The first hint arrived disguised as boredom.
Kvasir sat in a quiet annex of the palace data wing, surrounded by screens that displayed nothing a casual observer would find interesting. Freight tables, refinery outputs, customs manifests, transit authorizations—tedious numbers stacked atop one another like sediment. He worked without haste, fingers moving with the assured rhythm of a man raised in a culture that treated secrets as currency and patience as a weapon. If House Mordred's strategy was erosion, then the best counter was not a blade, but a ledger sharpened into a knife.
Tobias entered without ceremony, accompanied by Trace and the faint, habitual awareness that SCORPIO could be listening even when the room appeared empty. The Quiet Sisterhood haze lingered at the edges of his inner sight whenever SCORPIO was near, a soft blur that made prescience feel like trying to read text through fogged glass. He had not voiced that discomfort to many, but Trace saw the tension in the set of his shoulders. "You look like you're bracing for impact," Trace said softly, keeping his tone casual. Tobias offered a thin smile that did not reach his eyes, then looked to Kvasir.
"You asked for me," Tobias said.
Kvasir glanced up, pleasant as ever, then turned one screen outward so Tobias could see the line highlighted in pale gold. "I found a shipment that should not exist," he replied, as though announcing a minor inconsistency rather than the beginning of a crisis. "It's old, buried beneath revisions, concealed behind canceled work orders, and routed through transit nodes that were decommissioned before No'aar even entered its current stewardship." His eyes flicked to Trace, then back to Tobias. "Someone went to extraordinary lengths to make this record invisible. Which means it matters."
Trace leaned closer, scanning the line. "Dust," he said, and the word carried weight in the palace now, no longer merely commodity but power. Kvasir nodded once. "Ultra-pure," he confirmed. "Not refinery-grade. Not even standard export grade. The kind that would be reserved for state-level research or… private leverage." Tobias felt a chill, because purity in Dust was never accidental, and never transported without purpose.
Kvasir expanded the route with a gesture, and the projection unfolded into a chain of false destinations. The shipment had been "reassigned" dozens of times, each reassignment a paper mask placed atop the last, until the trail resembled a spiderweb rather than a line. It passed through neutral nodes, then through a corridor that belonged to no House and no corporation, then vanished behind an encrypted customs closure. Tobias watched the route and felt the future tighten, not into clarity, but into warning.
"Where does it end?" Tobias asked.
Kvasir hesitated for the first time, which told Tobias more than the answer itself. "That's the problem," Kvasir said carefully. "It ends outside Mordred lanes, outside Lunan lanes, and outside the standard Imperial registry. It is not simply illegal. It is unclaimed." He highlighted the final node: a designation Tobias did not recognize, a name that looked like a code word rather than a place. "Whatever was waiting there," Kvasir added, "wanted to exist without history."
Tobias felt that quiet pressure behind his eyes again, a familiar prelude to vision, and he forced himself to breathe slowly. "How old is this?" he asked, keeping his voice level. Kvasir checked a timestamp and frowned. "Older than our No'aar operation by years," he said. "Old enough that the people who signed the initial authorizations are either dead, disgraced, or promoted into places where questions no longer reach them." Trace's expression hardened, because rot that old meant it had been cultivated, not merely tolerated.
They did not take the discovery to SCORPIO by choice, but by necessity.
SCORPIO arrived as they always did—quietly, efficiently, and without offering the courtesy of surprise. The commander entered Kvasir's annex with two operators whose presence Tobias felt as haze more than sight, their minds smoothed into disciplined blankness. Tobias resisted the reflex to probe, because the Quiet Sisterhood training in them would turn his effort into nothing but strain. He watched instead, measuring posture, timing, and the faint, controlled distance between each operator, as though the spacing itself was a language.
Kvasir presented the route without embellishment, and SCORPIO studied it with a stillness that resembled indifference only to those who had never seen predators evaluate prey. The commander's gaze flicked across the final node, and Tobias caught the smallest change in her expression—an almost imperceptible tightening near the eyes. It was not fear. It was recognition. "This route is not a Mordred construct," she said at last. "And not Lunan. This pattern matches anomalies recorded in classified SCORPIO archives." Trace's jaw tightened. "Anomalies," he repeated, making it sound like an accusation.
