Date: March 23, 541, from the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored
Ligra by daylight, in Maël's company, turned out to be different from the city Dur had seen yesterday. That had been a resonant, businesslike organism. Today, Maël, like an experienced surgeon, began to show him the anatomy of this organism—its bones, muscles, and hidden nerve nodes.
They started with the "bones"—the foundations of well-being. Maël led Dur to a large, austere building of light stone with a sign reading "Guild Hall." Inside, work was in full swing: scribes registering apprentices, masters receiving orders for materials at subsidized prices, and lists of available vacancies on the walls.
"Want to be a mason?" Maël poked a finger at one sheet. "The Agrim family gives a loan for tools at a ridiculous interest rate if you join the guild and work for three years on their construction projects. They pay steadily: 3-4 silver a month, depending on your grade. Enough for bread, meat on Sundays, clothes, and a roof over your head for a small family. Not rich, but not starving either."
Dur, used to the uncertain luck of the hunt, was silent, impressed. This was a different kind of reliability—not from luck, but from the system.
Then they turned into an alley towards a low but long building from which steam billowed and it smelled of soap and damp wood.
"Public baths," Maël explained. "Once a week, every citizen has the right to a free visit. For families, a separate day. It's not a luxury, it's a rule. 'A clean body means a clear mind and fewer illnesses,' the Agrims say. Sick workers are a loss for the system."
Next, their path led to a squat but sturdy building behind a high fence. Behind it came the sound of laughter and children's clear voices. On the gate—a modest sign: "The Industrious Branch Orphanage."
"Orphans and children from the poorest families where parents can't cope are taken here," Maël's voice became a little harder. "They are fed, taught a trade, discipline. Then they are assigned to guilds or family services. They become... reliable cogs. The most capable can even rise. There are no hungry or abandoned here. But there is no freedom of choice either. Your path is predetermined from childhood."
It was here that Dur first felt that very "price" Maël had vaguely spoken of. Order and satiety were exchanged for personal fate. He remembered the "Old Pine"—it was hungry and uncomfortable there, but they had their oath, their dream, their choice to go their separate ways. Here, in Ligra, dreams seemed replaced by clear social elevators.
At the market, Maël again turned to economics, poking at goods and quoting prices like an experienced appraiser:
"See that butcher? Beef—3 coppers a kilo. Pork—2. Chicken—1. A worker earning 3.5 silver (that's 350 coppers) a month can afford meat regularly. Flour—half an alum per kilo. Vegetables—from an alum a basket. Calculate it."
He spoke confidently, knew all the figures. It wasn't the knowledge of a pauper counting every coin. It was the knowledge of a manager seeing the whole picture. Dur began to notice this strangeness.
Then Maël led him to a district that was clearly poorer. The houses here were smaller, the streets narrower, but even here there was no poverty, despair, or filth. Just modesty.
"Here live those who work but without great ambition, or large families with a single breadwinner," Maël explained. "They have it harder. But if the father of a family, spirits forbid, dies at work, the family gets a pension—1 silver a month for the widow and half a silver for each child until they get on their feet. It's the law. A child won't starve. But won't be full either. The incentive to get up and find work is huge."
"And if a person is alone, without family, and can't work?" Dur asked.
Maël shrugged.
"Then he's at the bottom. Public soup and a night shelter by the city wall—they won't let him die. But no one would want to live there. That's also an incentive. The Agrim family helps families. Singles have to survive on their own. That's how the system weeds out... the unstable."
And again that word—"system." It hung in the air of Ligra.
In the evening, climbing an old, half-ruined watchtower on the outskirts, from which there was a view of the entire city, Maël finally spoke about what lay hidden beneath this order.
"See the palace on the hill?" he pointed to a complex of buildings with sharp spires in the center of Ligra. "The Agrim Estate. Agrim Ma Rat, the head of the family... he's not just a ruler. He's... a force of nature in human form. They say his spirit, the 'Cleaving Vortex,' awakened when a horde of trolls was marching on the still-young Ligra. He went out to them alone. And didn't fight them one by one. With one blow, he split the mountain pass they were coming through and buried half the horde under the rocks. The rest fled. He's not a hero from ballads. He's an engineer, eliminating a problem as efficiently as possible. He builds the city the same way. And he sees people the same way. Parts of a mechanism. Useful, useless, oiled, or rusty."
There was no hatred in his words. There was a complex, almost professional understanding, mixed with a dull protest.
"They bring order. They conquered hunger, banditry, epidemics. Under their rule, you can live long and safely. But, Dur..." Maël turned to him, and in his brown eyes burned that very fire Dur had taken for a thirst for freedom. "Is life just safety and satiety? Where in their calculations is there room for a crazy idea? For a dream that brings no immediate profit? For a person who doesn't want to be a cog, even the best-oiled and most important one, but wants to be... an unknown gear in a mechanism unknown to anyone?"
Dur looked at the city lights flickering on in the twilight. He saw not a cage, but a hive. A hive where every bee has its place, its tasks, and the queen, ruthlessly efficient, ensures the prosperity of the whole swarm. But Maël was asking about a bumblebee. About one that buzzes too loud and wants to fly to a different field.
He didn't know what to answer. The forest gave no such answers. In the forest, you either survived by following its laws, or you died. Ligra offered a third way: survive by obeying laws that were wiser and more complex than the laws of the taiga, but no less inexorable for it.
"They're looking for you," Dur said quietly, looking at the lights of the estate. "To put you in your place. The one they've calculated as optimal for you."
"Yes," Maël answered just as quietly. "And I don't want to be calculated. I want to be an error in their calculations. An unoiled cog. A sound that shouldn't exist in a perfectly tuned mechanism. And I think I've found a kindred spirit."
He smiled at Dur, and in that smile was a challenge, not just to the Agrim family, but to the entire rational, ordered world they had built. Dur felt his own unconscious rebellion against predestination find a foothold. He didn't yet know who Maël really was. But he already knew they were looking in the same direction—away from the cages assigned to them, even if those cages were gilded and full of delicacies.