Chapter 10 | Part 4

The waiting lasted three hours.

Eldric spent them in the corner of the room, watching the artifact and thinking about patterns. The cube’s orientation had stabilized—no longer pointing at him specifically, but at a fixed direction that suggested its target was stationary. Or nearly so.

“It’s close,” Dulint said, breaking a silence that had stretched too long. “Whatever it’s tracking. I can feel the difference.”

Eldric could feel it too, though he couldn’t have explained how. The wrongness that had pressed against his awareness when he entered the room was more intense now, more focused. The artifact wasn’t just signaling anymore. It was reaching.

“How can you tell?” Balin asked. His nervous energy had transformed into something sharper—the alertness of a young man who had realized that danger might be closer than he’d allowed himself to believe.

“The cube is warmer.” Dulint held his hand near the artifact without touching it. “It’s been cold since we found it. Room temperature at most. Now it’s radiating heat.”

Eldric checked the exits again. Still three. Still four with the window. But the street below was darker now, the evening crowd thinning toward the scattered few who had business after sunset.

“If we’re waiting for something to arrive,” he said, “we should have a plan for when it does.”

“What kind of plan?” Xandor asked.

“The kind where we don’t all die if it turns out to be hostile.”

No one laughed. They weren’t the laughing type, not anymore.

Eldric positioned himself near the door—close enough to respond, far enough to observe. Dulint stayed near the artifact, his weathered hands steady despite the tension in his shoulders. Balin took the window, watching the street below with the earnest attention of someone who wanted to be useful but wasn’t sure how.

Xandor moved between them, his druid’s calm strained but present. “The texts suggest the Nexus responds to intent,” he said quietly. “If what’s approaching is hostile, the artifact should react differently. More defensively.”

“Should,” Eldric noted.

“The texts are incomplete.”

“Everything is incomplete.”

The artifact pulsed.

Not light—sensation. A wave of wrongness that rolled outward from the cube, making Eldric’s skin prickle and his heartbeat stutter. Dulint stumbled back. Balin gasped. Even Xandor, with all his scholarly composure, flinched.

“It’s here,” Dulint whispered. “Whatever it is. It’s here.”

Footsteps on the stairs. Slow, uncertain. The tread of someone who wasn’t sure they were in the right place but couldn’t turn back.

Eldric’s hand found the knife at his belt—not drawn, not yet, but ready. His body dropped into the stance he’d learned in decades of service, balanced and prepared for violence that might or might not come.

The door opened.

A woman stood in the threshold. Young—mid-twenties, perhaps—with grass in her hair and dirt on her clothes. Her eyes were unfocused, distant, looking at something that wasn’t in the room. She swayed on her feet like someone who had walked too far without rest.

“You’re the source,” she said. Her voice was flat, exhausted. “The screaming. It led me here.”

The artifact’s warmth intensified. Eldric could feel it from across the room, a radiant heat that shouldn’t have been possible from such a small object.

“Who are you?” Xandor asked carefully.

The woman’s unfocused eyes drifted to the cube on the table. Recognition crossed her face, dull and reluctant. “That’s what’s been screaming. In my head. For days.” She laughed, and the laugh held no humor. “I thought I was going mad.”

“You’re a seer,” Dulint said. Not a question.

“I’m a woman who collapses and sees things.” She met his gaze, and her eyes were clearer now, sharper. “I don’t know what that makes me. But that thing—” she pointed at the artifact “—has been calling me since before I knew what it was.”

Eldric studied her. Exhaustion in every line of her body. Defensiveness in her posture. But beneath it, a clarity that only came from surviving what you’d seen.

“What did you see?” he asked.

She looked at him. Surprise crossed her face at being asked directly instead of interrogated or dismissed.

“Black water,” she said. “Someone drowning. A hand slipping under the surface.” Her voice dropped. “The same thing. Over and over. Until I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.”

Eldric felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Black water. Drowning. The images meant nothing to him, but the weight in her voice suggested they meant everything to someone.

“The Nexus tracks seers,” Xandor said slowly. “People connected to prophecy. What you’ve been seeing—it might be relevant to what this artifact is searching for.”

“Or it might be nothing.” The woman’s defensiveness sharpened. “I don’t control what I see. I don’t understand most of it. All I know is that something drew me here, and now I’m standing in a room with strangers who have the thing that’s been torturing me for weeks.”

She swayed again. Balin moved to help her, but she waved him off with a gesture that was part pride, part exhaustion.

“My name is Maris,” she said. “And whatever that artifact is doing, I want it to stop.”

The cube pulsed again, gentler this time. Almost… satisfied.

Eldric counted the people in the room. Five now. A bitter veteran, a cautious merchant, an impatient youth, a scholarly druid, and a seer who didn’t want her gift.

Not exactly an army. But it was a beginning.

“Sit down,” he said to Maris. “Rest. And then tell us everything you’ve seen.”

She hesitated, suspicion warring with exhaustion. Exhaustion won.

End of Chapter 10.4 —> 10.5: The Knot at Riverhold: The Circle