{-Kaylin-}

  She listened closely, and made that clear. She wanted them to know that, just like how important this was, she wasn’t going to stop paying attention to what they were really saying. Rennyn might not be able to say the same, depending on what would happen; they’d made a deal that she should stop him if he fell too far, but that was only assuming she noticed, and if she felt she could do it without drawing too much attention to it. She didn’t want the others to see what was, frankly, the truth of the matter.

  That the two of them were barely more capable than the other three, and how close they could be from something worse.

  “First things first, I think it’s probably smart to mention we shouldn’t try to be friends with someone we obviously aren’t,” Seldir remarked. “We were able to get a couple of answers out of saying that we were merchants with Kharis, but not a lot—really, not any more than we got out of just asking. It worked for now, obviously, but I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable.”

  Slowly, Rennyn nodded. “Yeah, it was only supposed to be for a little bit. Hopefully, we won’t have to try anything like that again. But what were you able to learn from it?”

  “Kharis and Ether, and sometimes someone that sounded like Viragi, were asking after and occasionally buying weird stuff. I wrote down a list of it earlier”—he pulled out a slip of paper and passed it along to Kaylin, who showed it to Rennyn—“but we weren’t able to make sense of it, really.”

  “I think some of it could be used to create something like fireworks,” Lyrei added. “I thought about it a lot, and I can’t think of any other uses for them, or a way for that to be necessarily harmful to anyone. Sure, there’s some stuff you can do with them, but I don’t think there’s a lot of damage it can do on its own…”

  Noa slowly nodded. “There was a couple of other stuff, too. But it was a lot of mundane stuff. Wasn’t it something like a jewelry chain and a quill set? And more kinda random stuff?”

  “It’s a distraction.” Rennyn didn’t look up from the paper, instead focusing on it even more intently.

  “The… random things..?”

  “The fireworks.”

  Kaylin filled in the pieces that she felt like he wouldn’t be able to. “There were… some things that Dhymos collected throughout the other lives. Given from what you’ve said and what that list says, they’ve gathered some of that up again. Those ‘random’ things are very likely to just make those items easier to carry around and keep track of.”

  She couldn’t blame them for seeming confused. After all, there was still so much to say. But she wanted to give them time to think about it first, and come up with any questions they might feel they needed answered.

  “Is it something that you figured out in one of your other lives?” Lyrei prompted.

  “Across nearly all of them, really,” Kaylin confirmed with a nod. “It’s actually a good thing that this was brought up now—it has to do with what I need to tell you. But let’s spend just a little bit longer figuring this out.” She glanced at Rennyn. “Do you think we should prepare for them to do something with the fireworks?”

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  For a moment, he was quiet for long enough that she thought she wasn’t going to get an answer out of him immediately. But, slowly, he nodded. “We should at least try to figure out a little bit more. We need to make sure they don’t turn it into anything more dangerous. If… it’s possible, we should find enough to have a good case to give to the guards. Or at least give them a reason to keep an eye out for something. I don’t want any of you getting directly involved in something like that.”

  “Be honest,” Seldir began slowly, “you would be completely fine doing it alone, though, wouldn’t you?”

  Rennyn sighed. He didn’t look up at any of them. “We don’t have the time to argue about something like that right now. Is that all you were able to find? Come across anything else strange while you were out there?”

  Lyrei shook her head. “I don’t think so. But we’ll try to do what we can about getting the knights aware of it while we’re out next. It probably won’t be that hard, as long as we’re able to come up with some more concrete proof other than just a list…”

  “Is it… time to talk about all of those other things they got?” Noa prompted. “And how they’re related to what happened in your other lives?”

  Kaylin nodded, carefully calculating everything she wanted to say in her head. She had to be careful not to overwhelm them with too much information, without leaving anything important out. It… wasn’t something she’d ever had to do before—something that she’d actively avoided doing until now. A thought came to her that, if she didn’t tell them something, then they’d never know the difference.

  And that was something that she needed to avoid.

  “In the lives that I was away from Rennyn, I wasn’t just gone or unimportant,” she began, choosing each of her words carefully. “I had… a little bit of a different mission in those ones. A mission that the goddesses had tasked me with, and that I tried my best to fulfill, without getting anyone else involved. I was, simply put, their eyes and ears in the other lives. I was supposed to find some common qualities between each of the lives, and use those to try to determine what was the next stop of Dhymos’s plan. And, in that time, I was able to learn about some objects he’d been collecting throughout the lives.

  “Some of them were objects that held great power in the land that they’d originated from, but none to anywhere else. Others didn’t seem to hold any importance to them at all. For the most part, it would seem that their only relation to one another was the fact that Dhymos cared enough to collect them, and bring them with him into the other lives. I’m sure you all realize that there was much more to them than just that.

  “The exact things he plans to do with them is something that I was never able to figure out, not really. But I know that it’s something that he can only do once he has all of them, or at least the good majority of them. I’ve tried what I could to limit how much of them he had, but I was never able to do much. And unfortunately, aside from the details of each one of them, I don’t know much more.”

  Seldir sighed. “So it’s just something else that we’re going to have to keep an eye out for? Because it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot we can do right now.”

  “I… can tell you about each of the items. With any luck, you might’ve seen them somewhere else.”

  Rennyn shuffled a bit. “In the last life, Dhymos mentioned most of them, didn’t he? Whatever plan it was… it may be worth keeping in mind for now, but I don’t think it’s going to be put into motion soon. If Dhymos plans on doing anything, he’s going to make sure we know what it is, and he’s going to taunt us with it. It’s not the best of options, but it might be the best we have right now.”

  “I thought this was a meeting that was supposed to make us feel better about the current situation?” Lyrei asked, as if she wasn’t really sure to treat the question seriously or not. “Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s definitely not doing that.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry.” Finally, Rennyn looked at each of them. “We’re supposed to be doing this together and, from now on, we will. You’ve got no good reason to trust me on that, but… I hope you will. If not now, then after I’m able to prove it to you. We’ll take care of Dhymos, together, and one step at a time. You have my word on that.”