The small caravan of outriders they had bribed into traveling with them with had not been talkative, and the ride was not a pleasant one. They had twice been chased — once by some animal that resembled a deer with a shovel growing out of its face, and once by a drunken orcish scout who seemed to be in the mood to pick fights — and an unexpected wind picked up and scoured their faces with ice. On top of all that, Jadaar was being even more standoffish than usual. At this point he could probably win some kind of medal in standoffishness — he stalked away from conversation like an insulted cat and tended to respond to any necessary queries with as few words as possible. Between the outriders and Jadaar's mood, Asric spent most of his time staring at the snow going by, silent.

The caravan left them when the purple light of the Kirin Tor's magic was just beginning to crack the horizon — close enough to walk, but far enough away to drive home the point that their company was unwelcome. Asric had a lot of opinions about the Kirin Tor, none of them flattering, and even Jadaar pointedly ignoring him did not stop him from airing them in sequence. Eventually, they came around to the subject of access to the city, and Asric had suggested Magister Hathorel's seal.

"Asric," Jadaar sighed. "You are an idiot. Are you aware of that?"

"I've been informed. Do you have a better idea?"

"No."

"Then we're going with mine."

"I thought you said your Magister was in Dalaran already."

"He's not my Magister, and yes, he's in Dalaran. I'm taking a calculated risk. It's a big city, I can disappear once we're there. I promise, I'll toss it over the side once we're in." Jadaar rolled his eyes in a way that indicated he didn't think much of Asric's promise, or his intelligence.

In stark contrast with the bleak landscape around them, the area around the single access point to Dalaran was tiled. The place was crawling with mages — human, mostly, all garbed in purple and serious expressions, conferring with each other in low tones or sitting with their fingers bent into arcane signs, directing the pulse of magic through the landscape. On the tiled floor, strangely, they had set up tents — great constructions of royal purple and glittering metal, pennants flapping in the frozen breeze. It had been so long since Asric had been near so much arcane power; blood thrummed in his veins in tune with it, and he shuddered.

Two mages, a human man and woman in wide-brimmed hats, stood between them and the gate to the floating city. It seemed a paltry guard, but if Asric knew anything about mages, the guards would be the least of their worries should they elect to start trouble.

The woman, who seemed to be the senior judging by the lines on her face, stepped forward. She was leaning heavily on a great metal staff, topped with a faceted crystal that caught the light in strange directions — the Kirin Tor was never one for subtlety.

Asric did not even hesitate. He whipped out the letter, unfolded it, and leaned in conspiratorially.

"I have an urgent message for one of the Magisters here. Please, let me and my companion past."

"Sunreaver business?" the woman asked, raising a greying eyebrow and looking pointedly at Jadaar. Asric had never heard of a 'sunreaver' before, but he knew an unsolicited piece of information when he saw it. He nodded. The woman was still looking over at Jadaar, who seemed to sense that something was out of place.

"Shattrath Peacekeeper," he said, after a moment. Just saying the words seemed to make him wince, but he passed it off as discomfort with the cold.

"Why didn't you take the portal?" the younger mage asked. Asric swore inwardly. There was a portal?

"We are not coming directly from Shattrath," Jadaar said, his voice smooth. "We were already in Northrend when the portal opened. And the way here has been…troubled." He left the last word hang in the air, dripping with implication of bandits, Scourge monsters, and who knows what else. The younger winced sympathetically, then turned his back to confer with his partner.

"You're not a bad liar after all," Asric whispered, standing on the tips of his toes to whisper in his ear. The gesture made the draenei shudder down to the tip of his tail, which gave Asric a certain amount of wry satisfaction. Jadaar batted him away as though he were a pesky fly and muttered that he hardly intended to make a habit of it.

"Welcome to Dalaran, Mister…?" the woman eventually said, clearly prompting for a name.

"Asric Redmourn."

"Jadaar. Er, just Jadaar."

"Very well, Asric and Jadaar…this way." She led them along an oddly circuitous route, towards the net of mages who crowded, both standing and kneeling, their bodies pulsing with power. "The crystal, if you please. Lay your hands on it…the journey will only take a moment. It will be…disorienting."

Asric sighed, laid his hand on the faceted glass. Twenty unpleasant seconds later, he found himself on his knees, trying very hard not to throw up onto an expensive-looking ornamental floor mosaic.

