Luke reached the plaza and spotted a familiar figure sitting on one of the benches. Eleanor.
“Am I late?”
“You’re late… again,” she replied without looking up.
“I had a few things to take care of. Bought what I needed for traveling, even got my ship passage.”
“We barely survived one insane adventure and you’re already throwing yourself into another.”
“Well, you’re here in the New World too, aren’t you?” he teased.
She pulled a thick bundle of documents from the pocket dimension in her bracelet.
“I’m here on official business. I’m a diplomat now, remember?”
Luke glanced at the papers. The name Sirius stood out immediately.
He flipped through the pages, reading carefully.
“Thanks for this, Eleanor. I promise I’ll repay you in some other way, since you refuse to take money.”
“It’s for… a friend,” she said. “So I’m not charging you for it.” Then she studied him more closely. “Are you really set on this? Even after reuniting with your family?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “I’m going to kill the Dragon Queen. She came to me and took a friend away. I couldn’t do anything… not yet. This is my first step. Until the day I can do the same to her.”
Luke stored the documents back into the pocket dimension of his necklace. “What are these rifts?”
“From everything I could uncover about Sirius, nothing stood out more than that. It’s just a modest city on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Lagras, the very last town before the frontier. And yet, one of the dimensional rifts appeared there. Strangely enough… within the past year.”
“Dimensional rifts… interesting.”
“Our world didn’t just grow larger geographically,” Eleanor explained. “It expanded dimensionally. These rifts lead to other places, as if the planet exists in the same space, but layered across different versions of reality.”
“So the only truly interesting thing in that city is the rift,” Luke said. “Which means whatever I’m supposed to find is probably there.”
“And what exactly are you looking for?”
“I don’t even know yet,” he admitted.
When their conversation ended, Luke headed toward the harbor to wait for his ship. Over the past two days in Camlann, he’d searched for the fastest way to reach Sirius. The most practical route was by ship, crossing what people called the Continental Sea. In truth, it was a river so massive it might as well have been an ocean. He would have to stop in one of the port cities first, then continue on to Sirius.
***
The wind was strong as Luke stepped off the ship at the harbor. He had arrived in Black Stone, one of the major cities of the Kingdom of Lagras. The journey had taken eight days by "sea". Charlie had remained within his soul the entire time, since even a few hours outside would have cost her one point of Blood Energy.