Date: March 23, 541, from the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored
A dusty ray of morning sun streamed through the narrow attic window, illuminating dancing specks of dust in the air. Dur opened his eyes and instantly sat up, his hand habitually reaching for the knife hilt by his head. A second later, he remembered: he wasn't in the forest, not in Torm's hut, not under the open sky. Above him were not branches, but time-darkened rafters. The air smelled of old wood, the pigeon loft, and distant smoke from bakeries.
"Easy, forest man," came Maël's quiet voice.
He was already on his feet. The lad sat by the window, his blue caftan draped over his shoulders, which had dried overnight but still looked miserable. Maël chewed a dry crust of bread, peering intently through the gaps between the tiles of neighboring roofs.
"You need to learn the unofficial rules. Ligra is a big city. If you know how to breathe in rhythm with it, you can dissolve into it."
Dur got up, feeling an unfamiliar heaviness in his muscles. The stone bed, even covered with straw, was harder than forest moss. He went to his bow, checked the string—the humidity of the city was different from the forest, stickier.
"Tell me your rules," Dur said dully. "Torm taught me to survive among trees. Here the trees are made of stone, and they don't rustle."
Maël turned, his brown eyes gleaming with excitement. "Rule one: never look the guard in the eyes. Never. If you look them in the eyes, you're either challenging them or asking for help. Neither option suits us. Rule two: forget your 'forest step.' You walk too cautiously, Dur. In Ligra, only thieves and hired killers walk like that. Here you need to walk as if you have somewhere to be, and you're running late, but not so late that you need to run. Be part of the flow. And third..."
Maël walked up to Dur and adjusted his hood. "Your bow. In the city, that's a rarity for a simple wanderer. Cover it better with your cloak. To everyone, you're a failed hunter from the suburbs, come looking for manual labor. Got it?"
Dur nodded. He felt uneasy. In the forest, he could sense an enemy a hundred paces away by the crack of a twig. Here, an enemy could be standing ten inches away behind a thin wall, and you'd never know.
They descended the rickety ladder. When Dur stepped onto the cobblestones of the artisans' quarter for the first time that day, he was overwhelmed by a wave of sound. Ligra didn't just make noise—it hummed, like a giant, stirred-up anthill. The shouts of barkers, the clatter of iron-shod wheels on cobblestones, the clang of anvils, the neighing of horses. After six months of silence in the forest, this chaos felt like a physical assault on his senses, and he couldn't get used to it.
Dur instinctively crouched, his eyes beginning to dart frantically. "Look," he whispered, pointing to a pile of trash by the wall. "A heavy man in cavalry boots passed here. The track is fresh, he's limping on his left foot..."
Maël burst out laughing, grabbing his shoulder and straightening him up. "Dur, for all the spirits' sake, stop! You're trying to read tracks where thousands of people have left them! You'll go mad in two blocks. See that crowd by the fountain? That's where we're going."
They merged into the flow of people. Dur felt blind. His forest instincts, honed to perfection by Torm, failed him here. He tried to analyze every face, every movement of passersby's hands, expecting an attack. He watched Maël walk beside him—relaxed, slightly hunched, his gaze wandering, almost sleepy. But Dur noticed: Maël never collided with anyone; he flowed around them, like water flowing around stones in a stream, never once touching shoulders with a passerby.
"How do you do that?" Dur asked when they passed a particularly narrow alley. "You seem to disappear right in front of everyone."
"That's urban camouflage," Maël replied, his expression unchanged. "In the forest, you become a tree. In Ligra, you have to become... boring. No one looks at what doesn't interest them. A boring guy in a dirty caftan, a boring hunter with a pack—we're just background. Dust on the city's boots."
Dur looked up at the high walls of the houses, rising towards the sky. The windows seemed like hundreds of eyes watching them. He realized Maël was right: the city was a different kind of forest. Ruthless, complex, living by its own, as yet incomprehensible laws.
"Here it doesn't matter how accurately you shoot if you don't know which way to look," Dur thought.
He shifted his pack more comfortably on his shoulder and forced himself to relax his shoulders, copying his new friend's gait. The stone jungle of Ligra accepted him, but he knew: this was only the beginning. To survive here and continue his path East, he would have to learn not only to read the earth but also human souls, hidden behind masks of indifference.
And Maël... Maël walked ahead, leading him through alleys with the confidence of someone who had built every house himself. Dur still didn't know who he was, but one thing was clear: this guy was a better teacher for this new life than any forest hunter.