High noon. Even in the Elven Realm, the heat pressed down like a bronze lid.

Above, a colossal Sealing Array turned slow as a sky-sized millstone, yet it couldn’t dam the last blaze of autumn. Elves strolled the sun-washed streets like fish in warm shallows, faces bright as if sunlight were sweet wine.

Maybe it was their nature, fruit born of the World Tree, ripened by light. But for Mira, a human, for Varie of the Nacha Tribe, and for the “kitten” Barni who kept rolling in shadow to cool down, the air bit like fever. Worse, Mira and Varie had to cram into one narrow roost, hiding from Elves who loved to glance up at rooftops for sport.

“I’m telling you, that guy’s mixing a little too well, isn’t he?” Varie’s voice prickled like sunburn. “He’s human, but he walks like a local. He even drops into other people’s homes.”

Her cloak was strung between beams, a strip of shade like a cool stream over her and the silent blond girl beside her. Two birds with one stone: sun blocked, heat bled off.

Even so, the heat crawled. Varie stretched as far as the tight space allowed, tossed off her shoes, toes flexing, her small round ears twitching to shed warmth. For someone who never wore socks and danced along eaves all day, her feet were pale and smooth as porcelain; only a hard flex tugged out a few fine creases.

If Adelaide had seen that, she’d have teased her twice over. Varie didn’t need to worry. Mira hadn’t so much as turned her head once. Not once since last night.

“Your sister talks like she’s got nails under her tongue,” Varie muttered, half a sigh, half a growl. “But I’m guessing she’s great with people when it counts. What’s the vibe… human nobility?”

Mira gave no reply. Varie rolled her eyes and rubbed Barni’s belly a bit too hard. The cat nipped her thumb, a tiny bite like a pinprick. They both yelped, small and muffled.

One word fit Varie’s mood: stifled. Like steam trapped under a lid.

From the moment they slid close to the prison, Mira wore that same iron mask. Head down, fixed on one door while Adelaide sat inside. Adelaide left the prison, and Mira locked on the palanquin. Adelaide entered the palace of Queen Dreamlan, and Mira watched the palace like it might blink.

A master scrying eye could match that focus. It couldn’t match how boring she made it for her partner. At least if you poked a scrying eye, it wriggled in protest.

Her sister was extreme enough to make Varie sigh. Worse, the sister herself was just as outrageous. They waited half a day on the roof. Adelaide finally left the august Queen Dreamlan’s palace. She walked a few steps, then struck up a chat with another Elf, then followed her into her house.

And just like before, Mira said nothing. She found another good eave and stared as if that house had a single window cut into a wall nailed over with protest posters.

“Seriously, you’ve stared almost a whole day,” Varie said, a helpless breath fogging the heat like a ripple on hot glass. “Aren’t you tired? Or are you jealous your sister’s getting cozy with long-ears?”

Mira stayed silent. Where Varie couldn’t see, her hand clenched hard on the wooden rail. The beam gave a small crack like ice underfoot.

Jealous? No. Jealousy wasn’t the flame in Mira’s chest.

She knew her sister excelled at people. She knew Adelaide could wrap warmth around anyone when her goals demanded it. Even if, at first sight, a burn like coal licked her ribs, Mira always stamped that shameful ember flat.

Being ignored was different. That cut cold.

After Adelaide left Queen Dreamlan’s palace, Varie flashed a signal. Adelaide looked up, her gaze brushing their roof. Then she walked on, easy as wind, and chatted with Elves as if nothing had glittered in the sky.

Mira’s heart stumbled twice, like a drum losing the beat.

Why? Is she still angry? Does she still refuse to see me?

The thought sprouted and ran wild, a tangle of vines around her mind. The wood in her grip creaked louder, a spiderweb of cracks spreading.

Varie noticed and sighed. “You really hate talking, huh.”

She rolled her stiff neck; joints popped like rain on bamboo. Then she sat up straight.

“Fine. Treat this as me talking to myself.” Her face settled, serious as a drawn bow. “I’ve wanted to say this for a while. You keep dodging me.”

Mira didn’t answer, but her grip eased. The wood stopped its thin, ugly whine.

“I heard what you two said in the bath.”

“…”

“Tell me. What did the one who hit your family look like?”

