The rain did not stop. It only changed texture—soft, then vicious again, drumming against the roof like impatient fingers.

“Seems the road won’t forgive us tonight.” Anabeth peered out her window. She’d hung her cloak by the fire, steam curling off its hem. “You should stay till morning.”

I wanted to refuse. I wanted a dozen things—silence, distance, sleep that wasn’t full of voices—but her eyes made refusal seem absurd.

“Very well,” I said. “I shall take the corner.”

I set down my sword and leaned my armor against the wall. Across from me, she folded herself onto a woven mat, legs drawn close.

For a long while, there was only the sound of rain. The fire dimmed to a low, murmuring red as I lay on the floorboards, pretending to rest. Sleep came close, then fled again.

It wasn’t the wind, nor the thunder. It was her.

Anabeth sat on her mat, making it seemed as though she turned toward the window. She must’ve thought she was sneaky, but I noticed the angle of her shoulders and the way she occasionally stared at the very uninteresting wall behind me.

“Speak your mind,” I said. I didn’t even plan on saying that.

It took her another second to speak up, “What’s underneath that armor of yours, Ser?” Her tone was teasing, but her gaze lingered. “Can I call you Sir Knight?”

‘How do you know I’m a knight?’, I wanted to say.

“Answer me now,” I said, low and cold as a tombstone. “Tell me how you know of me and why you stare, or suffer the consequences you invite upon yourself.”

“Oh? What consequences do you talk of now, my good Ser?” Her voice was a mixture of scandalized delight and alarmed (also) delight.

I sighed. There was no point conversing with her.

She tilted her head and smiled mischievously. “Do you really sleep in that, Ser?”

Of course I didn’t sleep in it. No one could. The joints bit into skin and the weight could crush lungs. But the thought of unlatching it here, in some stranger’s cottage, under her steady gaze . . . Just no.

I feel no need to take it off, I meant to say.

[CERALIS: Autonomic Defense Activated — Identity Obfuscation Protocol.]

“I am bound to my armor,” I heard myself say. “I am my armor, and my armor is I.”

Her eyes lit up. “You’re—bound?” she whispered first, voice trembling between awe and intimacy. “As in a construct? A vessel? Was it deliberate? Were you aetherically bound to the armor through ritual convergence, or did it—oh gods—did it take you on its own? “Was there a pact involved? Were you a Knight of the First Cycle? A summon gone rogue? A soul echo sealed for preservation?”

I stared.

She didn’t stop. “Is your consciousness localized, or distributed through the metal? Can you feel the rain through it? Do temperature shifts inside you? Do you sleep, or simply shut down?”

“Miss Anabeth—”

“Do you remember your mortal name, or was it overwritten during the transference? Were you human before it happened? Are you even—” she caught her breath, eyes bright with delight “—alive in the conventional sense?”

I didn’t understand half of what she was saying.

Aetheric convergence? Soul echo? Transference? What even were they?

But one phrase did land.

Knights of the First Cycle.

That I knew. Even in the newer orders, their name still carried a kind of reverence. Back when knights were more than men, and when devotion outweighed mortality. Some of them, if the chronicles were true, had tried to bind their spirits into their arms and armor in return for nearly limitless power. Pacts of permanence, they called them.

But how did she know?

The Order had scattered long ago, and outside the knighthoods, few were familiar with the term. The last scholar I’d spoken to—a senior chronicler of the Grand Archive, no less—had looked at me blankly when I’d mentioned the First Cycle. Yet this young woman, sitting cross-legged on a mat beside her fire, tossed the name into the air as if it were a child’s riddle.

Who was she?

Before I could think of a way to ask, she peered closer at me and said, almost slyly, “You know my name, Ser Knight. It’s only fair I know yours, don’t you think?” Her eyes gleamed in the firelight.

“Henry,” I said.

“Henry,” she repeated, tasting it. “Only Henry?”

I didn’t answer.

“Oh, come now,” she pressed, grinning. “Whereabouts are you from, Sir Henry? Oh, no, don’t say. Let me guess.” She leaned forward further, studying me as though my armor might whisper secrets. “You lacking an insignia makes it difficult, but your accent, your diction, your cadence . . . Oh, your cadence! You must be from the far north!”

My cadence wasn’t even my doing. It was whatever Ceralis decided it to be.

