Const had barely descended the last step of the stone stage before Aim was in front of him.
"Right," Aim said, planting himself with the particular energy of a man who had been holding a question for forty minutes and was done waiting.
"Who are you. Like—you surely hiding something, mysterious man."
onst blinked at him. "We've met."
"We've met," Aim agreed. "You told me your name and that we'd cross paths again. That was four days ago. Since then you've developed a framework that made Professor Phagorus ask a question he couldn't answer and demonstrated atomic rearrangement in a sealed box in a public park." A pause. "On a Saturday."
"It seemed like a good day for it."
"That's not an answer."
Isolde appeared at Aim's shoulder with the quiet efficiency she brought to everything. She had her arms crossed and was looking at Const with the expression she reserved for case files hiding something important in plain sight.
"You came from outside the wall," she said.
"I want you to think about what that actually means for a moment." She tilted her head.
"Beyond that gate is twenty years of Omen territory. What isn't corrupted and dead is either crawling with creatures the RMO classifies as too dangerous to engage, or it's criminal territory — people we don't let back in for very good reasons. The refugees who make it through alive arrive with nothing. Barely their names." Her eyes didn't leave his.
"And then there's you. Four days out of that, and you're on a stage dismantling forty years of magical theory with props you built yourself. With a framework that required years of research to develop. With experiments that needed equipment, time, controlled conditions." A pause, precise and deliberate.
"Where exactly outside that wall were you keeping your experimentation, Mister Const?"
Const looked at her. Then at Aim. Then back at Isolde.
"You two are very good at your jobs," he said, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.
"That's also not an answer," Aim said.
"I know." Const smiled — warm, unhurried, the smile of a man who had been askede harder questions than this and had considerably more practice on not answering them than either of them could reasonably imagine.
"I'm a private person. I hope that's not disqualifying. Don't wanna get send out."
Aim opened his mouth.
---
The crowd arrived with the momentum of a tide that had been held back for the length of an applause and was now making up for lost time.
A journalist from 'The North' already rushed to face with him and have his notebook opened. Two researchers appeared on his right, one of them still holding the notes he had been taking during the demonstration. A young student with ink-stained fingers hovered at the edge, working up the courage to speak. Behind them, three more scholars were already angling for position with the practiced determination of people who attended a lot of public events and knew how crowds worked.
Const was, in approximately eight seconds, no longer accessible.
Aim and Isolde stood slightly to the side and watched this happen.
"We'll finish this conversation," Isolde called after him.
"I look forward to it," Const called back, which was either a promise or a very polite deflection and sounded identical either way.
---
The journalist went first.
"Your name, for the record?"
"Const."
"Institutional affiliation?"
"None currently."
"Previous institution?"
"None on record."
The journalist paused with his pen hovering. "And you arrived in Orenthel—"
"Four days ago. Through the South Gate. My residency permit is valid for two months. I expect to have established academic credentials well so i will have money to prolong its age."
Const said all of this with the pleasant efficiency of a man who had anticipated every question in the sequence and had simply waited for them to be asked in order. "Is there anything about the actual work you'd like to discuss? I find the biographical framing less useful than the theoretical one."
The journalist, who had been doing this for years and had interviewed everyone from Council to RMO commanders, listing interesting topic to ask and be in newspaper.
The first researcher stepped in before the journalist had finished writing.
"The second box demonstration," he said, skipping any preamble whatsoever.
"The glass shard. You stated you rearranged the atoms of the glass into carbon dioxide. Our current understanding of atomic theory doesn't support precision rearrangement at that scale — the forces involved should be—"
"Ohh ohh" Const leant down to whisper to that scholar him.
"Sometime, the truth they want you to know wasn't what really happened, okay?"
"B-But i don't understand..? How can mere human brain did all that..?"
"It's about catalyst."
"Catalyst? But official said it didn't rearrange things?"
"Study politic more."
"Study Catalyst structure too. Catalyst is designed to assisted for creating basic-human imaginable things.. that's why you never seen something unimaginable from them.. That's the Catalyst they gave you and those officers"
"Question more — why do her majesty can do theese that those, why do higher RMO rank can create more fireball, why do they limit use of catalyst toward academic faction."
The scholar just did a repetitive nod and taking note enthusiasticly.
"But this is what you can put in your research."
He stand straight again, his voice get louder.
"The standard model assumes the magician works against the material—imposes a new state onto it by sheer will. My framework proposes something simpler. The difficulty of any magical command isn't about power. It's about comprehension."
He set the box down.
"If you understand what the material already is — what it contains, what it's naturally close to becoming — then commanding the transformation requires far less precision than forcing one from scratch. The glass didn't resist because I wasn't asking it to become something foreign to its own composition. Glass already contains carbon, oxygen, and silicon. Carbon dioxide was already within reach of what that glass was. I didn't impose a new state. I recognized its structure and redirected it as you can see."
