The silence her words brought lasted longer than her other revelations. She felt the urge to speak but stayed silent. At last Yara spoke.

  "If the empire learned how to make these weapons," she said. "Or found someone who could..."

  "Agreed. They would no longer need us out here. If they could hand such a weapon to their commoners, they would. That would leave us at the mercy of people we all know care little for us," Merin said quietly.

  "That's putting it lightly," agreed Koss. "They would go to war with everyone. The elves on the Sylvaris continent, the dwarves in their mountains. Forget about us on the border, they would set their sights on the conquest of all..."

  Koss's tails stilled. When she spoke again her voice was quieter. "And this town is sitting in the Verdant Reach with no walls and no idea what's out there."

  "They know some of it now," Shai said. "They're not blind to the danger. That's part of why I'm here." She paused. "They have nothing from their world that could threaten anyone. No guns, nothing like that. What came through with them is what you'd expect from the centre of a town. Homes, a market, a harbour. People. Knowledge."

  "Knowledge," Merin repeated.

  "They built everything I described without magic. That doesn't go away just because they're here." Shai reached up and unclasped the watch from her wrist. She set it on the table between them. "One of them gave me this. It keeps time. You're welcome to hold it."

  Koss reached for it first, turning it over in her hands. The glass caught the light as she tilted it, the tiny hands moving steadily beneath. She held it to her ear.

  "It ticks," she said quietly. Almost to herself.

  "Constantly," Shai said. "It doesn't stop."

  Koss set it down carefully and looked at Shai with a small smile. "I'd like to know more about the man who gave you this. Later."

  Shai said nothing.

  Merin picked it up next, turning it slowly. He studied the casing, the glass, the movement of the hands. He said nothing for a long moment.

  "This isn't a single invention," he said finally. "Everything in here — the materials, the glass, the mechanism — each one of these is the end of a long road. Someone didn't just make this. Generations of people figured out how to make everything inside it." He set it down. "The knowledge that sits behind an object like this. I can't begin to measure it."

  Yara hadn't moved. She was still looking at the watch on the table.

  "Everyone in their town has one of these?" she asked.

  "As far as I know," Shai said.

  Yara's eyes finally moved from the watch to Shai. "I know you understand what it means to coordinate people at night. How difficult it is when that task requires more than one group working in lockstep. To all strike at a precise moment." She pointed to the watch. "This changes that."

  Koss's tails began to move again slowly.

  "No more guessing from the last bell," Yara said. "No margin for error." She sat back. "Their weapons may be the centrepiece but their knowledge has implications far beyond that. For how a war is fought, how a settlement is built, how people live. All of it."

  Merin looked at the watch still sitting on the table. "And this is what a commoner owned."

  "The goblin," Yara said. "You said he stored it whole. Was there no preparation?"

  "None," Shai said. "He held out his hand and it vanished. He confirmed it was in his inventory immediately after." She paused. "To explain that I need to tell you about something else first."

  She thought for a moment about how to put it.

  "All five of them have something that floats in their vision. Only visible to them. They called it a screen." She held her hand up, palm facing her, fingers spread slightly. "The closest I can get to what they meant is one of those glass panes I described, except imagine it floating here, in front of your eyes. Showing you information rather than the world beyond it."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Koss tilted her head slightly.

  "It appeared the night they arrived here. It shows them their physical condition, their magic. For the magic they compared it to a spell book. They said spells they've cast are recorded in it, accessible whenever they need them." Shai lowered her hand. "The storage works through the same thing. It isn't an enchanted pouch and isn't attached to anything they carry. It's part of this screen, part of them. All five have it. That's how the goblin vanished whole, no preparation needed."

  Yara looked at Merin briefly. "A storage that needs no enchantment, no object, no need to butcher or harvest. That takes anything whole, instantly." She sat back. "That alone would change trade across the continent."

