Zora arrived at Elbion at dawn, when the fog still clung to the harbor like a damp shroud and the cries of gulls echoed between the masts. The city rose before her in layered stone and timber, its walls stained by salt and age, its towers bristling with banners she did not recognize or care to learn. From the first step onto the docks, she felt only disdain. The air was thick with rot and brine, with fish guts discarded carelessly into the gutters, with smoke from a hundred small fires fed by damp wood. There were too many people—too many voices overlapping, too many footsteps, too much movement. Silence, once learned, was impossible to forget, and Elbion had none.
She had counted her coin carefully during the voyage. Enough to pay passage, enough to eat poorly for a handful of days, and perhaps enough to rent a corner of a room if she tolerated company. After that, survival would demand effort: mercenary work, hired spellcraft, or something less honest. But first, she had come for answers. Whispers had reached even the fringes of the world—rumors of forbidden texts changing hands, of grimoires seized at sea or hidden by collectors who did not understand what they possessed. A major trade port, a crossroads of merchants and smugglers alike, and a city that housed a magical college: Elbion was the obvious convergence. If any fragment of the knowledge stolen from Brockern still existed, it would have passed through here, or been claimed by someone arrogant enough to keep it.
She moved through the market with narrowed eyes. Stalls overflowed with fish laid out on melting ice, slabs of red meat attracting clouds of flies, baskets of fruit bruised and overripe. Vendors shouted prices as if volume alone could create value. The crowd pressed close, careless, intrusive. Not a single bookstall caught her attention. No parchment, no ink, no shelves bowed under the weight of thought. Only food—endless, mindless consumption. She felt a familiar contempt rise within her.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink,” the prophet’s words surfaced unbidden. “Is not life more than food?” She almost smiled. Simpletons would always remain simpletons, obsessed with the needs of the flesh while the machinery of the world turned unseen above them.
If the city offered nothing, there remained the college. The thought soured her mood. Scholars were dangerous in a way common folk were not. To the illiterate, her black tunic marked her only as strange, perhaps unsettling. To the learned, it was a statement—an origin, a lineage. In the wrong eyes, it would make her an object of curiosity, a specimen, or a threat to be eradicated. And even if she passed unnoticed, access to a true library would not come freely. Knowledge was hoarded behind titles, dues, and oaths. Membership. Permission.
Zora paused at the edge of the square, listening to the city breathe—its noise, its filth, its relentless life. Elbion offended her senses, but it was necessary. Somewhere within its walls lay a thread leading back to what had been stolen from her. She would pull at it patiently, methodically. And if the city refused to yield its secrets willingly, she would remind it—quietly, at first—that knowledge had never truly belonged to those who merely guarded the doors.
