There was quite a large crowd of people protesting outside the city's guild hall when I arrived. By the look of it, they must have been sleeping out here for quite some time as well. Most were Arcanians: Aves, Bovinaes, and Canes to spot a few. Though that did not mean there was a shortage of human presence either. I was able to read a few of the signs as the taxi pulled up to the curb.

[ARCANIANS, NOT ALIENS]

[DON'T STARVE OUR CHILDREN]

[EQUALITY]

To be here in person, it was a little difficult for me to watch, and a part of me even felt relieved that Verretheia was no longer around to see what the world had come to. The situation with the Arcanian civil rights movement had always been present in some form or another, but never to this extent. It was not just Singapore either, it was a worldwide problem.

"Peaceful protesters…" crossing my fingers tightly, I could only hope this remained the case. But even if things were peaceful so far, there was always a very real and tangible risk of the situation becoming a riot. Hivemind mentality was an extremely frightening thing; history was a fine testament to that— and the world was not ready for their primary defenders to turn against them.

…

"After all this time… I'm back again."

After leaving the taxi, I needed a moment's break before I could continue. Just a little bit, there was still some hesitation left tugging at my collar. However, I swallowed it and jogged up the set of stairs leading to the guild building.

The doors to the guild slid open on its own and a refreshingly cool wave of air washed over me. There was a stark difference between the outdoor humidity of Singapore and the inside of an air conditioned building. Once inside, I checked the time and it was about 12:30 PM.

Then I made a quick scan of the place to try to find the front desk. It had been nearly two decades since the last time I was here. The interior had changed somewhat compared to the past. But that really came at no surprise though.

"There it is."

Although not directly across from the entrance, the receptionist area was quite hard to miss once I was looking in the right direction. It was also not busy during lunch time, so I quickly made my way towards the lady sitting behind the desk.

"Excuse me," I waved.

"Yes, welcome. How may I assist you?"

"Uh. Well, Oryza said he would let you guys know I was coming."

"Oh, you must be Mr. Edmond!" the woman exclaimed, "please wait just a moment. I will let Mr. Levin know you have arrived."

"Actually," I raised my hand up, "there's no need."

"Pardon?"

"It looks like I'm getting the VIP treatment today," I gestured towards the man in the distance. He was built like a tank and had the scowl of a lion. Some might even have mistaken him for an Arcanian if they did not know any better, but I knew this man well. But strangely enough though, he pulled out a phone and snapped a photo my way before putting it back into his pocket.

"Edmond," Oryza said.

"Long time no see."

The two of us shook hands.

"Good to see you haven't gone frail yet, but what was that about?" I smiled. The firmness of his grip and the calluses on his hand did not belong to someone who spent his life at an office job.

"You'll see. And can't help it. I turned fifty recently and yet my workload shows no sign of letting up. Lately I've turned to using grip trainers to handle my stress. I've been working up to 160kg myself."

"Ha, well, we're certainly not getting any younger as time passes."

"I've never felt younger! But no matter, we can catch up another time. Come with me."

I nodded.

"Let's go."

…

Lost in my own thoughts, I followed Oryza wordlessly through the doors and halls that each required an ID card to pass through. Before I knew it, I had felt my hand tightening around the pendant on my neck. I knew Oryza well. Even though he had been against me retiring young, he respected my decision without much of a hassle. He knew what the guild meant to me and why I had to leave it and never look back.

He was not the kind of man who would have called me over without a damn good reason to do so, and unfortunately, a damn good reason hardly ever came with good news. The fact was, he had me come over to the guild anyways, and that could only mean one thing— that whatever he needed to talk to me about pertained to the confidentiality of the guild itself.

"Come in."

It was a small private office, but it was left largely unfurnished. If this was his office, then he probably had not been using it long, or it was a temporary one. That was the feeling it gave off. But I knew better.

"You'll want to take a seat for this." Oryza locked the door behind him and pulled out a chair for me. I took it.

"So then, what is it, Oryza?"

The man sighed. No doubt, it was difficult for him as well.

"Strictly speaking, what I'm about to show you is highly confidential information, but given the subject matter, I believe that you at least have a right to know. Needless to say, don't tell anyone about what you're about to see here. Understand? Good."

From within the drawer, he pulled out a case file that was about a centimeter thick and laid it on the table.

"What are you sitting around for? Don't look at me, open it."

"This is…" When I opened the case file, there were some newspaper clippings, documents, and photos. I read off some of the headlines, "'Arcanian Protest Devolves into Riot,' 'Ten Police Officers Critically Injured by Arcanian Artes.' Where did this happen?"

"It's a city in Africa. Edmond, you might not have realized it living in retirement, but the times are changing. I'm sure you saw the protesters gathered outside. Things have been calm so far, but just one wrong turn and we'll go up in a blaze." Oryza sighed and motioned for me to keep reading. I also noticed that he was playing around with one of the grip trainers he mentioned earlier. When he had taken them out though, I had no idea.

The next thing I focused on was an investigational report of the riot the newspaper clippings had reported on. I skimmed through it quickly. I had dealt with reports like these before during the time I was working for the guild so I knew how to pick out what was important and what was not.

"Started out early in the morning as a peaceful protest in front of the city's guild hall… police officers on standby… from the hours of 1100 to 1230, the tone of the protesters shifted into a much angrier stance. More police show up as a response to this change in tone. At 1323, an empty glass bottle was hurled protester-side towards police on standby but missed and landed in a bush."

As I continued to read through the report, I felt sicker and sicker at the scene that was unfolding in my mind— the beginnings of which were in many ways similar to what I had just encountered on my way here.

