Dawn was already awake when the knock came.
He'd been sitting by the window for the better part of an hour, watching the ring above Crysallis complete its slow shift from silver to gold. The girl was asleep on the spare cot, Elara had arranged it without being asked, which Dawn appreciated more than he said. Elara herself had fallen back asleep in the chair beside her, one leg tucked under her, head tilted at an angle that was going to hurt when she woke up.
The golden-haired man stood by the door.
Dawn glanced at him. "You're going to tell me someone's here to see me, aren't you."
"Someone's here to see you," the man said.
Dawn stared at him for a moment. "...How long have they been waiting?"
"A while."
"And you're telling me now."
"You looked like you were thinking."
Dawn opened his mouth, closed it, then just stood up and reached for his coat.
The common room downstairs was quiet at this hour. The inn's other occupants were either asleep or already out in the city, and the faint crystal pulse of the walls was the only sound as Dawn came down the stairs.
He stopped at the bottom.
Across the room, perched on the edge of a chair like she was about to launch off it at any second, was a girl with blue hair, cat ears, and glasses that had slid slightly down her nose. A blade rested against the chair beside her, a bow across her back. She was bouncing one leg restlessly against the floor, eyes darting around the common room with the particular energy of someone who found sitting still deeply unreasonable.
Then she saw him.
The leg stopped bouncing.
"DAWN" she started, already half out of the chair.
"Liz," he said. Flat. Calm.
She froze mid-launch, reading his expression, then settled back down and cleared her throat. "...Dawn," she said again, more measured this time. Barely.
He walked over and dropped into the chair across from her. The golden-haired man took a position by the wall without being asked, arms crossed, saying nothing. Dawn had stopped questioning that particular habit.
He looked at Lizzy properly. She looked, well. Tired around the edges in a way the energy was doing its best to cover up, but otherwise whole. No obvious injuries. Her equipment was intact.
Something in his chest that had been quietly tight for longer than he'd noticed loosened slightly.
"You look terrible," he said.
"You look like you haven't slept in three days," she shot back immediately.
"Four, probably."
She stared at him. "Dawn."
"I'm fine."
"You literally just said four days,"
"Liz." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "How did you get here?"
That stopped her.
The energy didn't disappear exactly, it was too fundamental a part of her for that, but it dialed down. She pushed her glasses up her nose and sat back properly in the chair. Something shifted in her expression, something that hadn't been there a moment ago.
Serious. Genuinely serious.
Dawn waited.
"Okay," she said. "So." She paused, like she was deciding where to start. "You know how I was at the palace that day? For the tournament qualifiers?"
"Yeah."
"Right. So." Another pause. "Something came down."
Dawn frowned. "Came down?"
"From the sky. Or, I don't know, from somewhere. It was like a beam. Enormous. Just, " she spread her hands, searching for the words, "silent. No sound. No impact. Nothing fell, nothing broke. You could only see it. This massive beam of light just, there. Over the palace."
Dawn said nothing. He was listening with the kind of stillness that meant he was filing every word away.
"And then it was gone," Lizzy continued. "Just like that. And where it had been, " her jaw tightened slightly, "a piece of the palace was just missing. Like something had taken a bite out of it. Clean edges. No rubble. Just gone."
The common room was very quiet.
"Then it happened again," she said. "Somewhere else in the city. Then again. Then again. One by one, chunks of Rinzard just, taken. And people started running." She exhaled. "I ran too. And the beam, it.. it split. These smaller balls of light broke off from it and they were fast, Dawn. I've never seen anything move like that. They were going after people specifically. Not buildings, not the ground. People."
Dawn's eyes hadn't moved from her face.
"I tried to fight back," Lizzy said. Her voice was even but something underneath it wasn't. "Reached for my sequence and it just, didn't. It was there, I could feel it, my stars, my constellation, everything. But it was like it didn't want to activate. Like something was holding it back." She looked at him directly. "I've never felt that before. Not once."
Silence.
Then she let out a short breath and laughed quietly, just once, dry and a little helpless. "Honestly? It felt like the world was ending."
The laugh faded.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Dawn leaned back slowly in his chair and stared at the ceiling. The crystal pulse of the walls continued its patient rhythm, indifferent, steady.
Rinzard.
Chunks taken out of it. One by one. Methodical. Deliberate. Not an attack in the way he understood attacks, not destruction for its own sake but something more precise than that. Something that wanted specific things and took them cleanly and left everything else exactly as it was.
Including people.
He thought about his parents. About Rain. About the city he'd grown up in, familiar and messy and his.
He kept his expression exactly where it was.
"How many people do you think were taken?" he asked. His voice was level.
Lizzy shook her head. "No way to know. Hundreds maybe. Could be more. The balls of light were everywhere by the time I stopped being able to see the city."
Dawn nodded slowly.
He thought about Lake Dawn. About the four cocoons rising from the water, the voice of the world ringing out, the floating island, all of it. He'd assumed, without fully examining the assumption, that whatever had happened to him was connected to those four. That it was about them, not him. That he'd just been in the wrong place.
But if Rinzard had been targeted. If hundreds of people had been taken. If Lizzy had ended up here..
It wasn't about the wrong place.
Something had happened to Rinzard specifically. And whatever had pulled him out of it had pulled others out too, scattered them, sent them, where? Here? Elsewhere? Both?
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Where did you land?" he asked.
"About two days walk from the mountain entrance," Lizzy said. "Took me a while to figure out where I was. Longer to find my way here." She paused. "You?"
"Lake Dawn," he said. "Right as they came out of the water."
Lizzy blinked. Her eyes moved briefly to the golden-haired man by the wall, then back to Dawn. "...They?"
"Later," Dawn said.
She accepted that with the ease of someone who'd known him long enough to know later meant later and pushing wouldn't help.
The common room settled back into quiet. Outside, Crysallis hummed along at its usual pace, unbothered and indifferent, the merchant district already stirring into its morning rhythm.
Dawn looked at the ceiling for a long moment.
Then, "You got a place to stay?"
Lizzy's expression shifted, something quick and genuine crossing it before the energy came back. "I've been managing."
"That's not what I asked."
A pause. "...No."
Dawn looked at the golden-haired man.
The man met his gaze, said nothing, and gave the smallest nod.
Dawn looked back at Lizzy. "You're staying here."
She opened her mouth.
"Don't," he said.
She closed it. Then, "Okay." Quieter than usual. "Okay."
Dawn stood up, hands finding his pockets. "Come on then. There's people upstairs you should probably meet." He started toward the stairs, then stopped. "Fair warning, one of them is going to have a lot of questions."
"The silver haired one?" Lizzy asked, already grabbing her blade.
Dawn paused. "...You've been watching us."
"Since the plaza yesterday," she said, entirely unashamed.
Dawn stared at her for a long moment.
"Of course you have," he muttered, and kept walking.
Lizzy grinned and followed, cat ears catching the light as she fell into step behind him.