Barin didn't request a formal meeting.
He sent a small folded note with a palace servant. No address. No signature. Just one sentence in calm, even handwriting:
"I am in the northern wing garden. Whenever you wish."
Ether read it twice. Folded it. Set it on the table.
"Whenever you wish" — that wasn't an invitation. That was a message from someone who knew you would come and was only waiting for you to decide when to admit it.
He said to Kai without looking up: "Watch the northern corridor. I want to know how many guards are with him and exactly where they stand."
Kai returned ten minutes later. "One man. No guards. He's sitting on the stone bench by the window. Reading."
"What is he reading?"
Kai paused. "I didn't notice."
"Always notice what people read." Ether stood and took his coat. "It tells you what they want you to think of them."
The northern garden was small and neglected — wild plants that had grown without anyone caring for them, and wet stones that smelled of moss. Barin sat on the stone bench as Kai had said, a book open on his knees, his eyes on the page.
Ether stopped three meters away and looked at the book.
Spectral Creature Neural Anatomy — an old edition, its cover cracked from long use.
"Good book," Ether said. "Chapter seven is completely wrong."
Barin raised his eyes slowly. No surprise. No greeting. Just a calm grey look measuring the distance between what he had expected and what he saw.
"Which part exactly?"
"It says the central neural node in Rank Two phantoms responds to thermal pressure." Ether sat on the opposite stone without being invited. "It doesn't respond to heat. It responds to sudden pressure change. A small difference, but it changes everything about how you handle them."
A short silence.
"Where did you learn that?" Barin asked.
"Experience."
"What kind of experience gives a mine slave knowledge that corrects academic texts?"
Ether didn't answer. He just looked at him with eyes that waited for the real question.
Barin closed the book slowly. Set it on the bench beside him. "Valerian lost fifteen percent of his spectral channel capacity. Not a disease. Not an accident. Something taken from him with surgical precision I haven't seen in fifty years of practice." He looked at Ether's hands. "Your hands."
"My hands what?"
"I want to see your hands."
A moment. Then Ether extended his hands forward — palms up, completely still. No trembling. No tension.
Barin looked at them for a long time without touching them.
"Valerian's dissection was extremely precise work," he said finally. "The kind that requires at least twenty years of training. You don't look older than fifteen."
"Appearances—"
"Lie, yes." Barin cut him off quietly. "But hands don't lie. The skin, the way calluses distribute across the fingers, the natural angle of the bend — these are the hands of someone who spent decades holding surgical instruments." He looked at Ether's face. "Not years. Decades."
Ether didn't move.
"My question isn't who you are," Barin continued. "My question is simpler than that." He reached into his inner pocket and produced the small old notebook he had opened in the examination room the night before. He opened it to the same page. Turned it to show Ether the line.
Ether read it.
His expression didn't change. But behind his eyes something moved — something small, fast, like the shadow of a bird crossing a window.
The line was in Barin's own handwriting:
"Talent Leaching — a forgotten technique. Last used by: The Unnamed Master. Two hundred years ago."
"Where did you get this?" Ether's voice was completely calm.
"I wrote it myself." Barin returned the notebook to his pocket. "When I was a student, my teacher described this technique as legend. He said whoever invented it disappeared before teaching it to anyone." He looked directly at Ether. "I didn't expect to see its trace in a noble's body on a remote island at the edge of the world."
Long silence.
The wind moved the leaves of the wild plants. Somewhere distant, the sound of sea.
"What exactly do you want?" Ether asked.
"Nothing from you." Barin's answer came immediately and quietly. "I am an old man with one curiosity left in his life." He paused. "I want to know if the legend is real."
Ether looked at him for a long time. He read him with the Spiritual Microscope — his pulse, his muscle tension, his energy flow. A man speaking honestly. No fear. No ambition. Just an old curiosity pulsing like an ember that hadn't gone out.
This was the most dangerous kind of person.
"The legend is real," Ether said finally.
Barin didn't smile. Didn't react. He just closed his eyes for one second — like someone hearing confirmation of something they had doubted for a long time.
"Then," he opened his eyes, "who are you really?"
In the eastern wing of the palace, Valerian sat at his desk staring at a letter that had arrived an hour ago.
Red seal. Wax broken carefully.
Barin had finally answered his question.
He read it slowly. Once. Twice.
In the last line Barin had written:
"What happened to your channels is not a disease and not an accident. This was deliberate. And whoever did it is still close to you."
Valerian set the letter on the desk.
He looked at the window.
Then he looked at his hand — the hand Ether had held that night. The hand that had carried a faint numbness ever since that day, which he had thought was an aftereffect of the illness.
He slowly closed his fist.