Even without being specifically tuned to divine energies the way Sev was, Vex could feel how much influence the gods had here. It was in the air, in the ground, in everything around them. It was... almost uncomfortable for him, even, though that was mostly because Vex couldn't quite shake the feeling of being watched.

Enkiros was a beautiful kingdom. Whatever their connection with the divine was, it enriched every aspect of the city. The air felt fresh and clean, the streets felt... good to walk on, for lack of a better term, and the temperature was neither too hot nor too cold.

"Damn," Misa said. "This place is cooler than I was expecting."

"Yeah," Vex agreed.

"There is something strange." Derivan seemed a little less enthusiastic. He glanced around, a slight frown evident in his eyes. "It is almost as if some elements of the city are... competing with one another. They are not in harmony."

"You think?" Vex cocked his head. "I don't feel it."

"[Intuitionist] is pinging strangely," Misa admitted. "I don't know why, though."

"Perhaps not all conflicts are those we can see," Derivan suggested. "In any case, it is unimportant. We must find the Vault. Sev has indicated to us that it is located beneath the fountain in the center of Enkiros, accessible via a passphrase."

"Hopefully this one hasn't been subverted by a group of nobles," Misa grumbled. "Think we'll run into any problems?"

"My hope is that we will not," Derivan said.

Vex glanced up ahead. He could see the fountain in question from here—it was enormous, with the central jet of water stretching almost thirty feet into the sky, if he was judging distances correctly. Each jet was illuminated by streaks of divine power that danced through the water and diffused into the air as tiny droplets.

No doubt this was part of what made the air feel so fresh. The whole kingdom was practically overflowing with divinity.

"Wish we could get more time to explore this place," Vex said regretfully. "It looks beautiful."

The people of the kingdom were interesting, too. It was nothing like Elyra, where there was a clear disparity between the nobles and the commoners—but it was very clear when different citizens were the followers of different gods. Followers of a given god wore very telling outfits, down to the small items of devotion on their persons.

And then there were the ones that followed multiple gods. Those people tended to wear bright, clashing colors, and they were probably Vex's favorite to observe. They were all so different! And they all got along with one another, too, though he did catch a few of them being given dirty glances every once in a while...

...Huh. Actually, now that he was paying more attention, he caught more than a few of those dirty glances—and not just directed at the ones who worshipped multiple gods, either. There was a clear tension between the followers of different gods that he just hadn't noticed before.

"Hi!" Before they could go any further, someone stopped in front of them—Vex blinked once, staring at the beautifully dressed dragonlike monk standing in front of them. He didn't recognize the species. He was pretty sure she wasn't a lizardkin. "You're new here, aren't you?"

"Uh... yes?" Vex tried. The dragon—was she a dragon?—beamed in response.

"Wonderful! I'm surprised you were able to get this far into Enkiros without someone offering to guide you. Would you like a guide? My name is Xelil, by the way!"

"Vex," Vex said automatically. "We don't need a guide, I'm sorry—we're here on business. Adventurers' Guild business."

"Oh!" Xelil brightened. "I've always wondered what the Adventurers' Guild is like. Tell me more! What kind of business is it?"

Oh boy. Vex glanced to both Derivan and Misa for help, only to find two amused faces staring back at him. He sighed.

Hiding what was happening didn't exactly help either, he supposed.

"It's actually very important we talk to someone in charge of the kingdom about it," Vex said politely. "I'm not sure if you've heard the news, but Elyra has fallen."

Technically, he knew she hadn't, because Enkiros had only just been restored. But he couldn't exactly say that. To Xelil's credit, her chipper attitude melted away almost instantly, and Vex could've sworn he saw a hint of fire in her eyes.

"Elyra has what?" she said. "...I'll take you to speak to the king and some of our other leaders. This sounds important."

"What, you aren't even gonna question it?" Misa piped up. Xelil's glance toward her was perfectly serious.

