The elder came to them while the dust was still settling.
She was old, small and slightly bent at the shoulder, with hands that had done decades of real work and a face that had processed a great deal of life and arrived at a kind of permanent, unshockable steadiness.
She walked across the ruined market space with a carved wooden cane and in no particular hurry, stepping around the debris without looking at it, her eyes on the three of them the entire way.
She stopped in front of Lucius.
She looked up at him, looked at the fallen alpha behind him. Looked at the destroyed stalls and the cracked well and the buildings that had taken damage they hadn’t had before the morning started.
Then she looked back at him.
"You saved us," she said. Her voice was the voice of someone who had been speaking plainly their entire life and saw no reason to change the habit now. "We’re really grateful for all you have done, but we have nothing to repay you with."
It was a statement of fact delivered by someone who understood the weight of it and wasn’t going to dress it up in language it didn’t need.
Lucius nodded. "We’re not here for repayment."
"Then what are you here for?"
The villagers behind her had gathered into a loose group, close enough to hear, far enough back to maintain the particular distance of people who hadn’t yet decided what the three strangers in their market space were.
Some of them were still looking at the fallen alpha. Some of them were looking at Valeria, which was understandable. A few of them were looking at Seraphine with the specific wariness reserved for corrupted divine energy in a region that had learned hard lessons about what divine energy could do.
"We’re looking for someone," Lucius said. "A seer or someone with seer potential." He paused. "Someone who sees things they shouldn’t be able to see."
The elder’s expression shifted, the particular look of someone who has been waiting for a specific conversation without knowing they were waiting for it.
She was quiet for a moment, then without further thoughts, she spoke.
"We have a girl," she said. "Come with me."
****
The elder’s name was Marta.
She told them this while she led them through the village, past the sections that needed repair and the villagers who were already beginning it, past the building that served as their combined meeting hall and storage and whatever else the village needed it to be on a given day.
"She studies old books," Marta said, her cane finding the ground with the same steady rhythm her feet did. "Ones she gets from traders passing through, mostly. Reads everything she can find about divine history, and old theology, pre-Church records."
"She talks about seeing things. Visions, she calls them. Distant places, events before they happen, sometimes after." A pause with something uncomfortable in it. "We never really believed her."
"Why not?" Seraphine asked.
Marta was quiet for a moment. "Because believing her would have meant something was happening to one of ours that we didn’t understand and couldn’t help with." She said it with the honesty of someone who had already passed judgment on themselves for it and moved on.
"It was easier to think she was going through something. A phase. That she’d settle out of it eventually."
"Did she?" Lucius asked.
"No," Marta said. "She didn’t."
She stopped in front of a door at the end of a narrow side street, one of the smaller structures in the village, set slightly apart from the buildings on either side. She knocked twice and pushed it open without waiting for a response.
"Mira," she said into the interior. "There are people here who want to speak with you."
The girl inside was not what he had expected, though he hadn’t examined what he was expecting closely enough to say exactly what that was.
She was young, and tall in the way of someone who had grown quickly. Pale — genuinely pale, not the pallor of illness but the natural colouring of someone who spent most of their time indoors by choice.
She was wearing glasses, small wire frames that she pushed up her nose with one finger in the automatic gesture of someone who did it constantly, and she was sitting at a table covered in open books with three more stacked beside her and one open in her lap that she was still holding when they came through the door, her finger marking her place.
She looked at Marta first. Then at the three of them.
Her eyes were the specific alert kind that read a room quickly and quietly, taking in details without making a production of it.
She took in Lucius, then Valeria — a slightly longer pause on Valeria — then Seraphine, and he could see the same process happening that happened in anyone with genuine observational instinct.
Then she realized how many of them there were and how little space the room had and she stood up too quickly and the book in her lap went to the floor and she bent to get it and pushed her glasses up again all in one slightly tangled sequence.
"Sorry," she said, to the room in general. "I wasn’t — Marta didn’t say—"
"Sit down, Mira," Marta said, not unkindly.
Mira picked the book up from the floor first, set it on the stack with the others, then sat down. She pushed her glasses up again even though they hadn’t moved.
Lucius pulled the nearest chair out and sat across from her. Seraphine and Valeria stayed standing, which was probably the right call given the room’s dimensions.
Mira looked at him with those careful attentive eyes and waited.
"The visions," he said. "Tell me about them."
Something moved through her expression. Not surprise, that he knew. Marta had obviously said something, but the particular reaction of someone who had said the word visions in front of enough people who responded badly that they’d developed a reflex around it.
"They started when I was young," she said. Her voice was steady, which he suspected took more effort than it appeared to. "I would dream about places I’d never been. Sometimes events — things that hadn’t happened yet, or were happening somewhere else at the same time." She looked at her hands on the table.
"Once I dreamed about a village flooding three days before it flooded. I told people." A pause. "They didn’t listen."
"And when you’re awake?"
"Sometimes, less controlled. Fragments, mostly. A face I don’t recognize. A sound with no context." She pushed her glasses up. "I’ve been trying to understand the mechanism. There’s pre-Church scholarship on divination, the old texts call it Seer’s Sight, an ability that emerges in people living near sustained divine current disruption." She glanced at the books around her with the reflex of someone whose first instinct in any situation was to reference her research.
"The mountains have been throwing divine current disruption into this valley for years. I thought it might explain—"
She stopped, and looked at him.
"You already know all this," she said.
"Some of it," he said. "From someone who was researching the same question."
Mira held his gaze. "Was?"
He didn’t answer that directly. "Can you find things? Locate them deliberately?" He paused. "People? Places?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"Gods?" Seraphine said quietly from behind him.
Mira looked at Seraphine, then back at Lucius. Something shifted in her expression, the careful steadiness of someone who had spent years having their experiences minimized, being asked directly whether they could do something specific as though it were a reasonable and practical question rather than something to be managed or explained away.
She looked at her hands again.
"I don’t know," she said honestly. "I’ve never tried to direct it. It just comes when it comes." She looked up. "I wouldn’t even know how to begin."
"We would," Lucius said.
Mira looked at him for a long moment. The careful eyes moving across his face, reading it the way she read the room when he came through the door.
"Who are you?" she said.
It was a genuine question from someone who processed the world through information and had identified a gap in hers.
"Someone who needs what you can do," he said. "And who can help you understand what it is."
Mira pushed her glasses up and looked at the books around her and then back at him.
"How?"