord."
Ragna opened his mouth to correct the title, found no obvious way to do so without a longer explanation than the moment allowed, and let it pass. Levi clapped him once on the shoulder, murmured a quiet "good luck" that carried more genuine weight than the casual words suggested, and followed Corin off toward the distant clatter of training weapons, leaving Ragna alone at the temple's entrance.
The interior struck him immediately, before his eyes had even finished adjusting to the dimmer light — the thick, warm scent of incense settling over everything, and beneath his boots, a floor of pale, flawlessly polished marble that reflected the flickering candlelight lining the corridor in long, wavering streaks. It felt, walking through it, less like entering a temple and more like stepping directly into one of the old books he'd spent so many hours poring over back in Sentel's library — a place built by people who had understood, centuries ago, that some spaces needed to feel considerably older than the people currently walking through them.
He thought, as he walked, of the fragments he'd gathered from those same books — the Watchers, ancient and enduring, and their leader, Master Tarus, who had according to the histories lived for over six centuries.
A man who had, if the timeline held together at all, personally witnessed the seven-hundred-year war's final, devastating chapters.
A living relic of an era Ragna had only ever encountered secondhand, through pages and rumor and one Crow's carefully rationed honesty on a dusty road.
The corridor opened, eventually, into a wide, candlelit chamber, dozens of flames burning steady and unwavering despite the absence of any obvious draft, and at its center, seated cross-legged on a simple cushion with his eyes closed, sat an old man who radiated a stillness so complete it felt, to Ragna, almost like its own kind of presence in the room.
Ragna bowed, low and formal, the way Sentel had once taught him to bow before visiting dignitaries whose rank demanded genuine respect rather than mere courtesy.
"Master Tarus," he said. "I've come seeking answers."
The old man's eyes opened.
Gold flooded the chamber the instant they did — not harsh, not blinding, but warm and total, the same rich, unmistakable color the old library book had described in painstaking, careful detail. The God Eyes, awake and fully unveiled, their pupils reshaped into strokes Ragna couldn't fully count from this distance, settled on him with an attention that felt, somehow, like being properly seen for the very first time in his entire life.
"Sit," Tarus said, his voice carrying the particular gravity of someone who had said very few unnecessary words across six centuries and had no intention of beginning that habit now.
He gestured toward a modest chair set in the chamber's corner, and a moment later, without any visible signal Ragna caught, a young attendant appeared with tea, setting it down with quiet efficiency before withdrawing entirely from the room.
Ragna settled into the chair, the warmth of the tea's steam curling up against his face, and waited.
"Ask what you've come to ask," Tarus said simply.
The question Ragna had been carrying since a stranger's face had blurred through half-formed newborn memories, since a Crow's calm voice had first spoken his father's name on a dusty road, arrived without hesitation.
"My mother," he said. "Who was she?"
Tarus regarded him for a long moment, the gold of his eyes unblinking, unreadable.
"You have not fulfilled the condition necessary for that answer," he said finally. "I cannot tell you."
Ragna felt something in his chest tighten, disappointment settling in fast and heavy despite every effort to keep his composure. "What condition."
"That," Tarus said, "you will have to discover yourself."
Ragna sat with that for a moment, frustration warring with the discipline five years of training had drilled into him, before he pushed forward anyway, unwilling to let the entire visit collapse into silence over a single unanswerable question.
"Then answer this instead," he said. "Is General Laiman Kuri my father? And if he is — if he already held Herinhon's dukedom three years before I was born — how did I end up two hundred miles away, in Manachy, abandoned in a basket on a stranger's doorstep, instead of raised in his household?"
Something shifted, subtly, in Tarus's ancient, unreadable expression — not surprise, exactly, but something closer to quiet, weary approval.
"That question," he said, "you have earned the right to have answered."
He rose from his cushion with the slow, deliberate ease of a man entirely unbothered by the passage of centuries, and crossed to a small shelf set into the chamber's far wall, retrieving a second jar of tea, distinct from the one already steaming beside Ragna's chair. He poured a fresh cup with careful, unhurried precision and set it in front of Ragna, the liquid inside it carrying a faint, unfamiliar shimmer that the first cup's had entirely lacked.
"Drink this," Tarus said. "It will carry us both down the same road — eighteen years, back to the beginning of everything you're asking about. You will not simply hear the answer, Ragna. You will witness it."
Ragna hesitated only a moment, the weight of everything he'd been chasing since that library table settling fully into place, before he lifted the cup and drank.
The dizziness hit him almost immediately, the chamber's warm candlelight swimming and blurring at its edges, Tarus's steady golden gaze the only fixed point in a world that had otherwise begun dissolving entirely around him.
And then, all at once, the chamber was gone.
He stood instead on open ground beneath a sky choked thick with smoke, the acrid, unmistakable smell of scorched earth and something far worse than scorched earth pressing into his lungs with a reality that felt, despite every instinct telling him this couldn't possibly be real, entirely and horribly present. Around him, as far as he could see in every direction, lay the aftermath of something vast and terrible — bodies scattered across a battlefield that stretched toward the horizon in every direction, armor and banners from both sides tangled together in the same indiscriminate ruin, smoke curling upward from fires still smoldering somewhere in the churned, blood-dark earth.
He wasn't fighting. He understood that immediately, some instinctive certainty settling into him even through the dizzying shock of the transition — he stood on this ruined field as a spectator only, untouched, unseen, a presence without weight or consequence in whatever memory he'd just been pulled into.
Master Tarus stood beside him, considerably younger in appearance than the ancient figure who'd poured the tea moments before, though the same steady, golden-eyed gravity remained entirely unchanged.
"The Battle of the Sixty Thousand," Tarus said quietly, his voice carrying easily across the ruined, silent field. "Eighteen years ago, to the very day you're asking about it. Watch closely, Ragna. What happened here is the beginning of everything you came to this temple to understand."