Norren groaned as his eyes fluttered open. His blurry gaze made out a stiff figure standing by the door of his office. Wait. Office—

He shot up, his wheeled chair creaking against his weight. His arms were still propped over his desk, brushing against the towering stacks of proposals and referrals he still needed to look at. And yet...

"Had a good nap, sir?" Rigel Locke, his trusty assistant, said as he shut the door to Norren's office. The blinds shielding the large, glass window slotted in it knocked against the wood with the assistant's motion.

Norren frowned, looking down at the thing he was doing before he inadvertently dozed off. His eyes scanned the rows and rows of names and numbers. Ah, accounting. It's no surprise, then. "Not enough hours, in my opinion," he answered the assistant's questions nonetheless. His joints cracked in satisfying clicks when he stretched his arms. "What brings you here?"

From behind him, Rigel drew a sealed envelope, and strode closer to Norren's desk. The thick manila crinkled as Rigel slid it towards him. Norren knitted his eyebrows, raising his gaze from the envelope to the assistant's face. "What's this supposed to be?" he asked.

"We received this from the Postal Quarters," Rigel stroked his beard. Even at his age, with the appearance of wrinkles on his pale skin, it remained spectacular. "It's addressed to your office but there was no address of origin."

Norren smacked his lips and pushed his hair out of his face. He pulled an all-nighter yesterday just to catch up on his mountain of work and had woken up late, leaving him no time to attend to his hair. It's the least of his worries, too, considering the dread slowly consuming his gut when he glimpsed the manila envelope. The timing was impeccable. If it proved to be the same as his dreams...

He shook his head and sighed. He waved a hand in Rigel's direction. "You can go, if this is all you came for," he said.

"I actually came for some other concern, sir," the assistant said, ducking his head and placing a hand to his chest—a gesture of respect. "If I may, it's about the Bill of Rights."

Norren closed his eyes. Not again. First it was Arya, and now, Rigel too? "What about it?"

"Hugh Grottway has mounted a great opposition against you in the Council," Rigel said. "By the next briefing, I predict he'd have swayed most of the Council to veto the bill."

Norren wasn't concerned. Not in the slightest. He doubted the Council were buying Grottway's antics, unless, of course, they had resorted to accepting bribes and other dirty, underhanded deals. If that happened, Norren could simply present some evidence and have them evicted from the Council.

If Grottway and his camp really wanted to halt the Bill of Rights' progress through the several Houses, they'd have to find other ways to convince the rest of the population. The only reason the Bill's able to move past the Houses was because Norren appealed to the notion of the power being in the masses. He had worked his butt off the past few years to gather enough voices and opinions to be certain most of the voters in Aldermere and beyond were looking to be progressive. And if these Councilors were found out to have vetoed the Bill, they might lose a huge fraction of their sure votes.

That's the bait Norren had been dangling over the Council's noses. Grottway and his camp didn't appear concerned in being vocal against the rights of the fae. That's only because they had the wealth to be able to buy off a few influential individuals and families to do the campaigning for them. It's dirty and frustrating, but that's just what it was. It's all politics.

And it sucked how the welfare of a whole other race was always being put on the line.

"Let's just do our best to present the next section in the following briefing," Norren said aloud. "When was it again?"

"This coming Risholvon, sir," Rigel answered. "Just let me know if there's anything else I can help with with the preparations."

Norren bobbed his head in acknowledgement, cutting the conversation short. Rigel, sensing his audience was done, turned and strode towards the door. As soon as the door shut behind the assistant, Norren snatched the envelope from his desk and tore it open. A single, folded sheet of paper was inside.

He upended the envelope, letting the letter fall flat on his desk. Scratchy and slanted letters greeted him as he flicked it open. His eyes skimmed through the contents, his eyebrows furrowing deeper and deeper the further he went. When he reached the end of the letter, a curse flitted out of his lips—something normal people would have found surprising, coming from a member of the Council.

The wheels on the legs of his chair shrieked as he bolted from his seat. He slammed his hand on the emergency bell on his desk. Immediately, stringent alarms shrieked throughout the entire hall where his office was located. He stalked towards the wire booth slotted to his desk's right. The wires curling in and out of the intricate contraption reflected the state of his coiling and frayed thoughts.

The letter mentioned someone close to him being involved. It couldn't have been his parents. If the letter came from Grottway or anyone remotely affiliated with his faction, they wouldn't dare hurt another human. Prison times were higher in committing crimes against their kind than with fae. And who was the only fae who has been involved with Norren lately?

Arya Salcrest.

The door to his office swung open and spat out Rigel and Emeline Vertelene, his secretary for the past five years since he started his first term. "Sir, what happened?" Rigel asked, his chest heaving for the breaths he's trying to catch.

"Is something wrong, sir?" Emeline asked, her hinds still haven't quite let go of the skirts she bunched up. Apparently, she ran up the stairs on her way here.

Norren yanked the receiver from the hook and started dialing the address he'd come to memorize. "Find someone named Arya Salcrest," he said as he slotted the receiver against his ear, letting his other hand grasp the booth's walls. "I believe she's been abducted."

Rigel blinked. "And how do you know that?" he prodded.

The other line picked up, Cornelia's lazy voice bleeding through the speakers in a drawled "Hello?". Norren jerked his chin to the opened letter scattered on his desk. As he turned to answer Arya's aunt, he spied Rigel and Emeline drawing closer to his desk and picking up the letter to read it.

