Stars shimmered. Darkness clung around them in the night sky.

  Just as the starlight illuminated the window panes, the shadows too deepened in their umbra of the frames.

  Anaphol sat on the bed’s foot pondering.

  No other light existed in the room except for the starlight.

  His hands interlaced, thoughts swirling, unmaking and reconstructing themselves. No rage came from him. Naph was tired.

  His appetite dead not from having eaten recently but because he went over the events of the day. From his hunt of Bulwark to the recent audience with Emperor Stelart.

  Inri’s indication of what he had to do, what is demanded of him from today sidelined by a goal he had chosen way before. Years before he ever stepped foot on the lands of Confederation of Tarna.

  It was no ordinary goal even. Not in the slightest.

  Naph whispered every word with a little click hidden in it, “I am going to save you.” His head dipping forward, but he was not referring to anyone from Sevenren. His whisper dying on little slow gusts of wind.

  Naph opened his palms. Staring down on the lines carved on his palms. Some were of natural birth as commonly found on any human hand, some were scars healing over only faint shadows remained of them, and there were a few that were not going to even stay beyond the hour.

  His hand moved to an inner pocket up closer to his chest within the neon jacket. Searching for an object he demanded be there, his eyes said so to no one in particular.

  The hand closed in on a few metallic objects.

  It steadily moved out of the pocket, each inch the hand moved Naph took a deep breath in and let it out.

  He did not open the palm. His gaze on it as the hand rested on his knee.

  “Bulwark was supposed to be a stepping stone.” Gnashing his jaws not in anger. “Don Extea’s message did not move me more than his choice…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to narrate his day. Opening his palm, there were metallic objects shaped and closely resembling circles at best and at worst were polygons. All of them were coins.

  Coins he had collected over the years he travelled on Tarna.

  Naph picked one out of the eight coins with his left hand. This one was the oldest of the bunch.

  Turning it over and over, he recalled the memories. The very ones he wished and forced to be drowned in the depth of his heart never to be seen or remembered.

  Except when he took this coin.

  He put it back within the same pocket first. Then he took his sweet time remembering the memories tied to the other coins one at a time. Each as he remembered once again submerged the old ones deeper and deeper.

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  Yet, one memory stuck. The one that reminded him of what the first word on the oldest coin meant.

  Sanctuary.

  This word of English was new to him. Still it was the closest to that particular word.

  Shaking his head at the last coin, he physically forced the memory to deep dive into the oceans of thoughts and background memories.

  Pocketing the last coin too, the one from Confederation of Tarna when it first took the Territory of Sevenren.

  He stayed there on the foot of the bed remembering every single moment of today. After a while, he stood up and walked out.

  The corridor ever so silent. His steps knew where he wanted to go. His mind didn’t. It stayed in that cloud of today’s events.

  Pacing along the corridor he went right into the depth of the wing his room was in. Another convergence of passages came and went by. And another. And another.

  While he walked sometimes Naph was touched by the starlight, sometimes he walked in pure darkness. No matter where he went the air never found to be stale.

  He did not know when he reached the only other double doors he had stepped foot through with purpose. Naph opened it as he recognized it.

  Woebegone expression finally settled within Anaphol’s face. Inri’s head rose back up from her book she was perusing. The same one that listed every lesio of a legend unmatched.

  “Hmm, so needed only four hours?” Inri queried.

  Naph ignored her. Walking towards Bulwark, he wished to know the reason a little girl of 12 years old couldn’t find a sanctuary. A sanctuary in a nation as wide as Confederation of Tarna.

  Rather than stopping again, he circled around Bulwark and went to his ride. Few of his bags were in it. He bent down and picked out two of them.

  Inri watched him do as he pleased. Her head tilting rested on the book’s spine.

  His jaw worked silently. Naph peeked maybe once or twice at Inri.

  A pleasing smile spread over her lips.

  Finally Anaphol chose to ask, “Could you…could you help me out?”

  “I can,” Inri knew what he meant, yet, “And I can choose not to.”

  Naph turned his head but he didn’t look straight at Inri at that instant. His gaze fell halfway at the floor, his mind making up what he wished to articulate.

  “Is that what this place is?” Eyes of fierce anger found its way to lay its stare at Inri. “Is that what it means to be from the Keyriftrian Empire? Not to give a dead child a proper send-off?”

  Inri put down the book, her head stayed tilted as she locked her gaze with his. “Why should the murderer of said dead child be giving her a funeral?”

  Through gritted teeth, Naph’s words came. “Because I am the only one here that is from Tarna properly.”

  “I can get someone who is not a murderer and from Tarna here within the hour.” Bobbing her head to her right, “Yeah, abducting such a person will not be hard.”

  Naph exhaled with acceptance of the truth, “Yeah. Maybe that is right to do.”

  Trying to change the topic, Naph asked. “If not that, then can you help me out in what Emperor Stelart,” he truly did not want to call Stelart as an emperor or by his name, “has asked me to do to convince him?”

  “Hmm,” Inri nodded. Reopening the page she was at, she began reading the list of lesios Rian no Tera possessed according to the myths around him.

  Naph stayed there standing next to Bulwark’s temporary resting place. He believed this empire will give her a proper funeral.

  So, he left the hall of the preservation wing of Plora’s wing of the castle.

  It had been half an hour since then, Inri still immersed in her reading. Except a single train of thoughts ran in her heart. Never stopping.

  She slammed the book shut, choosing to voice it out.

  “It is not in mine or anyone’s rights to give a funeral to a girl like Bulwark. No,” she shook her head the words did not match the raw intensity. Taking a deep breath, Inri said to no one in particular.

  “No one other than the Emperor Stelart will be allowed to give her a funeral. And he will not. No, she is here as a promise.” Another breath and a thought submerged. A different one came. “Maybe I can help you in getting your cata mind up to standards.”

  Inri wondered of the lesios she had heard Anaphol has and how does he have it at the bare minimum any human is always at of cata mind capacity.