She giggled to herself, clearly pleased with the guess, while I stared at the dying fire and tried not to think about how much my head ached.

I was too tired to untangle her curiosity, or to antagonize someone who’d offered me a roof and, perhaps, a path out of mediocrity.

“I will sleep,” I said at last.

She smiled, undeterred. “Then sleep well, Ser Knight Henry,” she said lightly. “May your armor dream with you.”

The rain continued its endless percussion against the roof. Somewhere between the rhythm and her words, I almost forgot which of us was supposed to be the dangerous one.

“Look at these rare quartz in his pannier . . . Only a true knight would travel with specimens of such exquisite quality.” I woke up to her voice close to me. 

“Oh . . . the breastplate . . . and this shoulder plate . . . sublime . . .”

I wanted nothing but to go back to sleep, but my sense of danger didn’t let me. Isn’t this voice a tad too close?

“Mmm . . . exceptional craftsmanship. That sheen! Must be an argent alloy from the Frostmere mines. Northern stock, I’d wager. I knew it.”

Her voice carried a sort of overexcitement one only used when delight overtakes restraint. A little too refined, a little too pleased with herself.

Thin, glacial blue lines spiraling up in my vision. I could feel some sort of aether threading through my armor’s seams, careful but invasive, like frost crawling into my arm.

Then came a low, delighted murmur: “Maybe I could just get a closer look . . . No, maybe I shouldn’t. But surely he wouldn’t mind if I just . . . tinkered with his gears a bit . . . hehehe . . . hehehe . . .”

That laugh did not sound like how anyone sane would sound. It sounded too . . . unholy. And it sounded too close to my ears.

My eyes jolted open.

‘What are you doing?’ I willed myself to ask.

“Cease your tampering, or I’ll see that hand removed,” I said.

[Intimidation Failed]

Anabeth knelt . . . a far distance away, hand hovering in my general direction, the sigil at her wrist rotating with mechanical grace. The aetherlight bled across her face in cold gradients of blue and white, washing her eyes into polished glass.

She looked up at once, startled but far from frightened. “Oh, heavens, calm yourself. It’s nothing malicious. I was performing a metal analysis, that’s all.”

My vision jittered. The light receded, and she was definitely meters away, standing upright now, one hand still outstretched.

Had I imagined her that close? Or had something else leaned in where she wasn’t?

“A what?”

“Yes. It allows me to discern an alloy’s origin, say, composition, age, even the forge that birthed it. If you’d allow me more time, I could tell the region where the ore was first drawn.”

“Cease this at once.” Her ‘analysis’ had been frighteningly correct: Frostmere was just a good one hundred miles North of where I was born. 

Her sigils dimmed. For a heartbeat, her face fell, crestfallen in a way that didn’t suit her. Then, as if she’d simply decided against sadness, the brightness returned.

“Well,” she said lightly, “it isn’t every day one encounters a man of such exquisite standing as yourself.” Her voice carried that polished, courtly lilt again. “Surely there’s something I could do in exchange for a more . . . intimate study of your armor?”

Why would she want to study armor? Was she simply one of those eccentrics who got excited over breastplates and pauldrons? There was no reason, no sense, in letting her anywhere near it again.

No, he willed himself to say.

“There is nothing that one such as I would seek from the hands of mortals.”

Her lips parted just slightly, and for a fleeting instant, all the mirth drained from her face. “You truly are . . . I knew this was no mere armor!” She said, voice rising a touch too brightly, “surely an all-powerful one such as yourself needs something. Perhaps a good bowl of soup? Or . . . perhaps . . .” Her eyes turned to the gleaming curve of his greaves. “you’d care to know the origin of your shin plates? Those shiny, beautiful shin plates . . .”

Okay. I wanted nothing to do with this woman.

[New Task Acquired: Obtain a Common-tier Item attuned to your Aetheric Profile (Path of the Earthen Aegis)]

[Boon: +1 RES (80% Success Chance)]

My first—what?

The words hung there, bright and insistent. What was an Aetheric Profile? I didn’t even know what that meant. Did I have one? And if I did . . .

Was that proof I could use aetheric artifacts? I could actually become powerful?

I met her gaze, the words forming before I fully thought them through.

“You,” I said slowly, “shall find me my Aetheric Profile.”

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