Chapter 64: How to Rescue Someone Who’d Never Admit Needed Saving (4)
There was a certain kind of silence that only happens when you’re too free to know what to do with your freedom.
And that was the silence that followed me as I walked through the containment wing of Antoril’s guard post—alone, no guards, no shackles, no guidance. Just me, my stubbornness, and the misshapen urgency to find Thalia before the city swallowed her whole.
What bothered me—aside from the persistent smell of mildew and evaporated dignity—was how easy everything had been.
One guard? In the capital? With an unconscious prisoner and a half-orc soaked in blood and mud? Either the guard administration was understaffed, or... there was something else. Something that reeked of authorized abandonment.
Even so, I pressed on.
The small administrative room—if it could even be called a room—was at the end of the corridor. The door was ajar.
A crooked chair, a desk with papers stacked in no visible order, and of course, the inevitable mug with something that once resembled coffee and now qualified as its own ecosystem. There was no magical presence there. Just neglect. The kind of place where reports go to die when no one wants to write the truth in them.
I approached cautiously. The papers were divided into piles of despair: unfinished reports, detainment orders, prisoner records scribbled over until their very souls were erased.
I didn’t look for logic. I rummaged the way one digs through muck hoping to find a soggy map.
And then I found it.
A small document, written in the rushed hand of someone at the end of their shift, dated the night before—or maybe earlier that very dawn. A short note. Straight to the point.