Valeri Ephars hadn’t been able to sleep properly for days. It wasn’t due to her bed being of any inferior quality, or it being too hot or too cold, Gods know that her life was the picture of luxury—far in excess of anything you’d legitimately need to survive. It was the memory of that man that she couldn’t shake from her mind.

Valeri had thought herself almost impervious to the whims of others, having dealt with the crooning and bootlicking her entire life. Her father was intensely rich and powerful, of course; a man of pure capitalism and greed, seeking just another way to earn coin. He wasn’t quite so uncouth as to dip his hand into the slave trade, but he was certainly willing to cut some moral corners to line his own pockets.

Jitah Ephars was a man that attracted a very particular kind of attention, and Valeri just so happened to be the best way to earn access to the man. Everyone wanted Valeri’s hand in marriage from the moment she was born, anything to earn the expertise of the man capable of turning anything into a successful business.

Valeri was ultimately conflicted by her father. He was cold and indifferent, too interested in his own personal gain to even be dismayed when Valeri’s mother had left them behind in Crossroads. But every now and then she’d see a spark of kindness, of love in her father’s eye.

Then there would be months where she’d only see the man at dinner twice, and those times were spent in silence. Maybe if she was willing to approach him on the grounds of running businesses, he’d be able to talk to her, but otherwise they were left to sit in silence and a mutual awkwardness.

She knew that her father wasn’t normal, and probably never would be. There were sacrifices he made to be as powerful as he was, and maybe the greater sacrifice was that he never saw them as sacrifices in the first place.

But that left Valeri with nothing, no future other than to be a bargaining chip for her father’s political of economic gains, even if he hadn’t made use of her yet. The temptation was there, even for Valeri. If she were to allow her to be bargained away, even to involve herself whole heartedly in the process, she could find herself as one of the most powerful women on Virsdis by her father’s age. She had no doubt that she’d be able to get to the point where a wave of a hand would start a war.

Yet, Valeri was a follower of Tarania, and that future didn’t seem very mighty. To just go with the tide that others had set for her.

That was why she was going to the meeting that the man had set, despite her mind screaming at her. It was a terrible idea from every point of view she could take, the enigma of a man had appeared from nowhere and had swept her up in a whirlwind of a night, just to set a date and a location for her to arrive at.

Valeri hadn’t been so mystified by someone since she was barely a child, when she’d found herself with a massive crush on a very handsome butler’s apprentice. The boy had been a charismatic mess, all smiles and secret, but with a terrible habit of slipping his hands into drawers and taking what was not his.

She remembered how she’d cried when her father had taken his right hand, only letting the boy have his life at her insistence. It was one of the only times that her father had strayed from his own iron rhetoric, a moment that she now morbidly cherished.

Valeri pulled herself from the tantalising embrace of her plush bed, walking towards her dresser and procuring from it the clothes she had specifically acquired just to make it to this meeting. She was awake far earlier than she’d been in years, the drowsiness of sleep hanging over her mind and making her eyelids quake under its weight.

As she dressed herself with the commoner’s clothes and travelling cloak, she lambasted herself in her mind. This was ridiculous, on all accounts. The man had taken her by the heart and was leading her around like a herd of sheep with it. It was embarrassing and humiliating, but that same mystique that led her to even buy the clothes still remained in her mind.

As Valeri threw on the last of her clothes, she turned to the small pack that had been put together for her—much of what was inside was really for emergency cases where this wasn’t a simple meeting and was more in the league of a kidnapping attempt. Though her heart knew that it wasn’t going to be anything so nefarious, her mind was fixated on the possibility, with more than twenty examples for her to gain the paranoia from.

Just as she completed her outfit, pulling her mass of unruly hair into tight bunches, a light set of knocks were placed on her large wooden door.

“Come in.” She said calmly, having expected the knocks. With a prompt speed, a slightly older man walked into the room without hesitation. He was maybe thirty-five, closing in on forty at the high end, but was the closest thing to a father that Valeri had experienced in a long time.

“Good morning, Miss Ephars.” The man stated neutrally with a bow, but Valeri could read the subtext in the greeting. She shook her head quietly, sighing as she fixed a particularly irritating piece of hair away with a handy pin.

“No, I will not reconsider, Yeram.” The man released himself from the tight bow and stood a little more relaxedly, but with the same propriety as he always did.

“I did not say anything, Miss Ephars.” Valeri scoffed, rolling her eyes all the while.

“You don’t need to say a word to get the message across, Yeram. How long do you think you’ve been my personal attendant?” Valeri didn’t wait for the man to respond, though her would certainly have answered with exact precision, down to the day, “This is no different from when you’ve subtly commanded me to go back to my economics classes.”

“I believe that this is quite different.” Yeram said coolly, “You are putting yourself in a great deal of danger doing this, Lady Ephars.” Valeri scowled intensely at the ever-polite man, his pale skin and slowly greying hair only adding to his authority as he aged.

“Don’t you ‘Lady Ephars’ me, Yeram.”

“Then please reconsider attending this meeting. You have no idea who this might–” The glare that Valeri fixed him with made his jaw close with a click, realising that he was beginning to overstep in his speech. Valeri grinded her teeth for a moment, letting the quietly powerful muscles in her cheeks show her frustration, but it didn’t last.

“Yeram…” She began softly, looking away from her personal attendant, “You haven’t met him. I don’t expect you to understand what it was like when he looked at me. It was something else entirely, like something even greater than a King was observing me.” Valeri paused, her face grimacing as her mind desperately reached for words that would even describe a moment of the sensation that she’d bathed in while in the man’s company.

