Lyss Dorn arrived forty minutes later.

  Junho had used the time to eat a bread roll from the desk drawer — stale, fine, the best food he'd had since arriving — and re-read two more pages of Vael's correspondence looking for anything referencing the vaults. He found one useful thing: a line in a longer letter that read the old ward still holds, with no indication of what it was holding or why it needed to.

  Super informative. Great documentation, past Vael. Really helpful for the guy who has to deal with it now.

  The knock was soft — three quiet taps that expected to be answered rather than asked. He opened the door.

  Lyss Dorn was smaller than he'd expected from Vael's notes, which used words like formidable and do not let the size deceive you. The size was slight — small frame, long dark braid over one shoulder with a scorch mark at the end she clearly hadn't noticed, robes in layered plum and black at least a size too large. Round glasses. Eyes that were soft and dark and already doing a full assessment of the room before she'd finished crossing the threshold.

  Lyss Dorn. Arcane division head. Spatial magic, genius rank. Eight speaking scenes across the first four volumes of the webcomic, and then in the siege of Calveth she builds a barrier array mid-combat in under two minutes that takes apart a kingdom's entire mage corps and the story just has to sit with that for a second. She is the most academically dangerous person in the Covenant and she is looking at my study like she's already cataloguing the differences from last time she was in it.

  "You wanted to see me," she said. Precise. No wasted syllables.

  "Sit," he said.

  She sat, looked at the desk, and her gaze stopped on the stone.

  "Where did that come from," she said — not a question exactly, more like a recognition reaching for confirmation.

  "The vaults," Junho said. He slid it across to her. "A creature brought it. Small, pale, knee height, eyes that catch light. It was inside the sealed vault at the end of the lower corridor. Came out through the warded door without breaking anything."

  Lyss picked the stone up with two fingers, turned it once, pushed her glasses up with the back of her wrist.

  "It opened the ward," she said.

  "Lock and ward were both intact. Door was just open."

  Something moved behind her expression. Quick. Recalculated. She looked at the carved face of the stone for a moment without speaking, and Junho let the silence sit because Vael apparently did that and also because he was genuinely curious what she was going to say.

  "A Pale Messenger," she said finally. "That's what the creature is. Rare — not dangerous. They're drawn to concentrations of old magic. They carry objects between significant places. Thresholds. Sites where something is about to change or already has." She set the stone down carefully. "The mark is a Sealing Mark. Old form, pre-Covenant. It means the stone is a key — whatever's sealed somewhere is bound to this. The stone unlocks it. Sometimes it's also a message attached to a binding that's already been opened. The two overlap more often than you'd think."

  Good. Clean. Useful. A carrier creature, a key stone, something sealed somewhere that it's pointing me toward. The pull left makes sense now. What doesn't make sense is why Vael had something like this locked in a vault that he apparently never opened, and why the Messenger chose now to deliver it, and what's at the other end of the pull.

  "Read the mark," Junho said. "Full translation. I want to know what's sealed, where it is, and whether opening it would be a problem."

  "That'll take time." She was still looking at the stone, doing quiet mental work. "I'll need to keep it."

  "Take it."

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She reached for it — and paused.

  "You've been holding this since the vault," she said.

  "About an hour, yes."

  "And you've felt nothing unusual."

  The pull. The constant low-grade directional nudge that's been running since my fingers closed around it, like a compass that's decided I'm its north. I've been ignoring it. Apparently that was the wrong call.

  "Define unusual," he said.

  Lyss looked at him over her glasses with the expression of someone deciding how literally to take a question. "A pull. Directional. Something orienting toward a point."

  "Left," Junho said. "Slightly. Since I picked it up."

  She went still.

  Not dramatically — she didn't flinch or sit back. She just stopped moving for one second, the way people did when something confirmed a theory they'd been hoping was wrong.

  "The stone has accepted a bearer," she said, carefully. "When a Sealing Stone bonds to someone it orients to them — pulls them toward whatever it's keyed to unlock. It's not supposed to happen on contact alone. It requires deliberate attunement. Normally."