The researcher stared at him.
"You read the material," he said slowly.
"Before I redirect it. Yes."
"That implies a form of magical perception we don't have a formal framework for."
"It implies several things we don't have formal frameworks for," Const agreed. "That's rather the point of doing it publicly."
The researcher wrote something down at speed. Then looked up. "Can you teach it?"
"Maybe." Const said.
He glanced toward the young student with the ink-stained fingers who had been hovering with increasing desperation at the edge of the group.
"Did you have a question?"
The student startled as though she had been caught doing something. "I — yes. I'm sorry. I'm a second-year at the Erudite Institution. My thesis is on magical law boundary conditions and I've been — I mean, your argument about Purification—" She stopped, reorganized herself visibly, and tried again. "You said Purification might not be magic. What do you think it is?"
The group went slightly quieter. This was, Aim realized from where he was standing, actually the best question anyone had asked.
Const looked at the student for a moment with an expression that was not quite a smile and not quite something else.
"I think," he said, carefully, "that Purification operates on a principle we don't have language for yet. And I think we can find answer in patern-noticing." He paused. "and I think Purification is a window into manys more question. And I think answering it will require a kind of thinking we haven't formalized yet."
The student was writing so fast her pen was barely keeping up.
"What kind of thinking?" she asked, without looking up.
"Mathematical. Structural. The kind that treats the laws of reality less like natural facts and more like—" He stopped. A brief pause, half a second, the length of a thought being edited before it reached the air. "Like a system with a logic that can be understood from the outside, if you find the right vantage point."
He moved on to the next question before anyone had time to ask what he meant by outside.
---
Aim had been watching all of this from a distance not too far not too close, which was close enough to follow the conversation and far enough to observe it properly. Isolde was beside him with her arms still crossed, doing the same thing with more discipline.
"He almost said something just then," Aim said quietly. "When the student asked about Purification. He started a sentence and changed it."
"I noticed," Isolde said.
"What do you think he was going to say?"
"Something true, something exceed our understanding." she said. "Which is why he didn't say it." Isolde roll her eye toward Aim "Or do you think he is afraid to say it for some reason?"
"Could be."
They stood with that for a moment.
"He's not going to slip up out here," Aim said. "He's too comfortable with a crowd. He knows how to redirect."
"Yes."
"We need a different environment."
Isolde was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was already three steps ahead of the conversation. "Somewhere smaller. Less structured. Where redirecting a question looks more obviously like redirecting a question."
"Somewhere with drinks," Aim said.
Isolde looked at him sideways.
"The Rusty Gear," she said.
"I was going to say that."
"You were going to say it less efficiently."
Aim considered this. "Fair."
They waited. The crowd around Const thinned gradually, the way crowds do when they've gotten what they came for and the next thing is somewhere else. The journalist closed his notebook. The researchers drifted back toward their contingent, still talking to each other in low urgent voices. The student with the ink-stained fingers left with the expression of someone who had just had a very good and very confusing day.
Const turned and found them immediately — that same precise gaze, the one that always seemed to know exactly where they were without having to look — and crossed the remaining distance without being called.
"Still here," he observed.
"We wanted to congratulate you," Aim said, with his most pleasant expression. "Properly. Over drinks."
Const looked at him. Then at Isolde. Then back at Aim.
"Free drinks," he said.
"Obviously."
The small smile. "Who would refuse."
He fell into step beside them without being asked, heading back toward the South District through the evening crowd. Aim and Isolde exchanged a glance behind his back — the specific glance of two people whose plan was entering its second phase and who both understood, without saying it, that the second phase was probably not going to go the way the first phase hadn't gone either.
But they were committed now.
The Rusty Gear was around the corner, the ale was enthusiastically brown, and one way or another, tonight they were going to find out who Const actually was.
---
The Rusty Gear was decorated by any reasonable metric, not a good bar.
The ceiling was low. The lighting was lower. The chairs did not match. Several of the floorboards had opinions about being walked on. The ale came in a colour Aim had once described as "enthusiastically brown" and Isolde had described as "evidence of wrongdoing."
It was, for reasons never formally discussed, their bar.
They settled into the corner booth — Aim and Isolde on one side, Const on the other — and the bartender arrived with three glasses before anyone had ordered.
Aim and Isolde exchanged a glance.
The plan was simple. Get Const talking. Keep refilling his glass. Wait.
Const picked up his glass, examined it with mild curiosity, and drank.
"So," Aim said pleasantly. "You're not from Orenthel."
"No," Const agreed.
"Where from?"
"Further north. Originally."
"Originally," Isolde repeated, in the tone she used when filing something away.
