Emma had gotten herself lost, now alone. The situation looked harmless enough from the outside, but the building itself turned out to be a genuine labyrinth of stone and corridors that all seemed to bleed into one another.
She found herself now in a wing far less traveled than the main hall, where only the occasional hurried figure crossed her path, collar turned up against the cold, never sparing her a glance.
Going by what she remembered from before the Elevation, the arrangement of the doors and the rows of benches lining the walls could only mean one thing: she had to be somewhere near a debate chamber. She couldn't have said how she'd ended up there, but she eventually pushed open a door wider than the rest and stepped into an enormous, perfectly circular room.
The whole space seemed designed for one single purpose, to keep every eye fixed on its center. Tiers of dark wood rose in concentric rings, climbing higher and higher the farther they stretched from the heart of the room, until they faded almost entirely into the shadows of the ceiling above. At the very center stood a bare stone circle, some five or six meters across, plenty of room for a speaker to claim as their own. The geometry of the place was built so that the faintest whisper spoken at its center would carry, effortlessly, all the way to the last row, a principle Emma knew well enough herself, an old hand at lecture halls built on the same logic back when she was still a student.
The room was empty. And for the first time in longer than she cared to admit, that silence carried nothing oppressive in it. It hung there, almost peaceful, drifting between the deserted tiers like a theater caught between two shows.
This had to be the place where decisions were made that shaped the fate of an entire continent, and yet, seeing it lie empty and dormant like this, Emma felt, for one fleeting moment, something she'd nearly forgotten she was still capable of feeling.
A sense of normalcy.
Standing at the top of this magnificent senate, Emma wanted a closer look. She made her way down the stairs slowly, savoring the rare luxury of this small reprieve, her fingers trailing along the massive wooden benches as she passed. The touch of the wood beneath her palms brought back, without warning, the place where she'd grown up, cracking open a flood of memory she hadn't seen coming.
Reaching the center at last, alone, she allowed herself to play at being someone important, straightening her back, lifting her chin, as though hundreds of eyes had suddenly turned toward her instead of toward empty tiers.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate," she declaimed aloud, her own voice returning to her in an echo off the curved walls, exactly as the room's geometry had promised. "Today's debate: the war..."
Yes, she thought, a smile slipping free before she could stop it, savoring this position of power she'd just invented out of thin air. I think I'd like that, actually.
She'd never harbored that kind of ambition before. But Odyssey, apparently, had a gift for handing out brand new desires to people who'd never asked for them, and quests to chase that she would never have dreamed up for herself.
"What war?"
A man's voice rang out across the chamber, carried by an echo that bounced from one tier to the next.
Emma flushed instantly. She'd believed herself alone, and only now understood, a beat too late, that she'd just put on quite a show for an audience of one.
She spun toward the source of the voice.
A man in his thirties had just stepped through the door opposite the one she'd come in by, charismatic, his hair slicked back with precision, dressed in a black suit whose cleanliness felt almost out of place in this building worn down by time. He watched her with a wide smile, no malice hiding behind it that she could see, as though the little performance he'd just witnessed had genuinely delighted him.
"What war, exactly?" he asked again, descending the stairs toward her at an easy pace, his voice as soft and as amused as before.
Emma was caught completely off guard, finding herself, with an irony that wasn't lost on her, in nearly the exact same position Andrew had been in barely an hour earlier. She had no idea what to say.
"Well... war in general, sir?" she managed, with a composure she absolutely did not feel.
The man seemed to find the answer delightful. He didn't reply right away, taking his time finishing his descent, and when he finally came to a stop in front of her, a full head taller, he simply said:
"Paul. And you?"
"Emma."
"Well, Emma," he went on, his pale green eyes narrowed with amusement, "for a moment there, I thought you meant the war creeping up on our dear Odyssey, right at our continent's doorstep. But however could you have known about that?"
The smile never left his face. But something in the way he'd asked the question, far too precise to pass for idle politeness, was enough to send a chill straight through her.
"Who are you?" Emma, no longer in any mood to play along, snapped the question out with a sharpness that surprised even her.
Paul raised both hands in mock surrender, his smile still fixed in place, though something about it had shifted, sliding slowly from amusement into a kind of irritation that was far harder to sit with.
"Paul. Honestly." He tilted his head slightly, the way one might study some curious animal. "Are you one of those Awakened with a bit of... memory trouble?"
Emma no longer had any idea how to respond. This time, it wasn't fear climbing up the back of her skull, but a real, mounting irritation. This man, in his immaculate suit, with a bearing that seemed carved specifically to fill a room like this one, wasn't he supposed to be someone important? Someone in charge, someone capable, rather than this endless game of guessing?
She tried again, more precise this time.
"I meant: what is your role within the Council?" she asked, her voice now openly annoyed.
"Ah, straight for the big words." He let out a small, light laugh. "I'm nobody, really. Just a humble councilor."
The word hung between them, far too modest to be honest, and Emma sensed, without being able to put exact words to the certainty, that she'd just been handed a polite lie rather than a real answer.
Paul took one more step toward her, his smile hardening almost imperceptibly at the corners, and when he spoke again, every trace of play had drained out of his voice.
"But tell me, Emma. There's something that's always troubled me." His green eyes, narrowed with amusement only a moment ago, now fixed on her with an entirely different intensity. "What does it actually feel like, being a Relic? That sensation of being cut off from the world, buried under the rubble of history for an entire century? What impression did it leave you with, waking up?"