The wyverns carried them east for the better part of two days, Mira flying point with a reckless, delighted confidence that made her mount bank harder than seemed strictly necessary at every turn, Akira keeping careful pace at Remus's shoulder, Vantor grumbling the entire way about having drawn the short straw of riding double with a passenger who kept white-knuckling the wrong strap.
"I said I wanted to ride with Mira," Remus pointed out, not for the first time, both hands locked around Vantor's midsection as the wyvern dropped through an air pocket hard enough to leave his stomach somewhere above them.
"If I'd let you ride with me, Akira would have sulked about it for a week," Vantor said, entirely unmoved. "You got the neutral solution. Complain to the Council, not to me."
They found the Temple of Balance only after the sun had fully set, a low white shape rising suddenly out of the tree line where nothing had been visible a moment before, moat water catching the moonlight in slow, silver ripples around a courtyard thick with gardens nobody living had apparently planted on purpose.
"It only shows itself at night," Mira said, an afterthought that earned her a flat, unimpressed look from Vantor. "I forgot to mention that part earlier."
"You forgot," Vantor said, "or you enjoyed watching us worry."
Inside, moonlight fell through high glass in wide, pale columns across murals depicting figures Remus half recognized from old myths he'd never fully learned the names of, and it was Remus himself who stopped dead in front of one panel near the temple's inner hall, freshly painted, the mortar around its edges still faintly damp.
"Look at this," he said.
Four riders on three wyverns, two girls and two men, the two men mounted together on the same beast. Akira's breath caught audibly beside him.
"Why does it look like us," she said.
"Coincidence," Vantor said, though something in his voice suggested he didn't fully believe his own answer.
An old monk found them there a moment later, bowing low, entirely unsurprised by their arrival. "You are expected," he said. "The sage who lives within these walls dreamed of your coming three nights before your ship ever crashed."
He led them through winding, garden-lined corridors to a small room at the end of a long hall, and the voice that answered his knock was gravelly, patient, older than the rest of the temple somehow.
Inside, a blind sage sat cross-legged on a worn cushion, eyes pale and vacant and somehow more attentive than any pair of seeing eyes Remus had met since he'd woken up on this island.
"I've been waiting," the sage said. "Are you ready to know yourselves?"
"Yes," Mira said, immediately.
"Do we have a choice," Vantor said, dry.
"Your four spirits move as one quad," the sage said, ignoring both answers equally. "They only manifest once in a thousand years, and history has never been able to decide whether that's an omen of triumph or of ruin. I won't waste your time pretending I already know which this will be." His blind eyes moved once over Mira, Akira, and Vantor in turn, and something like amusement crossed his weathered face. "The three of you already know exactly what you are to each other. You worked that out for yourselves on the road here, by the look of it, and I've got no interest in telling strangers something they've clearly already settled among themselves."
"Fair," Mira said, sounding faintly disappointed anyway.
"Suits me," Vantor said. "I'd rather not be told what I am by a man I met five minutes ago."
"And you, outsider." The sage turned to Remus, and something in his blind, pale gaze felt, for a moment, uncomfortably thorough. "Not from this world at all. A raven walks with you: clever, hungry to understand, quick to solve whatever's in front of you and just as quick to miss whatever isn't. You will never fully solve the mystery of people, however hard you try. We're too strange, too particular, to be reduced the way a bridge or a blade can be. Find someone who reads people the way you read machines, and let them carry that part of the work for you."
"Is that everything," Vantor asked. "Can we go?"
"Almost," the sage said. "I have two gifts for the outsider. One is a piece of wisdom, which I've already given him. The other is this."
He drew, from somewhere within the folds of his own robe, a small, dark claw carved from something Remus's Identify skill couldn't immediately name, and held it out with both hands.
"The Raven's Claw," the sage said, as Remus took it. "What you're actually looking for, Nature Magic and balance both, waits at the bottom of the Abyssal Maelstrom. Even a short distance in has driven better men than you to madness. I'd advise more care than curiosity."
"Daegon," Remus said.
"Precisely," the sage said, and something that might have been a smile ghosted across his weathered mouth. "Happy travels, outsider. Keep the claw close. Not everyone you meet from here forward deserves to know exactly how you came by it, and there's no shame in letting that particular truth stay yours a while longer."
Remus turned the claw over once in his own palm, feeling its odd, cold weight settle against his skin, and understood, with a small private clarity he didn't say out loud to any of the three watching him, precisely what the sage meant and precisely who he already intended to keep it from. Not the truth itself, which he'd lived through and would remember perfectly well without anyone's help. Just the sharing of it. There was, he thought, already a long list of things he'd learned to hold back from the people closest to him rather than risk what handing them over honestly might cost him, and he tucked the claw away into the same private ledger without examining, yet, how much longer that particular habit could keep working before it finally didn't.
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