"I can tell when someone lies, among other things," she said simply. "That wasn't a lie or other things. Which tells me that Elyra has actually fallen." She peered a little more closely at him. "...And it's a little more serious than you're saying, isn't it?"

Vex squirmed a little under the intensity of her gaze. "Not a little," he admitted. He glanced back to the fountain—they needed to go and get the Grand Anchor, but evacuating Enkiros was on their list, too. It didn't necessarily matter which one they did first, as long as both were done before the Prime Anchor started to fail. "Deri, how much time do we have?"

Derivan closed his eyes briefly, the lights in his helmet flickering out as he did so. "...A little more than two days, I believe."

"Not a lot of time." Vex grimaced. It was more time than they'd had for the Elyran evacuation, though—that had been very last minute. They'd saved as many as they could, but the thought of how many must have slipped into the cracks... it was a fear of his. How could they know if they'd missed someone, if their entire history was wiped from reality? "Enough to get this done first and then get to the Vault."Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"The Vault?" Xelil tilted her head, curious.

"We'll explain that later." Vex took a deep breath. "Can you take us to the king?"

"Right this way," Xelil said, injecting a little bit of cheer into her voice. Vex caught the hint of worry in it, though; clearly, she knew this was more serious than they'd let on. He wondered who she really was. A random dragon approaching a group of adventurers, and then immediately being able to tell that they were here for something important? They couldn't have been the only tourists in the kingdom when it went down, nor the only group of adventurers.

...Speaking of which, he needed to get the branch of the Adventurers' Guild located in Enkiros to reconnect with the Guildmaster. Once she got out of whatever predicament she was in.

"Who are you, anyway?" Vex asked suddenly. "I mean, I know your name, obviously, but you're not just some citizen, are you?"

"Very astute!" Xelil's cheer was a little less forced, this time. She smiled down at him, and Vex was struck with a strange sense of familiarity. "I'm the head priestess of the Church of Navigation. We're followers of the god—"

"Wait," Vex interrupted. "Do you know an Exvhar?"

Xelil stopped in her tracks. "You know my little brother?" she asked, sounding dumbfounded for the first time in this conversation. Unmoored, even. "He's—he's been missing for days. We couldn't find him even with the strongest tracking spells we had. Do you know where he is?"

"He's waiting right outside of Enkiros with a friend of ours," Vex answered truthfully. Come to think of it, they probably should have gone back to fetch the two once the spell had resolved—but they'd appeared right in the middle of the city, so Vex had forgotten.

Xelil's eyes hardened. "I need to see him," she said immediately. "I understand your business is important. I can take you to go see the king first if you tell me where he is."

Derivan observed her for a moment, and then spoke. "You believe he is involved in something that is also integral to the safety of this kingdom."

Xelil glanced up at him, surprise flashing across her face. "Yes," she admitted. "It's very serious. I doubt it's related to what you three are here for, though."

"Oh, believe me," Misa said. "You'd be surprised."

Xelil blinked. "I never got your names."

"I am Derivan," the suit of armor said.

"Misa." The half-orc waved.

"Pleasure to meet you," she said. She looked between the two, then turned to Vex. "You guys are being serious, aren't you? If what we're both here about is the same thing, then what are you here for? Can you help us fix it?"

Vex shook his head. "No," he said softly. Gently. As if saying the words more quietly could somehow dampen their impact, though he knew they couldn't. "We're here to warn you to evacuate. What happened to Elyra—it's about to happen here too."

It took a while for them to sort through everything they knew, largely because Xelil's information was incomplete at best. That they had noticed Exvhar's disappearance at all was an artifact of the way both he and the kingdom of Enkiros had been brought back from the Void. There was a gap in reality, there—Exvhar hadn't been brought back with everything else. So reality had twisted to compensate, building a new event into the timeline that had never actually happened.

That disappearance of one of the kingdom's dragons meant that they'd investigated the failing reality anchor a little more thoroughly. They'd questioned the gods more heavily, too, and they'd begun to notice the gaps in their knowledge, the little discrepancies created by the disappearance of one god or the other.

