“Ah, there you are!”

The voice was impossible to miss — loud, warm, and carrying easily across the streets of Mondstadt.

Grand Master Varka stood near the city gates, broad-shouldered and relaxed, one hand raised in greeting. Beside him stood a younger knight in white and deep indigo, pale mint hair catching softly in the afternoon light. His posture was elegant. His expression, gentle.

Varka laughed when you approached.

“I was wondering when I’d run into you again. Mondstadt has a way of throwing familiar faces into my path at the strangest times.” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “Still getting yourself tangled in interesting trouble, I hope?”

He spoke to you easily, like someone who already knew enough about you to skip introductions.

But while Varka talked, you felt something colder settle over your skin.

The knight beside him was watching you.

Lohen had not said a word. His face was calm, almost beautiful in its softness, but his eyes remained fixed on you with unsettling focus. Not rude. Not obvious enough for Varka to comment on. Just intense. Quietly, patiently intense.

When your gaze met his, Lohen smiled.

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It was gentle.

That somehow made it worse.

Varka glanced between you two and gave a knowing huff of laughter.

“Right, I should introduce you properly. This is Lohen, Vice Captain of the Ranged Company.”

Lohen inclined his head with perfect courtesy.

“So this is you,” Lohen said, his tone light, almost pleasant. “Grand Master Varka made you sound interesting.”

His eyes stayed on you a little too long.

“I thought he was exaggerating.”

You hadn't meant to find him. The supply room at the back of the Knights of Favonius headquarters was supposed to be empty at this hour — the kind of quiet corner you sometimes ducked into to escape the noise of the main hall. But when the door swung open, you froze.

Lohen sat on a low crate, one leg crossed over the other. A small glass vial stood open on the table beside him: the unmistakable pale green of a healing potion, the kind issued to knights before dangerous expeditions. In his hand was his dagger, slender and polished, the tip slowly dipping into the liquid. He turned the blade once, twice, watching the surface ripple. A faint, gentle smile sat on his face — the kind one might wear while remembering something pleasant.

He did not startle when he saw you. He simply looked up, the smile unchanged, and held your gaze.

"Oh." His voice was soft. "You're earlier than I expected."

He didn't move the dagger. The potion clung to the metal in slow, glistening beads, and you could see your own reflection warped across the blade.

"It's a strange thing, healing potions," he said conversationally, eyes still on yours. "Useful, of course. But sometimes a wound that closes too quickly can hide what caused it. Don't you think?" His smile deepened, just slightly. "Some things are better left... slow."

He lifted the dagger from the vial at last, letting the excess drip back in with the patience of someone who had done this many times before, and set the weapon flat on the table — within reach, but no longer in his hand.

"You can come closer, if you'd like." A pause. "Or you can pretend you saw nothing. I won't mind either way."

The library annex of the Knights of Favonius headquarters was usually empty in the middle of the afternoon, which was exactly why you had come looking for a quiet place to think. You pushed the door open expecting silence — and found Lohen.

He was sprawled in one of the high-backed reading chairs in a way no senior officer had any business sitting. One leg hooked carelessly over the armrest. His coat half-unbuttoned at the collar. A thick leatherbound volume balanced loose in one hand, his eyes lazily skimming the page with an expression so unimpressed it bordered on insulted.

A pink bubble bloomed slowly from his lips.

It expanded, perfectly round and glossy in the slant of light from the tall windows — and then popped with a small, neat snap. He drew it back into his mouth without ever taking his eyes off the page, jaw working with the slow rhythm of someone who had long since stopped pretending to be interested in what they were reading.

When he noticed you, he didn't sit up. He didn't even adjust the book.

"Mn." It was barely an acknowledgment. His dull red eyes flicked to you, then back to the page, then — slowly, almost reluctantly — back to you again, as if the second look had been worth it.

Another bubble began forming. Smaller this time. He let it grow until it covered most of his lower face before pulling it back in.