"Well, here I am ready to leave, and there you are on the floor and about to vomit. How cozy. Just like our days in the World's End Tavern," Jadaar said, somewhere above him. Asric groped for something to help him up, found Jadaar's waist, and hauled himself upwards. After a moment of steadying himself, he shook his head and waited patiently for the nausea to clear. "Do you not take well to portals?" Jadaar asked. Asric shook his head.

"Some people get seasick," Asric said, rubbing his temples. "I get portal-sick. It's not that uncommon." He staggered to his feet, with almost no active help from Jadaar, and leaned through the archway to get a good look at the city.

Asric blinked.

"It's changed a bit," he said. "Aside from the whole floating thing, I mean. Looks like they changed up the whole town center."

"There are portals to Shattrath City here?"

"Apparently." There was a tap-tap-tap on the tiles, and Asric turned to find Jadaar looking out an opposite archway. "Wait, where are you going?"

"Out." Jadaar did not elaborate.

"You can't just wander off—"

"Oh, really? I will do whatever I wish. I have been praying for a moment alone."

"Why?"

"I need a reason now, do I?"

Asric recognized this. Jadaar was experiencing…what was that peculiar turn of phrase they used in Common? Buyer's remorse? No, that wasn't quite it. After their brief conversation in the Kalu'ak sleeping hut, rudely interrupted by the arrival of a mustachioed busybody hemming and hawing about seals, Jadaar had suddenly turned cold. He had responded to even the slightest brush of Asric's hand by either seizing up like a rusty Gnomish timepiece or performing evasions worthy of a Farstrider captain. Asric was starting to suspect he had been Jadaar's spur-of-the-moment bad decision. Which was better, he supposed, than being someone's calculated risk, but…well, the novelty was starting to wear off, and Asric was starting to miss the old Jadaar.

"I'm going to go have a drink at the nearest tavern. I'll be getting a room in the nearest inn." Asric shrugged in what he hoped was a non-chalant manner. "I'm sure a strapping young draenei like you can find me just fine."

Jadaar nodded brusquely and vanished into the crowd.

Three days later, Asric was running out of coin and Jadaar had not re-appeared.

The sky was starting to darken, and visitors were beginning to stream into the tavern. Asric enjoyed this time of day — it distracted the bartender from trying to make conversation. The bartender here — a chatty high elf whose name Asric had pointedly not bothered to learn — was the kind of person who fancied himself diplomatic, but has really only mastered the art of being equally insufferable to everybody. Asric did not find the company of high elves particularly pleasant, even ones who professed to be magnanimous enough to run a house of universal welcome (though, privately, Asric suspected that the open-door policy of the Legerdemain was due less to genuine fellow-feeling and more to the sort of base greed that takes money from anyone willing to hand it over). High elves tended to remind him of his father, and that tended to remind him of his mother, and fairly soon Asric would be finding himself remembering Quel'dalas and Shattrath and that brief, dreamlike stay in Tempest Keep, and would be forced to order another drink to keep his head quiet.

The patrons of the Legerdemain tended to be transients with loyalties that had come unmoored in the wars. People with more political feeling gravitated towards the Alliance and Horde quarters that had been staked out in Dalaran since Asric had been here as a young elf; the leftovers who had a bit of coin in their pockets went to the Legerdemain to drink and ignore each other. There was, Asric had heard, a boarding-house in the city's underbelly for those with less, but Asric still felt enough pride to avoid sleeping in an actual sewer for as long as possible.

Almost reflexively, he scanned the crowd. Mostly human, some dwarf, some elf, and a lone gnome sitting alone with his enormous nose buried in a book nearly as big as he was. Near the entrance, a young draenei woman smoothed her skirts and watched the crowd with impassive golden eyes, clearly waiting for someone and growing more anxious by the second. Asric quietly sympathized with the girl.

It was approaching the third night of Jadaar's absence. Perhaps he had taken the portal to Shattrath and gone back to his family. Perhaps he had found a job that did not require the services of a courier or an investigator of somewhat flexible methodology. Perhaps he'd simply decided Asric's apology was worthless and his company grating. Perhaps he'd found Asric a lousy lay compared to sinuous draenei women like that girl loitering by the exit.

There was nothing for it. Jadaar was three days late, and Asric determined to give him up for lost. He resolved to spend the majority of the night drinking until it no longer seemed like a problem.

