They left Duskfall at dawn with the light still grey and the settlement still sleeping.
Aelara had said goodbye to Vest the evening before not a full goodbye, not an explanation, just a conversation at the well that closed in a specific way that people in the borderlands understood meant someone was moving on.
Vest had looked at her with the forty years of borderlands experience that lived behind her eyes and said: the network knows how to find you if it needs to. Aelara had said: I know how to find it if I need to. And they had left it at that.
She had not said goodbye to anyone else.
The relationships she had built in Duskfall were real and they were also, in the way of everything she built in these years, constructed to be functional rather than dependent. The settlement would be fine. The Wednesday well conversations would happen with whoever came next. The early-warning network she had helped connect would keep running.