"The police officer, who was likely the bottle's intended target, reacted by shouting offensive racial slurs. After which, the situation quickly escalated and at 1331, a fire based arte was fired off from within the group of protesters which engulfed three police officers, leaving them in critical condition with serious third degree burns. Oryza, what the hell is this?" shocked, I asked the man, but he simply instructed me to keep going.

"Flip to the end."

When I did just that, there were three photos paperclipped to the last page. They were all of varying quality and from different angles, but after inspecting it carefully, I realized that they were all taken at about the same time.

"After some digging, we found the instigator from two sources of mobile phone recordings and one from a security camera that just so happened to be pointed towards the streets."

"I think I see him. The Canis with the bandanna on his arm right?"

"That's right. After sending off that first shot, he proceeded to fire off two more artes, with an ash based one and then a frost based one next. We were unable to track him down again after this."

"How terrible." Taking a deep breath, I put the case file down. It was terrible, but if this was all he wanted to show me, he would not have called me over. "Oryza… what are you trying to get at here? Don't tell me you're showing all this to me to get me to come out of retirement. Didn't you respect my decision to quit?"

"Edmond…" he leaned back against his chair and said with a tired voice. But it was not it. His eyes showed me as much. He then took out what I could count to be at least ten more case files out of the drawers. "I've thought about it a lot, but you just have to trust me that this is the only way I can give you the entire context of the situation."

"…Okay."

I took the case files and looked through them one by one. They all had the same tone and focus around them: riots, protesters, injuries, and even a case where riots seized control over a guild building. None of them were pretty, and neither were the tactics that riot police officers employed. They used rubber bullets on bystanders and even threw stun grenades and tear gas canisters into crowded areas. However, I knew that acts like those would only cause a greater backlash in return. I knew personally just how sturdy Arcanians were, just like how I personally knew how well they could fight even unarmed.

"The symbol on their clothes" I finally made a revelation after looking through the third case file, and realizing this, I quickly flipped through the contents of the rest of the case files and confirmed my suspicions.

"It took us a long time to realize they were part of a group," Oryza shook his head, "though, I suppose with all the evidence put in front of you, it would be difficult not to come to the correct conclusion."

"These instigators, who do you suppose they are? These riots have been happening in different parts of the world, but they're at least coordinated enough to have several members at most of the scenes. And if civil unrest is what they're aiming for, it wouldn't surprise me if they have members within the police force as well. It would be easy to cause an outrage if the police started using violence first."

"Their symbol is the Wings of Liberi and they have taken to calling themselves the 'Arcanian Liberators,'" Oryza said dully. "While they have done nothing to mark themselves a terrorist organization yet, they might as well be, and that's how we have been treating them internally."

"That's not in good taste," I responded dryly.

"It's not," he spat.

The Arcanian Liberators— they were the people who put their lives on the line to evacuate the survivors trapped in the Russian Great Rift Outbreak Event during 1 AR. I… and Oryza as well, we were a part of this. We joined in the relief efforts as the first wave of responders and that was where we had met Verretheia. So for terrorists to call themselves Arcanian Liberators, it was an insult to those who had lost their lives in the line of duty in that hellhole.

Oryza pulled out a photo from his inner breast pocket but he did not show it to me immediately. He looked at it for what seemed to be ages with an expression that I had not seen on him since… well, not since that day.

"…Here. Please look at this. It was sent to me earlier this morning," he said with a deep sadness in his voice.

"No… But this is… Are you messing with me right now?" All my words failed me at this very moment and it felt like my heart had just leaped out of my throat.

—I was unable to believe my eyes. I simply refused to believe in what I saw. That was because in the photo, wearing the royal uniform of the Imperial Draconians and donning the emblem of the Wings of Liberi…

"Verretheia…"

It was the woman whom I loved with every fiber of my being, with an appearance just like I had remembered. Everything, from her height to the curve of her horns and where they were placed on her head, to the color of her eyes and hair, the shape of her nose, and even the outline of her face, were all the same as I had remembered nineteen years ago.

A myriad of uncontrollable emotions raged inside me and threatened to suffocate me where I sat.

—Hope. Verretheia was alive, by some miracle.

—Dread. But she was now a part of a terrorist organization.

—Confusion. The Verretheia I knew would never have joined an organization meant to spread fear and harm.

—Denial. There was no way this was actually Verretheia, afterall she had died nineteen years ago during a rift outbreak event because of me, because I had let her go, because I valued her too much to hurt her.

In the span of a second, both my mind and my emotions became a flashing blur. How could this have happened? There was just no way. The dead could not come back to life. But here she was, and alive. Just why had she joined a terrorist group? Just how much had she changed over these past nineteen years? No, no way, this was just a look-alike. This was not Verretheia. I refused to believe it.

…Yet, the truth was harsh as ever. All this time I looked at her photo, there was a tiny detail that failed to escape me. It was small and blurry, but it was jarring all the same. There was simply no way I would mistake what it was, after all, its counterpart had been hanging off my neck for the past twenty years now. The realization setting in stone nearly broke me.

"Then it really is her…" I spoke in a voice so low that it was nothing more than a whisper.

"Aye," Oryza shook his head sadly. It seemed he could not even bear to look at me.

I struggled to stand on my feet.

"Sorry, I need some time to myself right now."

He stopped me however.

"There's no need. I'll wait outside."

"Thanks…" It took all my effort to even say thanks to Oryza. My brain could not process everything that was going on right now. Even the sound of the door gently opening and closing was loud like an explosion that deafened my ears. And once Oryza was gone, I lost strength in my legs and I collapsed back into the chair.

"Verretheia… what changed you so much to do this?"

But there was nobody here to answer my questions. There was only me and my own thoughts in this place now.

…

…