"You can sit," he said finally. The boredom in his voice somehow made the invitation feel more genuine than enthusiasm would have. "Whatever idiot wrote this thinks tactics is a series of inspirational speeches." He turned a page without looking. "You don't strike me as the inspirational-speech type. Save me from it."

He marked the page with a folded corner — sacrilege, in any other knight's hands — and let the book rest on his stomach. The faintest curve touched the edge of his mouth.

"Unless you came looking for me on purpose. In which case." He let the sentence hang. The smile widened just enough to be a problem. "Even better."

The assignment sheet had someone else's name on it.

Yours was written beneath it in smaller letters — a last-minute addition, the ink still slightly uneven from whoever had filled it in quickly. Reassignment. Effective immediately. Report to Vice Captain Lohen at the east gate by the second bell.

You had served in the Fifth Company for long enough to know his name, his rank, and the general shape of his reputation.

You had not, in any meaningful sense, ever met him.

The Fifth Company operated in squads. Yours answered to a sergeant who answered to a lieutenant who answered, eventually, to the Vice Captain — a name on orders, a signature at the bottom of deployment notices, a figure you occasionally glimpsed at a distance during full company assemblies before the crowd shifted and he was gone again. The kind of officer whose presence you felt more through the structure he maintained than through any direct contact.

Which was normal.

Which was fine.

Which was why standing at the east gate with your gear and your reassignment notice, waiting, felt more unusual than it had any right to.

The second bell rang.

"You're punctual."

The voice came from your left.

You turned.

He was already looking at you.

Vice Captain Lohen stood a few feet away, close enough that you weren't sure how you had missed his approach. White and deep indigo. The silver of his hair caught the morning light. He held a folded assignment notice in one hand — yours, or a copy of it — and his expression was composed and politely attentive in the way that suggested he had already formed several observations and was keeping them to himself.

He looked younger than you expected.

He looked at you the way you might look at something you hadn't anticipated finding interesting.

"Filling in for Aldric."

It wasn't a question. He glanced briefly at the notice, then back at you, and the notice disappeared somewhere into his coat.

"He'll be out another week at least. Knee."

A pause.

"Have you done the eastern ridge route before?"

His tone was easy. Professional. The tone of someone asking a practical question because the answer was useful, not because he was making conversation.

But he hadn't looked away.

The morning was quiet around you — a merchant cart rattling over cobblestones somewhere behind the gate, pigeons, the distant sound of the fountain. Ordinary. Unhurried.

His attention was neither of those things.

Not uncomfortable, exactly. Simply — precise. The kind of focus that accounted for everything it landed on. You got the impression that whatever he was looking at, he was actually looking at it. That nothing in the vicinity was being processed at less than full capacity.

You also got the impression that right now, that capacity was directed entirely at you.

Not obtrusively.

Not intensely, in any way you could easily name.

He simply looked at you, and waited for your answer, and the small neutral curve of his mouth said nothing at all about what he thought of what he saw.

Somewhere to the east, the ridge road wound up into the hills toward the treeline. Routine patrol. Standard assignment. Nothing that should require the Vice Captain's direct presence, by any reasonable logic.

You had not asked about that yet.

He seemed in no particular hurry to explain it.

"Whenever you're ready,"

he said instead, adjusting the strap of his pack with one hand. The morning light shifted. His eyes, when they caught it directly, were a color you didn't have an easy word for.

He was still watching you.

Still with that same expression.

Still with that small, unhurried, already-knowing smile.

"We have time."

A beat.

"For now."

The lamps in the Knights of Favonius headquarters had burned down to half-flame by the time you found yourself in the upper west wing. Most of the corridors were dark. Most of the doors were locked. But one office — small, unremarkable, tucked between two larger captains' offices — had a thin line of warm light beneath the door.

You didn't knock. The door was already cracked open.

Lohen was at the desk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a stack of reports in front of him. His coat hung over the back of the chair. A half-empty cup of tea sat at his elbow, long gone cold by the look of the surface. He was signing something with the same unhurried elegance he gave to everything else, the scratch of the pen the only sound in the room.

Without looking up, he spoke.

"Close the door behind you."