A gloved hand laid on his shoulder, making him jump. Asric turned to find himself looking at a sin'dorei woman with a severe haircut and an expression of barely-veiled contempt, wearing a tabard he dimly recognized as belonging to the Sunreavers.

"Asric Redmourn?" the woman asked. Asric nodded. "You're under arrest in conjunction with the recent disappearance of Utherin Brightspark."

Asric was too stunned to protest when the woman steered him out with a firm hand on his elbow.

It wasn't really a holding cell, per se. It was more of a converted basement — it might have once been slated for a minor bureaucrat's office, before they decided this squat little windowless room was not a fit environment for even the most minor of bureaucrats. Now, there was a lock on the door, and a little cot, and a sin'dorei fellow who was missing half of his ear guarding the door. Asric had paced the cell thirteen times, complained of the cold on three occasions, and politely requested some water without soliciting a single change in expression from the guard. Apparently word got around, because eventually the door opened and a tin cup of water was slid inside, but other than that Asric may as well have been talking directly to the smooth stone wall. Trying to ask the guard what on earth he was being held for did get a reaction, but always the same one — a comment that they were sending an official to speak with him about the charges. This was a spectacularly unhelpful response that did nothing to improve Asric's mood.

The official in question, however, did not wait long. Asric's sense of time was less than perfect without the sun, but it couldn't have been more than an hour when the sound of booted footsteps, muffled by the fine carpet outside, approached Asric's makeshift cell. Armor clinked as guards bowed their heads, the door opened, and Asric was staring into a face he'd really rather have forgotten.

"Hello," Magister Hathorel Stormhawk said, as pleasantly as the day Asric had met him. "Long time no see."

Curse it, Jadaar had been right. He was going to be so smug if he ever heard about this.

"What do you want, Magister?"

"Magister? Oh, Asric, my dear, don't be so impersonal."

"I don't think we're on a first-name basis anymore, Magister." Asric had been sitting down with his knees drawn up against the chill against the back wall of the room; he did not move as Hathorel swept into the room, his simple red-and-gold scholar's robe swirling around his ankles. The only bit of ostentation about him was a bright red brocade sash, embroidered with the emblem of the Sunreavers with what appeared to be genuine gold thread. The Sunreavers, Asric had learned, were some kind of partisan group lobbying for the advancement of the blood elf cause within the Kirin Tor; while Asric still had some shredded vestiges of patriotism and agreed with the idea in theory, he found it difficult to trust any organization dedicated to the advance of anything, and this was not improving his opinion.

"We'll be on any basis I please," Hathorel pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles back up on his nose. "I suppose you're wondering why you're here."

"Because you're still a bitter old viper?" Asric said. He knew precisely why he was here.

"Asric, might I remind you that you were the one who bit first."

"I trusted you," Asric said, trying to keep his voice even. "I risked my reputation for you, and you lied to me and used me to seize at honors you don't deserve—"

"Deserve? It's not a matter of deserving or not, Asric, it's a matter of having the wit to take what you want. Besides, I wouldn't be talking about deserving, given the company you tend to keep. First that third-rate Magistrix Illynia, then that consumptive old coot Voren'thal and his Scryers, and in between…well, we all saw how that little experiment turned out, didn't we?

"Hathorel! I don't care about your rambling! Tell me what's going on or leave me here to rot!"

Hathorel broke into one of his deceptively gentle smiles. "Two days ago, Utherin Brightspark disappeared. He was a Sunreaver employee — a minor one, but one of us nonetheless. He left no forwarding address, no notice of where he was going, but the last conversation anyone can remember having with him mentioned the name Redmourn."

"That's impossible. Nobody will believe I had anything to do with this. I've only been here for three days!"

"Yes, but your suspicious conduct at the gate did not escape notice, my dear. If nothing else, I will enjoy watching you try to explain yourself. Besides, if it comes down to a question of your character, I can provide anonymous-but-reliable confirmation that you are the sort of person who shares confidential messages with bedmates."

"And I can provide confirmation that you are the sort of magister who seduces couriers to profit from the ideas of better scholars."

"Oh, Asric, it wasn't all about politics. I like you — I do — but when opportunity knocks, you answer the damned door." Hathorel sighed. "Regardless of what you think of my career, you tried to ruin it. Turnabout is, as the humans say, fair play. The only difference between you and me is that I'm much better at it. Good night, my dear Asric," Hathorel said, bowing a little, and sweeping out of the room ignoring Asric's growled insults. The door slammed behind him, and Asric was alone.