“It was magical, Yeram, and yes I understand how it sounds.” She almost snarled at the man before he had the chance to ask the question in the first place. “Everything in me wants to pick apart the experience, to denigrate it and eventually ignore it as a flight of fancy, or an adrenalin fuelled fever dream, but I can’t.” The room was laden with silence for a moment, the young lady’s attendant waiting patiently to see if she was going to say anything more but nodded quietly when she didn’t.

Yeram was a man of caution and expertise. He was much more than a personal attendant, and caution was a defining feature of his mindset, and caution made him extremely good at his job. But when he was placed up against that face of Valeri’s, it caused a conflict inside of him that drew his every emotion into a grand war. It was the exact same conflict that he’d struggled with when he’d once apprenticed that young boy, and the same conflict that had allowed the boy to get away with slipping his fingers into pockets for far too long.

“Do you fancy him, Valeri?”

The simple question rocked Valeri to her core. She whipped her head around to look at the older man, a crease of worry prominent in his brow. Yeram had called Valeri by her first name only a handful of times in her entire life, leaving it for the most important moments. Valeri swallowed against a sudden dryness in her throat, turning away from the man with too many expressions waging war on her face.

“I don’t know.” She answered after a moment. Yeram bobbed his head quietly after his own pondering, the man taking a step back and letting his form relax ever so slightly.

“I see.”

After all the words that needed to be said had been spoken, Valeri made to leave her room with quick and restless steps, trusting in her attendant that he’d cleared the way to the hidden back door so that she’d be able to leave silently in the early morning. However, just as she grabbed the handle of her door, her attendant’s voice rang out in the silence, almost startling her.

“Lady Valeri. You may wish to take your rapier.” She turned to the man, who was now holding the training rapier she normally wielded, extending its handle out to her with a severe expression on his face. She took the rapier quickly, and quickly left the room and followed the path that she’d always taken out of the house when she wanted no one to know of her departure.

The lavish halls she walked through were obscenely wide, freezing cold with the night’s chill still being held by the marble flooring. The cold air just made her feelings towards her home more apparent, almost achingly so.

She walked down through a service door that had been promptly left open for her to walk through, striding down the narrower corridors that ran through the house unseen. In only a few moments she was outside, practically jogging through the small path through the expansive gardens that her father paid mind-boggling amounts of money to keep.

Then she found herself on a path towards the northern road, the gated community on this road contained some of the richest and most powerful people outside of the Brauhm Empire’s elite. It was with ease that she procured herself a horse that she’d use for the trip into the city, and from then it was only a short travel to her destination.

While a lone rider was hardly common, it didn’t raise any eyebrows, especially with the commoner’s clothes and travelling cloak that Valeri wore. She reached the city centre, and quickly cross referenced her internal compass with the one illustrated through tile in Crossroads’ centre. She turned to her right, leading down the western arm of the city, and committing to the short ride out into the fields to the south-west of the city.

The nerves were building, and had been building for a while, the concept of meeting that man again had her mind in jumbles, desperately trying to reconcile how she felt with the situation. But, woefully, Valeri was not given the time to truly examine herself, her horse quickly blazing out of the city limits and quickly making headway into the fields that surrounded the city, past the homesteads that sat just outside the city, quietly existing.

She kept riding, the horse being exceptionally fit for the task, but as the kilometres flew underfoot, she was left with a quiet doubt, building in her chest. She scanned the periphery as best she could, and despite being able to see great lengths in the fields, she saw nothing of the tall form that he sported.

After another ten minutes of riding, she found herself riding towards a stream of gently moving water that could only be considered a creek. She followed it for a while, feeling the time slowly trickle through her fingers as she searched, each passing moment adding just a little bit of doubt.

“You actually came.” Valeri jolted, almost spooking the horse with the movement, whipping her head around to see a much smaller form than the man that she knew.

“Who are you?” She asked warily, clutching onto the reigns, and preparing to force the horse into a gallop at a moment’s notice. The smaller man looked up towards her, dressed in traveller’s clothing just as she was. Underneath the long and dark cloak, a blank metal mask was visible, the only features on it being a small slit for the mouth and two eyeholes that allowed the man’s blazing green eyes to peer through with all their intensity.

“Master Maximilian sent you here.” The man said gravely. The voice wasn’t deep or remotely resonant like that man’s had been at moments, but it held a different sort of seriousness and gravity that weighed on Valeri’s shoulders despite herself.

“Who are you?” She asked again, both of the participants of the conversation not willing to yield to the other’s will. The shorter man looked at her for a long, tense moment, and as he made to respond, a strange glow began to burn in his eyes—brighter even than the iridescent green of his natural eye colour.

“You can call me Midday.” He said solemnly, the slight glow in his eyes suddenly became brighter than the morning sun, the overwhelming gold making Valeri shiver with a sudden understanding of just how powerful they promised he’d be. She swallowed, desperately trying to wet her tongue so she could speak clearly.

“I am Val.” She said, trying to obscure her identity from the man’s eyes, but even as the false name fled her lips, she couldn’t help but feel as if it were nothing beneath his gaze—a mere mockery of his exacting eyes.

“You are nothing.” The words radiated with a dominant power that undulated forth from the cloaked man, forcing her and the horse to stay perfectly still and commanding their entire attention.

“Leave your horse here, he will not stray too far.” Midday’s words were almost gentle in comparison to the words preceding them, “We will see if you are worth any of my master’s time.”

The shorter man turned and walked away with a sure step, his figure glowing ever so slightly with a golden light that made goosebumps cover her arms while she looked at it. She did as she was told, dismounting from the horse quickly and following after the surprisingly fast man, only now realising that she was almost half a foot taller than the intimidating man.

What a spectacularly befuddling day this already was.