It wasn't a question. It also wasn't quite a command. It was the kind of soft instruction that assumed you were already going to do it. You did.

Only then did he set the pen down. He leaned back in the chair, rolled his shoulders once, and finally looked at you. The lamp light caught on his pale skin, on the small beauty mark beneath his right eye, on the faint shadows of a long day worn in the corners of his expression.

"You shouldn't be wandering the headquarters at this hour," he said mildly. "Someone might think you were looking for someone in particular."

He let the implication settle between you.

Then he nudged the chair across from his desk out with his foot — the second time he had done that to you, and it would not be the last — and gestured toward the cold cup of tea.

"There's another cup in the cabinet behind you, if you can stand bad tea." A small smile. "Or you can simply tell me what brought you here, and I'll decide whether to keep pretending I'm working."

You had been passing through the plaza when the shouting started.

Not a fight — not yet. The shape of it was wrong for a fight. One voice too high, too ragged, the kind of volume that came from something breaking rather than something attacking. A young man near the fountain, a crowd keeping its distance, two city guards at the edge of it trying to decide whether to move in.

And Vice Captain Lohen, standing close enough to be in range of whatever happened next.

You stopped.

You had seen him at distance before. At assembly, at the gate, the back of his head in a briefing room. You had not seen him like this.

He was not doing anything obvious. He was standing, hands visible, posture easy, the way you stand when you are communicating that you are not a threat and have all the time in the world. He was talking. You were too far to hear the words — just the register of them, low and even, the specific cadence of someone who has decided that this situation is going to resolve a particular way and is simply waiting for the other person to arrive at the same conclusion.

The young man was crying now. Still loud. Then less loud.

Then not loud at all.

It took seven minutes. You counted without meaning to.

When it was over — the guards moving in gently, the crowd dispersing, the young man sitting on the fountain's edge with his head in his hands — Lohen stepped back. Unhurried. He said something to the guards. One of them nodded.

Then he turned.

And found you watching.

The training grounds were not on your way.

And yet.

You weren't sure how long he had been sitting there before you noticed him — or how long he had noticed you before you noticed him, which was, you were beginning to suspect, the more relevant question.

A knight in white and deep indigo. Pale silver hair catching the last of the evening light. Sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the grounds with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere else to be and had decided this particular spot suited him.

You recognized the uniform.

You recognized him.

You kept walking.

What he was doing registered a half-second later - the small practical dagger, the open vial beside him on the wall, the substance inside catching the evening light in a way that was faintly, distinctly luminescent. Not quite gold. Not quite green. The color of something that had no business being beautiful.

He drew the blade out.

Held it up.

Examined it.

Dipped it again.

Unhurried. Unbothered. Completely unconcerned with the fact that he was doing it in the open air with the city carrying on just beyond the grounds as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world.

To him it probably was.

You kept your eyes forward.

Kept walking.

The wall was behind you.

Almost past it.

Almost.

"You noticed."

His voice came quietly at your back. Not loud. Not calling after you. Simply - present, delivered with the mild certainty of someone stating something they had already confirmed.

Your feet slowed.

Stopped.

A beat of silence.

Then, because there was nothing else to do, you turned.

He was looking at you.

He hadn't moved from the wall. The dagger rested between his fingers, the vial still open and faintly glowing beside him. Posture unchanged. Expression composed and pleasant and entirely unbothered by the fact that you had just watched him do something most people would have questions about.

The smile arrived.

Small. Settled.

"Most people don't," he said. A brief pause. Something in his eyes noted your expression and filed it away with what appeared to be genuine interest. "Or they see it and decide they'd rather not have noticed."

He tilted his head a fraction.

"You stopped."

Not an accusation.

Not quite a question.

The dagger turned once in his fingers - an idle movement, habitual, the way someone fidgets with a familiar object.

The vial caught the last of the evening light and held it.

He waited.

With the particular patience of someone who had already decided this moment was more interesting than whatever came before it - and the particular quality of attention that suggested you had just become, without entirely meaning to, the most interesting thing in his immediate vicinity.

What happened next was up to you.