The commander's eyes remained calm. "Events that do not fit official history," she said. "Shipments that vanish, signals that appear where they should not, dead relays that suddenly transmit again. We have seen this before." Tobias felt the room constrict around that admission, because it meant the Emperor's finest did not fully understand what they hunted. He watched the two operators behind her and wondered how many things they had done in the dark that even they could not explain.
"What is the destination?" Tobias asked.
The commander's answer was honest in the way a locked door was honest. "Classified," she said. "Not because we distrust you, Lord Tobias, but because certain knowledge becomes a liability the moment it is spoken aloud." Tobias almost laughed, but he did not, because the truth of that statement was too sharp to be mocked. He had already felt how SCORPIO's mind-blocking dulled his prescience, and he understood now that the Emperor did not merely fear enemies. He feared uncontrolled information.
Trace's voice cut through the tension. "Then what do we do?" he asked.
"We verify," the commander replied. "We isolate the origin points, identify who authorized the diversion, and determine whether additional shipments exist." Her gaze shifted to Kvasir. "Your skills are useful. Continue. Quietly." Then her eyes returned to Tobias. "And you will not pursue this alone. You will not chase shadows without SCORPIO oversight." Tobias held her gaze, feeling the haze around her operators like a field of muffled sound. "Understood," he said, though he did not like it.
That night, Tobias slept poorly.
The palace was quiet, but not peaceful, and the sea wind through the arches seemed to carry messages he could not decipher. He lay awake for hours, watching moonlight crawl across the ceiling, feeling his prescience pulse like a heartbeat that refused to settle. When exhaustion finally overcame him, it did not grant rest. It opened a door.
The dream began with cold metal and the smell of ozone.
Tobias stood in a corridor that was not No'aar's stone and coral, not the warm elegance of Hawthorne architecture, but something older and harsher. The walls were ribbed with industrial reinforcement, slick with condensation that froze in thin, translucent sheets. Dim red lights blinked in slow intervals, like a warning that had been repeating for years. He heard distant machinery, a groan that sounded less like functioning equipment and more like something awakening unwillingly.
He turned, and the corridor stretched into darkness.
A symbol glowed faintly on a sealed door ahead, not a House crest, not a corporate mark, but a shape that made his stomach tighten with instinctive dread. He could not name it, yet his mind insisted he had seen it before in fragments of half-dreams, the kind the Quiet Sisterhood taught him to quiet. The door's seams vibrated, and from beyond it came a low hum that felt like thought without language. Tobias stepped forward, compelled, and as he reached out, his prescience flared—only it did not branch into futures. It collapsed into a single, blunt certainty.
This place is real.
The door opened.
Not fully, but enough for cold air to spill out, carrying a scent like scorched circuitry and stale Dust. Tobias saw only a sliver beyond—darkness, faint blue light, and the suggestion of vast machinery suspended like a sleeping god. Then a voice entered his mind, not telepathy in the way he knew it, but something heavier, older, as though the corridor itself had spoken.
You are late.
Tobias jolted awake with a gasp, sweat cold on his skin despite the warm air. The palace ceiling stared back at him in silent innocence, but the feeling did not fade. His heart hammered, and he pressed a hand to his brow as though he could physically push the dream back into nothing. Yet the images remained sharp, as if carved rather than imagined, and the final certainty stayed lodged behind his eyes like a shard.
He rose and crossed to the balcony, staring out at No'aar's endless ocean.
In the distance, the capital's lights glittered across the water like scattered stars, while above, the sky remained calm and indifferent. Tobias clenched his fingers against the rail until his knuckles whitened, because he understood now what the diverted shipment truly meant. Someone had been moving Dust not for profit, not for war alone, but for something hidden outside every map he knew. The future had opened a door elsewhere, and it had spoken his name without using it.
When Tobias returned to his chamber, he did not try to sleep again.
Instead, he activated his holocomputer and began writing down every detail he could remember, because the Quiet Sisterhood had taught him that visions faded when unanchored. He recorded the corridor, the symbol, the hum, the voice, and the certainty that it was real. Then he stopped, staring at the final line on the page, the one his hands had written without conscious instruction.
The war is not spreading. It was seeded.
And Tobias Hawthorne, watched by SCORPIO and measured by the Emperor, realized with chilling clarity that No'aar was only one front of a conflict that had been planned long before he was born.