The way reality anchors compensated for something being erased wasn't perfect, after all. It left jagged edges that could be identified, if someone looked carefully enough. If they had the right skills and noticed the right things, which was a feat in and of itself.

Fortunately, Xelil said, that was the specialty of the God of Navigation. His domain was a broad concept that could be applied to many things; navigation wasn't even really the right word for it, although that was the word he'd chosen. He was also sometimes called the Guide, or the Mantle of Leadership. He didn't embody the physical concept of finding one's way through physical space as much as he did the general, metaphorical idea of guidance and finding one's way.

Eventually, she frowned. "I was supposed to bring you guys to the king before we went into detail about this," she complained, mostly to herself. "I got caught up in things when you told me Exvhar was alive. Look, if what you're saying is true, let's go fetch and bring him—it's going to be easier to convince everyone of what you're saying if you've got two dragons backing you up."

"Speaking of which," Vex said. "You and your brother are very different."

Xelil grinned at him. "What, never met a dragon before?" she said, flexing her wings and splaying them out to her sides. "We're all capable of shifting. Kinda. Exvhar's bad at it, so he hates doing it. Says walking on two legs makes him feel all wobbly. We keep telling him he'll get used to it, but he doesn't want to."

"He seems young, for a dragon," Derivan observed.

Xelil just shrugged. "He's not that young," she said. "A few decades old. But he doesn't want to grow up, because if he does, he has to take on more responsibilities. We're letting him figure it out on his own. Anyway, you said he was right outside the kingdom?"

"Yep," Vex said. He opened his mouth to elaborate, but Xelil held up a hand to shush him, and with her other hand, she traced a symbol in the air. A point of light shot out from her finger, zipping through the city's streets; a few people let out startled yelps, but most of them just stepped out of the way, as if they were used to it.

Xelil grinned. "Finally that spell works," she says. "Alright! This way, then."

She led them through the streets and past a number of street stalls that caught Vex's eye—Enkiros had a lot of handcrafted goods. He couldn't help his eyes from wandering, taking in every craft he could see. There were things from pottery to handmade jewelry to accessories that seemed specifically made for dragons. He wondered how much they were embedded into the culture of Enkiros; Xelil had implied they all held fairly important positions within the kingdom's hierarchy.

He wondered also if the reason things had gone so far off the rails in the iteration of Enkiros that he'd seen was that the dragons were gone. He hadn't seen them at all, when he interfered with the king's decision and advised them to evacuate—hadn't even heard that they existed. Yet they were present when he tapped into the semerit for the first time, and the transformation it had subsequently induced had been entirely involuntary until he'd learned to control it.

Lost in his thoughts, Vex almost didn't notice when they reached the gates of Enkiros. The guards took a single glance at Xelil and then hurried to open the gates, and Vex blinked at the non-interaction.

Weird.

"Little brother!" Xelil exclaimed the words happily as soon as she saw Exvhar patiently waiting outside. Novice stood next to him, leaning against his flank and reading a book; he nearly toppled over when the large dragon immediately lurched forward to hug his sister. "Exvhar, no! Transform first! Hugs after transformation, not before!"

If she thought Exvhar was going to listen to her, she evidently thought wrong. Vex watched in some amusement as the dragon's younger brother toppled them both over in the force of his attempted hug, missed entirely, and then managed to hit his snout on the ground.

"Are you, uh... alright?" Vex asked. He wasn't even sure who he was asking the question. Misa snickered behind him, and Derivan looked on, mostly silent.

"I'm fine," Xelil said with a sigh. "And so is he. He always does this."

"Sorry," Exvhar said, sitting on the ground. If dragons could pout, he was definitely pouting. "I just missed you."

Xelil's gaze softened. "I know," she said. "I heard a lot from these kind people. But why don't you tell me what happened to you? From your perspective."