Amber beast eyes. Gray, triangular beast-ears matted with her mother’s blood. A huge scar running from the right corner of his mouth up across his cheek—too deep for even a Nacha body to fully mend. The pictures rose at once, crisp as frost. She was under her bed again, a black-haired girl with a hand over her mouth, holding her breath like it was a candle in a gale.

“Don’t want to talk? I get it.”

Varie took the silence and kept going, her words falling like pebbles into a still pond.

“Honestly, hearing the Nuhaman clan has a survivor… It won’t change what I do. It won’t soothe my conscience. But it does lift my mood.”

“You realize that sounds like provocation.”

“And you finally talk,” Varie said, sticking out her tongue like a cat. “For the record, we aren’t like long-ears, all locked behind a seal. After the Chaos Uprising, a chunk of our people drifted beyond the seal. They cut ties with us. Their children never took our rites, never held our legacy. You could call them something else entirely.”

She paused, letting the words settle like dust in sunlight.

“And the Nuhaman genocide? Long-ears took that case. Your home sat on their border. Within half a month, they caught dozens of the bandits and executed them together. Meaning, your enemies are likely already dust.”

“…”

“I’m telling you this so you know the ground you stand on,” Varie added, voice firm as a drawn line. “Not to excuse myself. Even without our creed, if they’ve got these ears, they’re still our people. And hunting clan scum who spit on honor is part of my job as a Hero. If I find a single loose fish, I’ll chase them to the world’s edge, until their chests stop rising.”

Silence answered her. Then a voice cool as shade under noon.

“So what. That’s yours to carry. It has nothing to do with me.”

“It does,” Varie said, and flicked something soft toward her.

Mira caught it. A bit of iron chain clinked like a tiny wind chime. It looked like an earring, but it wasn’t. A shriveled beast-ear hung at the end.

She looked to Varie, puzzled. Varie shrugged.

“Call it self-serving if you want. When I cut the ears off the Nacha’s disgrace, I prefer to place them in living hands, not leave them as late justice at a grave.”

Mira’s eyes widened. She looked down. Time had bleached the ear to gray-white, a fallen leaf without color.

From the shape, she knew it wasn’t the ear from that night.

Even so, she looked for a long time.

Then she tossed it back.

“I gave up revenge long ago. I don’t need that.”

She turned her face and returned to watching the Elf’s house Adelaide had entered. Her voice stayed with the wind instead of the silence.

“By the way, eavesdropping isn’t in a Hero’s job description, is it.”

“Haha.” Varie laughed, fingers already scratching the cat again. “Barni, did I mishear? Someone who fooled around in someone else’s bath is accusing the bath’s owner of eavesdropping?”

Mira’s face didn’t change. Her heartbeat didn’t jump. “That bath wasn’t yours.”

Varie’s hand froze mid-scratch. Mira glanced sideways at her.

“I’m curious. That spicy décor—what Elf did you get it from, and how exactly?”

Varie’s smile locked in place. “You…!”

Color washed her face, blue then white, like clouds rushing past the sun. In the end, she turned away.

“Forget it. I won’t bicker with you impossible sisters.” She muttered low, then couldn’t help raising her voice. “For the record, I did nothing. An Elf shoved that bath on me. That’s it!”

Mira hummed, a soft note, a rare curve at her lips.

A breeze slipped past. The noonday blaze felt less like a whip and more like a warm hand. Riding that cool thread, she spoke again.

“So. What’s the real conflict between you and the Elves?”

Varie bared a tooth, half a grin, half annoyance. “What, sudden interest in our mess? Don’t tell me this is your way of thanking me. If it is, be direct, missy.”

“As if,” Mira said, flat as still water. “It’s intel my sister might use later. I’m asking. If you’ve changed your mind and don’t feel chatty, I can go back to silence.”

“Given your needle tongue, right up there with your sister’s, I kind of regret getting you to talk.”

Varie rolled her eyes and leaned back. Barni swelled to several times his size, fur becoming a soft cloud under her shoulders. She stretched like a cat, gaze rising to the slow-turning Array in the blue.

“It wasn’t complicated at the start. This damned Array loosened. Chaos mana leaked to the ground like smoke under a door. Our Nacha lands sit to the north, near the Uprising’s first spark. Soon it wasn’t livable. We had to move south.”

“So you marched straight into Elf territory?” Mira’s voice was cool, but the edge felt blunted by wind. “They’re generous hosts, considering how you feel about them.”