"Hi, is this the Allridge residence?" Norren asked, trying and failing to keep his voice from trembling. In fear or from something else, he had no time to know.

Cornelia's voice crackled as she sensed the urgency in Norren's tone. "Yes. What's going on?"

"Have you seen Arya lately?" Norren said. His hand shook against the wire booth's walls so hard he had to instruct it to grip the metal divider tighter. "Is she home?"

"She went out to get groceries not too long ago," Cornelia answered. "And it's odd that she hasn't returned until now. I just assumed she got sidetracked by a random fictiontale price-drop again but..."

Norren reached up and loosened his tie. Air. He needed air and to breathe properly. Everything's just going according to Grottway's plan. The timelines coincided from when Arya went outside and when he received the letter. It could only be connected.

"Listen to me, ma'am," he said into the circular disc peppered with holes at the other end of the receiver. "I want you to call the Maltarci at this address I'm going to give. Arya might be in trouble, but please, remain calm. I'll..."

He glanced behind him to see Rigel ducking out of his office with a scowl. Emeline squeaked, tossed the letter back to his desk, and followed after the assistant. "I'll get her back safely," he said. "I promise you that."

The other line was silent. "Hello?" Norren prodded. "Please stay put wherever you are, Ma'am. I'll fix this. I'm going to save her."

"What's your name again?" Cornelia's voice crackled from the speaker.

"Norren Sterling, Ma'am," he said. "Is that of any significance?"

Cornelia chuckled. The sound seemed so out of place at such a time like this. "No. I'm just curious who my girl has been seeing secretly behind my back," she said. "It's nice to see it's not some creepo. Might be an upser, but thank heavens, it's not a demon's spawn."

Norren pursed his lips, not quite knowing how to reply to that. He might have been well-versed in all manner of rhetoric and reasoning, but for some reason, Cornelia put a stop in all of his facilities. "Well, I'll do my best on my end," Cornelia continued. "I'll trust you to bring Arya back in one piece. And if there's a scratch on her, I swear to Ouine, I'm going to make you pay."

"Understood, Ma'am," Norren said in a voice he had never used since he volunteered for the Maltarci drills in his youth. He hung up, the hook making a satisfying ding as the call cut and gears and cranks inside the machine crunched out the fee of his recent call.

He looked back at the letter once more and gritted his teeth. It had all been the same as what happened in the dreams. They had been a constant part of his childhood and his teenage years, showing him the daily life of someone whom he could only guess was a Crown Prince in one of the dynasties in the Old Kingdom. He still has yet to pinpoint who, but he's getting close.

The dreams seemed harmless and even entertaining at some point. But since the girl with the red hair showed up, Norren would always wake up with inexplicable dread gnawing his gut. Every morning, it had become his habit to try to remember what else his dreams showed him, and remembering always haunted him and his routines.

He had done his best to conceal it from everyone he knew for as long as he did. He had been doing well ignoring his dreams' existence, of course, until he encountered the girl in the museum. From there, everything became clear. The dreams—they were a message, a warning. It's a story of what's supposed to happen if fate was in control. It's both his past and his future.

And what's worse, Arya was always going to be involved in it.

Norren stalked towards the lone bookshelf in his office. He's doing this because he had to save Arya from her own doom. To honor the wish of the man in his dream, he's going to make sure Edge's next life has a future ahead of her. She had suffered for so long, and Norren would have to see to it that she get to live freely in this world she was dropped into. That's why he fought for the Bill of Rights all these years. That's why he was now taking out the only stack of books in his shelf that lay horizontally.

Arya's confession still rang in his ears and didn't fail to twist the verbal knife in his chest. Sure, he found her endearing with her brilliant ideas and her ability to keep up with him in terms of theory and philosophy, but that's where it ended. She might have shown him an honesty he didn't find in anyone else for all his life, but that's where Norren should put a period.

He wouldn't dream of having any more of these...annoying feelings towards her, not when she didn't want him. He'd go there, get her out, and maybe treat her for a cup of coffee or two. Then, he'd vanish from her life. Completely. After all this, Arya had managed to prove she was right. It would only be a disaster if they kept seeing each other.

The topmost book on the horizontal stack slid off the shelf. Norren placed it back to his desk and popped the lid open. Instead of the perfectly bound pages of a fictiontale, a gaping hole greeted him. And inside it sat rows upon rows of bullets casted with silver.

Norren clenched his jaw as he rounded his desk and snatched the cane leaning against the wall behind his chair. To everyone, it looked like a simple cane with a bar handle meant to assist him as he walked. Well, that's where they're wrong.

With practiced fingers, Norren flicked the latches attaching the handle to the rest of the cane's body. They were so thin and painted the same color as the body that they were almost negligible unless one looked a little more intently. Then, as the locks and the inner mechanisms holding the cane in place slid free with a characteristic hiss, a pistol's nozzle tumbled into view.

Norren pulled one of the levers down, unlocking the mechanism keeping the nozzle and the handle straight, letting the pistol bend. It gave him enough view of the empty cartridge inside. Six shots. That's all he could afford to take.

The bullets clinked against each other as Norren slotted them inside the pistol. It delivered a final click as he locked it into place once more. He flicked the safety off, pointing the pistol at a random spot in his wall. He pictured someone standing in the empty space, hooking this forefinger against the trigger.

His mind played the scenario in which he clicks it, letting a bullet fly with a bang, and watching it hit any part of a human's body. It was only proper because whoever hurts Arya has to eventually deal with none other than him. He was, after all, Norren Sterling, and he wouldn't ever miss a target.