"The north is mostly dead land now," Aim said. "Has been for about fifteen years. Most people who came from there arrived here much earlier than four days ago."
"Most people," Const agreed, without any particular stress on the words.
Aim refilled Const's glass. Const thanked him and drank it at exactly the same pace as the first, which was to say the pace of a man with nowhere else to be and no intention of going anywhere.
An hour passed. The Rusty Gear filled around them. The plan was not going well.
The problem, Aim was beginning to understand, was that Const was genuinely good company. He asked questions — real ones. He asked Isolde about the work as Greycoat rank in RMO, and she found herself explaining in more detail than intended. He asked Aim about the Palace and why he'd left, and Aim, who had deflected that question for three years running, heard himself giving something close to an honest answer before he realized what he was doing.
Const, meanwhile, had consumed four glasses and appeared to be operating at full capacity.
Aim had consumed four glasses and was beginning to feel them considerably.
"You're not getting drunk," Aim observed.
"I'm not," Const agreed.
"That's hard to believe."
"Most things about me are, apparently."
"At least you admit it."
Const smiled — warm, unhurried, a little too comfortable for a man four days into a new acquaintance. Aim noticed this through the pleasant fog that was beginning to settle across his thinking.
"You two have never changed-"
He shook his head.
"Mhmm nothing.."
The laugh was drought.
It look like a recovery. The kind of thing you wouldn't catch if you weren't paying attention. Aim was paying attention. He was also four glasses in, which meant the attention was present but arriving slightly late to everything.
'Changed from what?' The thought surfaced slowly, like something floating up through murky water. We met four days ago.
"Const," he said.
"Mm."
"You said 'changed.'"
Const looked at him over the rim of his glass with an expression of mild, pleasant curiosity that did not reach his eyes quite the way it should have. "Did I?" he said.
Aim opened his mouth. Closed it. The thought was already sinking back down, the ale pulling it under before he could get a proper grip on it.
"...I probably overlapse my friend over you two," he muttered, and put his head down.
Const took a sip and said nothing.
---
Isolde who have been sitting still and wait for right moment to continue her convo since Aim started speaking finally get to continue it
She ordered another glassed of ale, second glass
On second glasses of Isolde, She had abandoned the investigation entirely and was delivering a detailed critique of the RMO structure to an audience of one, who was listening with more genuine attention than the topic probably warranted.
"Okay so—" Isolde leaned forward, dropping her voice to the conspiratorial tone of someone who had been waiting to say this for a while.
"The Whitecoat and Redcoat threshold? Solely on section commander's word. That's it. That's the whole system." She gestured with her glass for emphasis. "Commander Vael promoted three of his own cadets to Whitecoat last spring. Three. All from his unit. All passed on his personal recommendation alone with zero independent assessment." She leaned back with the exhausted energy of someone who had been personally wronged by bureaucracy. "Set during the third Council restructure by people thinking about political optics, not magical aptitude nor will to serve country! Nobody's stand against it since standing up against higher rank mean.. mean.. ughh" The alcohol is affecting her linguistic thinking.
"Dead of carrier part." Aim assist.
"Exactly." Isolde pointed at him. "He understands. He's useless but he understands."
Const was giggling, not the laugh that exist jsut to make speaker not feeling left out. Something warmer, less guarded, like a man who hadn't laughed like this in a long time and had not been sure he was still allowed to.
Aim noticed this. Filed it.
"In my experience," Const said, when it settled, his voice slightly less performing than usual, "the best partnerships are ones where both people are useless at completely different things. It balances out."
"Your experience," Isolde said. "You're twenty-three."
"Twenty-three? Where did you get that from?" he paused "Nevermind, whatever."
"You are twenty-three to us nevertheless, do work."
The group of three fell into the brief awkward silence
"I think." Const looked between them — that warm precise gaze, something in it Aim couldn't quite name. "I think we'll drink like this again. Many times. After accomplishing something worth drinking for."
Aim lifted his head.
Const was looking at his glass. But there was something in the set of his shoulders, in the quality of the smile that had gone quiet on his face, that didn't match casual small talk with a four-day acquaintance. It matched something much more genuine. Something that looked, from a certain foggy angle, like relief.
Like a man who had been carrying something for a very long time and had been briefly, carefully, allowed to put it down.
"Const," Aim said. Carefully. Through four glasses of enthusiastically brown ale. "Who are you actually."
Const looked up. For half a second something moved across his face that Aim could not categorize. Not guilt. Not calculation. Something older than either of those.
Then the smile came back, easy and warm.
"Someone who is very glad to be here," he said. "Tonight, specifically."
Aim looked at him for a long moment.