  "It gave them their magic as well," Shai continued. "Before it appeared they had nothing. The magic came later though, they've been here a week and they'd had it less than a day when I found them. Whatever this screen does, it doesn't do it all at once."

  She paused. "It changed them physically as well. One of them had a badly damaged leg. Old injury from the sounds of it, years of wear. Gone by the time I met them. All five are built like men who have trained for years but their movements don't match that at all." She shook her head slightly. "My best guess is the changes happened sometime in that first week. They haven't exactly had time to sit down and work through the details themselves, let alone explain it to me."

  Yara sat forward. "So, a screen that grants combat magic, transforms men into warriors and gives a type of storage that breaks every limit we know. And they don't control it."

  "No," Shai said. "They have no idea where it came from..."

  "There's one more thing before I get to my recommendation," Shai said. "I mentioned to them that beast-kin in the empire's core have no protection under the law. That nobles can take whoever they want off the street."

  Koss's tails had gone still.

  "They didn't know," Shai said. "None of them. The moment I said it the mood changed entirely. One of them couldn't hide his anger, wanted to know how no one stops it, how it's allowed. Another asked if I was serious." She paused. "I confirmed it. They were quiet for a moment and then one of them said that where they come from, enslaving another person is one of the worst things you can do. That someone would spend the rest of their life in prison for it. All five of them felt the same way. That was clear."

  Koss looked at her hands on the table.

  "These are humans who react to the enslavement of beast-kin the way we would," Shai said. "Not with indifference or by looking away. With anger. I don't know what their world looks like in full but I know what I saw in those five men when I told them. There was no acting, they meant every word."

  "Their world has no other races," Merin said slowly. "Just humans." He turned it over for a moment. "If slavery is outlawed there, then it isn't because of sympathy for beast-kin. They had to find another way to run everything that slavery props up here. The labour, the economy, the noble estates. All of it." He shook his head slightly. "That's not just a world without slavery, it's a world that functions without the suffering of countless commoners. An entire world that found a different way to live, and from the sounds of these men, somewhat comfortably."

  "Or their nobles are different," Koss said quietly. "Less powerful maybe? Less able to resist the masses without magic."

  Shai shook her head. "They don't have nobles."

  That stopped them both in their tracks.

  "No nobility at all?" Merin asked.

  "None that they mentioned. They had swords once, they moved past those, maybe it was the same with this too. Whatever their world looks like now though, it differs from ours more than any of us have been imagining."

  Merin sat back and let out a breath.

  Koss's tails had started moving again slowly. "Not all of these humans may have the same views or mannerisms," she said. "However the fact that the first five you met got angry on our race's behalf speaks volumes."

  "Agreed," Yara said.

  Koss nodded once, more to herself than anyone. "Then let's hear your recommendation."

  "They need help," Shai said. "That much is obvious. No walls, no combat training, no knowledge of what lives in the Wilds or how the empire operates. Three thousand people who arrived here without asking to and have been figuring it out day by day since. They won't last on their own. Not out here."

  She paused.

  "But this isn't just about what we can offer them. What they have is worth considering. The knowledge behind that watch, behind everything I described in that town, it has more uses to us than their guns. Those are a potential trump card but also they lead down a path we won't be able to turn back from. Think about the potential knowledge they have on agriculture, building and medicine. Things that would change life on the border that have nothing to do with weapons. A world that built all of that without magic will have found ways to solve problems we haven't even thought to look at yet."

  Yara's eyes were on her.

  "And then there's the empire," Shai said. "If the nobles find them first, or find out what they know, everything I just described about those weapons becomes a conversation about how quickly the border stops existing. Keeping that knowledge away from them needs to be top of our list. Having these people on our side, as a deterrent if nothing else, helps stop that from happening. If we help them, they could grow to be our strongest ally and our biggest benefactor."

  She looked at each of them in turn.

  "I'm not asking you to commit to anything today. I'm asking you to agree to meet their leadership. That's all. See them for yourselves and decide from there."