“Don’t make it sound like we came to freeload,” Varie said, voice dropping like dusk. “You don’t know how many died on the road. Like you losing people that night, those were our kin and family. If there’d been any other way, we wouldn’t have chosen this path.”

Mira was quiet for a beat, the pause soft as a hand laid on a shoulder. “Sorry.”

“Hmph.” Varie rolled her eyes, a pebble skittering off a roof. “We’re not thankless curs. The long-ears gave us a temporary roof, and we put in the sweat. In the first ten years after we migrated, under our current chieftain—the old man—things held steady like a well-pitched tent. We even took every major elven build, stone and timber rising like a small forest. Back then wasn’t like now.”

“So what shifted the wind?”

“At first it was tiny cultural snags, burrs under a saddle. My brothers catch their scent and want to gag. And the long-ears keep luring our girls away. They play them, then drop them like dull knives. Most went out laughing, came back crying, rain on a sunny day. That’s why I call long-ears cheap—”

“Spare me. The point.” Mira’s voice cut like a thin blade through silk. “If that’s ‘small,’ what’s the big one?”

Surprisingly, Varie didn’t snap; her face went grave, clouds pulling tight over a ridge. After a beat, she said, “Your village.”

“...How does that thread tie in?”

“If you woke to find the neighbors butchered by raiders, you’d panic too,” she said, spine straightening like a spear set. “So I don’t fault the long-ears for sealing our quarter and slapping on a curfew, gates slammed at dusk. But even after it was proven the Nacha Tribe involved were drifters out in the wilds, bandits with no tie to us, they kept the lockdown. They kept us penned for a long stretch, and they dammed the river of basic supplies.”

Varie rubbed her brow, and with a sidelong glance at elves strolling the sunlit street like a lazy stream, she muttered a few Nacha curses under her breath.

“In short, to us it was a bolt from a clear sky,” she said, bitterness like iron on the tongue. “There were a few clashes—no deaths—but the knot of bad blood set hard. That’s when I got tossed out, door slammed behind me. After that, I only heard dust-blind rumors. From what I dug up these past two days, the old man got grabbed because the long-ears started sealing our district again for no good reason.”

“Again...? So what shadow fell this time?”

“Don’t know. Maybe some long-ears need a stick to the skull to wake them up.” Varie let out a cold laugh, then sank back onto Barni like a cat onto warm stone. “Give me a few days. I’ll see some old friends, and we’ll know.”

Mira blinked, words snagging like thread on a thorn. She’d thought her village’s mess only stained her, but now the ripples were widening across the pond.

She drew breath to speak, but Varie suddenly snapped up with a quick kip-up, quick as a fish breaking the water.

“Hey, look! She’s out!”

Mira’s forming words blew away like dust in a gust. She whipped her head back. The white-haired figure stepped out of the watched house, waved to the owner like a leaf-tossed farewell, then turned... and walked into an empty little alley?

Mira and Varie traded a look, feet ready to leap to the next roof. Before their muscles fired, Adelaide came back out the same alley, footsteps retracing like a skipped record.

Hm…? Is her compass spinning?

The two of them stared at Adelaide’s back-and-forth path, a swallow zigzagging over water. After she emerged, Adelaide didn’t leave at once. She stopped where she was and lifted her head, casual as a cat, eyes sliding straight to their rooftop perch.

She smiled and stretched, a slow arc like dawn warming stone. From their angle, it looked like a wave hello.

“What the hell is she playing at...?” Varie grumbled, a spark spitting from dry tinder.

Mira’s eyes narrowed, a coil of caution tightening before the spring. After a few heartbeats, she flipped from the roof and dropped into the same alley Adelaide had entered, shadow to shadow.

As expected, the alley was empty, a narrow throat between walls. A few wooden crates were stacked there, their backs hunched, dust settled thick as frost.

“Hey, she’s getting away. You not tailing her?” Varie’s voice drifted down, a rope tossed too late.

Mira stepped to the crates and scanned them top to bottom, gaze like a knife tip.

Sure enough, on one crate the dust lay thinner, a pale scrape against gray.

She eased the crate aside. A sheet of pale yellow paper showed under it, like a leaf pressed in a book.

She picked up the folded note. The cheap stock scratched her fingertips, rough as bark—no mistake, it was the paper Adelaide had been using.

But why would her sister leave it hidden like this? What was she trying to whisper through the cracks?

Mira unfolded the page. After a few seconds, her eyes widened, ice cracking on a stream.