The light hurt.
Not in a dramatic way. Just a clean, unfiltered sharpness that made my eyes ache as soon as we emerged from the mine's mouth. I instinctively turned my face away, blinking hard as if I could negotiate with the sun into being gentler.
It did not oblige.
We had been underground longer than I realized. Long enough that the world above felt overexposed—colors too honest, edges too defined. The sky was a hard blue, the kind that didn't soften for anyone. Even the air felt thinner, as though it expected more of me now that I could see it properly.
I lifted a hand to shield my eyes and waited for the ache to pass.
It didn't.
We stopped without being told to.
When my vision steadied, the world rearranged itself.
A man sat on a sun-warmed rock just beyond the mine's shadow, positioned where the light broke cleanly across the ground.
His hands rested loosely atop the pommel of a massive sword, its tip planted into the earth before him at a slight angle—as if the weight of it was not something he needed to manage, only acknowledge. The blade was enormous. Not brutal in design. Simply vast, forged with the assumption that whoever wielded it had never needed to question whether they were strong enough to do so.
He rose when he noticed me looking.
He wore full plate, polished enough to catch the sunlight without glare. No dust marred it. No mark suggested travel or strain. The armor did not look new—it looked kept, as though neglect had never been an option.
There was magic there, woven into him so completely that separating it from the man felt like a mistake in thinking.
"You've been adjusting," he said.
His voice matched the memory. Calm. Measured. The same tone that had carried through my dreams.
"How does it feel," he continued, "being a bard?"
Behind me, the party stilled.
I didn't answer immediately.
The dream rose unbidden—the same posture, the same stillness, the same sense that he was not observing events so much as allowing them to occur. The sword. The expectation.
"It feels wrong," I said finally. "And useful."
A faint smile touched his expression.
"Good," he said. "Then you are paying attention."
His gaze flicked briefly to the others. Not dismissive. Not assessing. Simply acknowledging that they were present—and not part of this exchange.
"Was it helpful," he asked me, "to know certain things in advance?"
Imoen shifted. I heard the soft scrape of her boot on stone.
"To recognize patterns," he went on. "To anticipate danger."
Jaheira's staff tapped the ground once. A quiet, deliberate sound.
"What is he talking about?" Imoen muttered.
"Yes," I said. "It helped."
"Of course it did," he replied. "Predictability always does." He took a single step forward, the ground seeming to accept the weight of him without protest. "But it is not meaning."
He stopped a few paces away.
"Things exist to be challenged," he said. "Without resistance, there is no measure."
The sword shifted slightly as he rested both hands atop it again.
"You were given familiarity to orient yourself," he continued. "Nothing more."
My chest tightened.
"Appreciate what you were able to predict," he said. "It will not happen again."
A pause.
"From this point forward, the world will diverge."
For a moment, the land itself seemed to settle.
Not reveal—align.
The road ahead resolved into something coherent, its bends and slopes making sense in relation to the ground beneath my feet. Distances felt honest. Direction felt real. I did not know where the path led—but I knew where I stood.
The man watched my expression change.
"This clarity," he said, "is not a gift."
His tone remained calm. Exact.
"You have been disoriented since you arrived—not by danger, but by scale. Too many unknowns at once blur meaning." He gestured, vaguely, to the land around us. "So I remove the blur. Briefly."
The air felt quieter. Less crowded with threat it had not yet earned.
"Understand this," he continued. "I am not showing you what lies ahead. I am reminding you that the world exists independently of your confusion."
His gaze sharpened.
"This will not remain."
The alignment began to slip even as he spoke.
"You may attempt to survive what follows," he said. "Or you may attempt to shape it."
I swallowed.
"To impose order on what comes," he finished, "or to be erased by it."
He glanced past me, toward the road stretching away from the mine. Toward everything beyond it.
"If you wish to preserve your existence," he said, "and the existence of those bound to this world, then decide what chaos is allowed to remain."
Silence followed.
This was the stillness that comes when something has already been set in motion.
I blinked.
The sunlight stabbed.
My balance shifted—just a fraction, enough that I had to plant my foot more firmly against the ground. My breath came shallow for a beat too long, ribs tight as if I'd misjudged a step on uneven stone.
The man was gone.
Only the faint impression of the sword's point remained in the dirt—already softening, as though the ground itself was uncertain whether it was permitted to remember him.
The road no longer arranged itself.
Distances felt less honest again. Direction less certain. The land waited.
No one spoke.
Imoen was the first to exhale.
"…Okay," she said carefully. "So. Either I've hit my head harder than I thought, or we've officially passed the point where things make sense."
"If it helps," Xan said mildly, "things rarely make sense before they end."
Rasaad watched me for a moment longer than the others.
"The Sun teaches that clarity often arrives through strain," he said quietly. "If this was a challenge, then how you respond matters more than what was said."
Jaheira looked at me.
"Some encounters," she said, "are not meant to be shared."
I rubbed at my eyes, the ache still lingering behind them.
The sun did not soften.
And the road ahead no longer looked familiar enough to pretend it ever would.