Chapter 147 - The Crow Again?

Chapter 147: 147 - The Crow Again?

The train finally stopped beneath the vaulted roof of Sylvarin’s central station.

Adrien felt the change before the doors even opened, the platforms outside packed with elves moving in every direction, some dragging luggage behind them while attendants steered new arrivals toward different exits.

The station itself ran larger than anything in Valleroy built for the same purpose. Pale stone columns held up the roof, reinforced by dark metal arches engraved with mana formations, while several tracks ran beneath elevated walkways joining the platforms.

Trains arrived and departed without pause, and among all the elves Adrien picked out several dwarves working around the engines.

Most wore heavy clothing reinforced across the shoulders and forearms, with tools he could not name hanging from thick belts.

One dwarf was half inside an opened engine panel while another held a crystal housing and talked with two elven workers beside him.

Amelia clearly had not exaggerated about the dwarves helping to build Sylvamir’s railway network, since they were still keeping it running.

The carriage doors opened and Cordelia stood first, followed by Lucien. Amelia gathered her things beside Adrien, and the four of them stepped onto the platform with their luggage.

Adrien stayed slightly behind the others.

He had no idea where he was supposed to go from here, so following the three people who actually knew the capital struck him as the sensible option.

His senses spread through the station as they walked. Hundreds of mana signatures overlapped around him, and the farther he travelled into Sylvamir the easier it became to tell elves from humans without looking at them.

Their mana was not entirely different, though it moved through their bodies more cleanly and with a balance he could not quite name.

Plenty of reasonably strong people filled the station too. Several Three-Stars moved through the crowd, and Adrien counted a handful of Four-Stars among the guards and older travellers. Solid strength, though nothing remarkable by the standards he had grown used to lately.

Then something familiar brushed the upper edge of his perception. Adrien slowed and looked toward the large glass sections built into the station roof.

For several seconds he found nothing but scattered cloud, sunlight and the white towers of Sylvarin beyond the structure. Then a dark shape crossed above one of the openings.

Adrien narrowed his eyes. ’You’ve got to be kidding me.’

A crow.

More importantly, the strange concentration of mana wrapped around it was exactly what he had sensed on the road, not merely close enough to be another creature under the same spell. It felt identical.

Adrien followed the bird as it circled high above the station before drifting toward the nearby rooftops, and the recognition left him with an obvious question.

’How the hell did you keep up with the train?’

They had spent most of the day moving at a speed no ordinary bird could hold for hours.

The simplest answer was that whoever controlled them had swapped from one crow to another somewhere along the route, except that did nothing to explain why the mana signature had not changed at all.

Adrien kept walking after Amelia while holding most of his attention overhead. The crow eventually dropped onto the edge of a distant roof overlooking the station entrance, where nobody else seemed to find anything odd about it.

Adrien did, and he also had the uncomfortable sense that it had noticed him.

The bird’s head turned in his direction, its attention fixing on him, and Vael’s warning came straight back: sometimes a crow was only a crow, and sometimes somebody very far away was looking through its eyes.

Adrien weighed that for several seconds before deciding to test something. He raised one hand toward the distant bird and gave it a thumbs-up.

It probably looked ridiculous, though there were not many clearer ways to say what he wanted to say. ’I received the invitation. I’m going.’

The crow’s head tilted. At the same moment Adrien felt the mana around it tighten slightly, as though whatever link ran between the creature and its owner had narrowed onto him.

Amelia noticed his raised hand. "What are you doing?"

Adrien lowered it. "Nothing. I thought I recognized someone."

Amelia followed the direction of his gaze toward the rooftops. "Up there?"

"Apparently not."

She studied the area a moment longer before carrying on toward the exit. Adrien waited until she looked away, then glanced up again.

The crow was gone. Not flying off into the distance either, since he could not sense it anywhere above the station, on the surrounding roofs or among the nearby buildings. The signature had simply vanished.

That made his suspicion considerably more solid. Whoever had been watching probably wanted to know whether he had received Aetherion’s invitation and, more than that, whether he intended to accept it. Now they had their answer.

’That should be enough. I’ll find out who sent the letter once I reach Aetherion. For now, I should concentrate on what’s in front of me.’

By the time Adrien’s attention came fully back to the station, Cordelia and Lucien had moved several paces ahead. Cordelia was doing most of the talking while Lucien listened beside her, giving a short answer or a nod whenever she explained something about their plans in the capital.

Adrien turned toward Amelia. "Where are we going?"

"We aren’t going anywhere yet. Someone should be here to collect us soon, so we’ll wait near the main entrance."

They followed the flow of passengers through the station.

Through its enormous windows Adrien could finally see Sylvarin from street level, white buildings rising beyond rows of trees while mana-powered vehicles slid silently along broad roads.

One of the two rivers he had seen from the elevated railway ran farther off, throwing back the afternoon light between carefully maintained stone embankments.

They reached the waiting area near the entrance, and Adrien put his suitcase down beside him. "Who’s picking us up? Someone else’s fiancé?"

Amelia opened her mouth to answer. Before she could, Adrien’s attention shifted, because two mana signatures had entered his range and both were enormous.

They ran far beyond the Four-Stars he had sensed throughout the station, deeper and denser than almost anyone he had met since awakening his Core.

Neither reached Vael’s level, though the gap was not wide enough for Adrien to shrug either of them off.

The two presences were approaching the station together. Adrien turned toward Amelia, who had already caught where he was looking.

"Who exactly is coming?"

Amelia hesitated for half a second. "My parents."