Then he put his head back down on the table, because the ceiling had started moving in a way he didn't entirely trust, and want to filed everything about Const—to be examined later, when the room had stopped being so warm.
Aim just blackout because of the alcohol.
Isolde set her glass down and looked Const with the expression she used for cases that were hiding something.
"I'm going to figure you out," she said, with great certainty.
"I know," Const said kindly.
"That's not reassuring."
"I know that too."
Outside, a gas lamp flickered once on the street corner and held steady.
"I will pay if you help me carried this sleeping princess to his place." Isolde said
"Heh? It's not in the deal of 'free drink" you give though.. fine, miss."
"Check please." Isolde called out to the bartender then pay the bill
---
Aim was not a small man, which made carrying him an exercise in logistics rather than sentiment.
Const had one arm, Isolde had the other, and Aim had the particular dead weight of someone who had committed fully to unconsciousness and had no intention of returning from it anytime soon. He muttered "Mhmm greycoat got lots of pretty girl.. must get to them through Isolde.." — and then went quiet again.
"What a jerk right?" Isolde said, while grinning slightly
"I assumed," Const said.
They navigated the narrow streets of the South District in the direction of Aim's apartment, which Isolde knew the way to without thinking about it, the way you know the route to somewhere you have walked to more times than you have counted. The gas lamps threw long shadows across the cobblestones. The city was quieter now — the Saturday evening crowd retreating indoors, the distant sound of someone's window closing against the night air.
Const was quiet in the comfortable way of someone who did not feel the need to fill silence. Isolde appreciated this more than she expected to.
After a while she said, without quite deciding to
"We grew up in the same street."
Const glanced at her.
"Aim and I," she clarified. "Three houses apart. His mother used to send him over with vegetables from her garden because she grew more than she needed and my family" A pause. "We needed them, some years."
She shifted Aim's arm slightly across her shoulders.
"He was insufferable as a child," she continued, in the fond tone of someone describing something they would not change. "Clever and rebellious in the way that gets children into trouble—always standing up over littke thing, high risk no reward you can say." she paused
"We once have overly strict history teacher with big ego.. he state in his class that Thalassia lose on the war against Valemont in the year four hundred eighty four. And then Aim stood up are argue with him, he raise some—I don't book that claimed it contain recorded of every army influence throught out ancient time and he state that due to Thalassia's advantage geography and the fact that it was a big hub for trading—they have so much ally and benefit so that their ally wouldn't let it collapse because they would afraid that the new leader would make conflict of interest or something like that.
She almost smiled. "Teacher dragged him out of class after that."
"Few years later that record turnt out to be according to newspaper during the conflict between Valemon and Thalassia two hundred years ago. They never had a war, just nationalist propaganda to make them hate Thalassia and boost themselve."
Const said nothing. She got the sense he was listening in the specific way that she can't think of the word of.
"He was top thirty in the royale cadet program," she said. "Out of four hundred and twelve applicants that year. He graduated and went straight to the Palace Affairs Office—which was what everyone expected, what he was built for." She looked at the dark street ahead.
"He requested the residency post eight months later. Never explained why, not properly. Said the Palace was 'suffocating.' Which is true, from what I've heard. But Aim doesn't leave things because they're hard." A pause. "He leaves things when he decides they're wrong. And he doesn't always say which thing it was." She glanced at Const sideways.
"You're not surprised by any of this."
It wasn't a question.
Const adjusted his grip on Aim's arm, looking ahead. "He stamp my permit like someone who has always known exactly what he living for." he said. "Those people tend to find institutional politics difficult."
"Living for? Didn't know he like stamping that much.." Isolde teased
"Just kidding, I get it though, you mean he would prefer working in role that contribute to refugee than serving those politician."
They walked another half-block in silence. Above them the sky was the particular dark of a city that never went fully quiet — orange-tinged at the edges from the gas lamp.
They reached Aim's building. Third floor, second door on the left — she knew without checking. She had walked him home before, on nights less eventful than this one.
They got him through the door and onto the narrow sofa in his front room, which was cluttered with the particular organized chaos of someone who read too much and filed nothing. Aim resettled himself immediately into the cushions with the contentment of a man who had found his natural habitat.
Isolde pulled his coat over him. Stood.
When she turned, Const was looking at the room — the stacked papers, the marked-up maps of the city districts on the wall, the small collection of books with broken spines from being read too many times. Looking at it with an expression she couldn't fully read in the low light. Something between recognition and something older.
"It was as if you've here before," she said, before she could stop herself.
Const just reply with silence.
"Right," she said.
She picked up her coat from the chair by the door.
"Goodnight, Mister Const."
"Goodnight, Officer Isolde."
She left first. On the stairs she paused once, without knowing why, and looked back at the closed door.
Nothing unusual. Just a door.
She kept walking.