~ NYXARA ~
She was not watching him.
That was an important distinction. Gods did not watch their supplicants with the focused, slightly desperate attention of someone who had just rediscovered a thing they thought was gone forever. That would be undignified. Nyxara was seventeen thousand years old and had witnessed the birth and death of mountain ranges. She had dignity in quantities that most beings could not conceptualize.
She was simply... aware of him. In the way that the ocean is aware of a particular wave. Incidentally. Professionally.
He had found a tavern.
Good. That was sensible. He needed shelter and food, and the Cracked Lantern on the corner of Dyer's Row was reputable enough, if one's standards were calibrated to 'unlikely to be murdered before morning.' She knew every establishment in this city. She knew every city. This was not special attention. This was omniscience, which she had always had and which had never before made her feel like this — this faint, unplaceable warmth, like something long cold remembering it used to know how to burn.
She was fine.
He was sitting at a corner table now, turning his last copper coin over and over in his fingers while the barmaid gave him the specific look reserved for people who had ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and were clearly considering asking for bread on the side. Kael met the look with the serene expression of a man who had no shame left to lose.
Nyxara, who existed across seventeen planes of reality simultaneously, found that she had devoted a disproportionate amount of her awareness to this one table in this one tavern in this one city on this one unremarkable world.
She was going to need to be more careful than she'd thought.
— ✶ —
The problem — and she was already cataloguing it as A Problem, which was new, because problems were for beings with something to lose — was that it was so entirely him.
Not just the soul. The soul she had recognized instantly, like a chord she had memorized in a different key: the shape of it, the specific quality of its light, the way it pushed back against the dark with stubborn, unscientific optimism. She had watched that soul in other bodies, in other centuries, and she had always found excuses not to intervene.
She had rules about that sort of thing. Gods did not chase the dead. The cycle was sacred, the reincarnations coincidental, and sentiment was for beings whose existence had an end.
But then he had opened his mouth and said 'thank you, Nyxara, vast and strange' in a voice that was wrong in every measurable way — too young, wrong accent, a slight rasp that the previous version hadn't had — and still, hideously, recognizably his.
She had given him a blessing worth three silver before she'd fully processed what she was doing.
The man at the bar was watching Kael.
Nyxara noticed because she noticed everything, and because the man had the particular stillness of someone who was being paid to have it. Big. Scarred across the jaw. A tattoo on his left wrist that marked him as employed by the Threefold Ledger — which was a polite name for the network of debt enforcers that operated in the lower city's financial underbelly.
She looked at Kael. She looked at the man. She looked at the small ledger the man was consulting under the bar, and at the name written at the top of the open page.
Ah.
So that was the debt he'd inherited.
It was not a small debt. The previous owner of that debt had been spectacularly optimistic about their ability to repay it, in the way that only people who did not expect to remain in the city long could be. And Kael, who had apparently stopped to help an old man who was neither old nor in need of help, had signed something he shouldn't have and was now, technically, on the hook for forty-three silver and rising interest.
Forty-three silver was not an amount you negotiated. It was an amount that bought you a quiet walk to the docks and a less quiet trip into the river.
The man at the bar set down his ledger.
He stood up.
Across seventeen planes of reality, Nyxara went very still.