  So it just decided on its own that I'm the one. I picked it up from a creature in a basement and a magic stone went ahead and bonded itself to me without asking, which means I'm now the only person who can use it and the pull isn't going to stop until I find whatever it's pointing at.

  I've been in this world for one day. One day and I already have a side quest that wasn't in the source material. What the hell.

  "What does that mean, practically," he said. Flat. Measured. Not annoyed, even though he was annoyed.

  "It means you're the only one who can use it to unseal whatever it's keyed to." She set the stone back on the desk edge — not returning it, not keeping it, just putting it somewhere neutral. "The pull won't stop. It'll fade to background noise once you adjust but it doesn't go away. Not until you find the source." A pause. "Or until you're dead."

  "Noted," Junho said. "Find out what the mark says."

  She picked the stone back up carefully and tucked it into a pocket of her robe. Stood. And then — doorframe, because apparently everyone saved something for the doorframe today:

  "You asked me to define the directional pull," she said. Not accusatory. Just precise, the way she was precise about everything. "As if the terminology needed explaining."

  Junho said nothing.

  "You've handled Sealing Stones before," she said. The same shape as last time — open, not quite a question, giving him room to correct or confirm.

  She caught it. I asked her to define a term that a man who has been running a magic-adjacent organization for years would know. I buried it in a longer sentence and kept my voice even and she still clocked it because this is Lyss Dorn and she notices things the way other people breathe — automatically, without trying, without stopping.

  "I wanted your read," he said. "Not mine."

  A beat. Lyss filed that response somewhere behind her expression — in the same drawer, probably, as everything else she'd noticed today.

  "Results by morning," she said, and left.

  ?

  After the door clicked shut, Junho sat in the quiet and did a threat assessment.

  Seris clocked that I'm different within the first hour. Lyss just caught a knowledge gap and filed it without saying what she's going to do with it. Two people. Both sharp. Both already running quiet calculations I can't see. Day one. I haven't even slept yet and my cover has two pressure points.

  And now I'm the bearer of a magic stone that's pulling me toward something that wasn't in the story, which means it's something Vael knew about and chose not to act on, or something Vael didn't know about either, and neither option is reassuring. The hero is out there right now getting his inciting incident. Chapter three of the story. He's just started and I'm already dealing with off-script variables and I haven't eaten a real meal in two worlds.

  He pulled the top desk drawer open. There was a small blank journal inside — plain cover, different from the theatrical marginalia Vael left everywhere else, clearly kept for something private. Junho opened it to the first page.

  He wrote three headings: What I know. What I don't know. What becomes a problem if I don't figure it out.

  He wrote for twenty minutes. When he stopped, the middle column was the longest by a significant distance.

  Yeah. That's about right.

  He closed the journal, put it back, and looked at the ceiling. Stone arches. Candlelight burning low. The deep-night quiet of a building full of sleeping people who had no idea their leader was a twenty-year-old from Seoul who was running entirely on secondhand knowledge and the kind of stubborn refusal to visibly panic that was less bravery and more a deeply ingrained habit of not giving people the satisfaction.

  In the storage room, the creature breathed slowly. The stone was somewhere in Lyss's pocket, still pulling left, probably annoying her methodology by refusing to behave like normal artifacts. The hero was on the move. The story was running. Junho had a list of things he didn't know that was longer than his arm and a council that met again in two days and Seris Vale, who noticed everything, already watching him from approximately four angles at once.

  He opened the desk drawer one more time. Found the second half of the bread roll. Ate it.

  I need to find out if this world has noodles. Not as a priority. Just — as a quality of life baseline. Because if I'm going to survive being the villain in a fantasy war story with an off-script mystery side quest and two people who are actively closing in on figuring out I'm not who I say I am, I need to at least be doing it with decent food.

  Ramyeon. God. I miss ramyeon.