Chapter 415: WHAT WIRASENA KNOWS

Neither of them spoke on the walk home. Rama carried their sleeping daughter against his shoulder, Larasati’s mother having watched her through the reception’s final hour, and the quiet of the streets after dark felt considerably louder than it should have, every step landing heavier than the last.

Sekar waited until their daughter was settled and the door closed behind them before she finally let the question out.

"Did he mean what I think he meant?"

"I don’t know what else ’a flame that does not yet burn’ could mean." Rama lowered himself onto the room’s single wooden stool, exhaustion pulling at him in a way training and combat rarely managed anymore. "Sekar, he described exactly what we found in my quest log. Word for word, almost."

"Dormant. Unconscious." Sekar sat across from him, already working through it with the particular focus she brought to genuinely difficult problems. "He said his order has kept records for three generations. Children’s dreams, warmth without source, presence without shape. That’s not coincidence, Rama. That’s the same thing our daughter’s been describing since the second week in Tirtayasa."

She pulled the bark-scraps from their bundle, spreading a few across the small table between them, though there was nothing written on them yet that addressed this specific problem.

"I want to think through what he actually knows versus what he suspects," she said. "He said his order has never been certain. Some of them thought it superstition. He’s the one who believed there was something real underneath it."

"And tonight he found confirmation standing three feet away from him."

"Which means he knows something considerably closer to true than either of us has managed to piece together on our own, even with the System actively feeding you information." Sekar’s fingers drummed once against the table’s edge, a habit Rama recognized from seven years of watching her work through genuinely difficult strategic problems. "He’s spent forty years on this. We’ve had two months and a handful of cryptic notifications."

"You want to talk to him," Rama said. It wasn’t a question.

"I think we have to." She met his eyes directly. "I know the instinct is to pull back, to treat what happened tonight as exposure we need to contain. But Rama, think about what we’re actually facing. We don’t know what the First Ember is beyond a few fragments. We don’t know why it’s reaching for our daughter specifically. We don’t know what happens if whatever’s under that shrine wakes up wrong, or gets forced awake by someone who shouldn’t be anywhere near it."

"And Wirasena might know more of that than we do."

"He might know considerably more of that than we do. Forty years of records, Rama. Generations of accumulated observation we simply don’t have access to any other way." She leaned forward slightly. "I’m not saying we tell him everything. I’m saying continued avoidance isn’t actually protecting us from anything. It’s just leaving us blind while someone who clearly already suspects the truth keeps working the problem without us."

Rama sat with that for a long moment, turning it the way he’d once turned genuinely difficult institutional decisions, weighing risk against the specific cost of continued ignorance.

"He said he wasn’t going to treat us as a threat," he said finally. "For what that’s worth."

"For what that’s worth," Sekar agreed. "But he’s also spent his entire life around a court that survives on careful information and careful leverage. I don’t think he’s lying to us. I think he’s also not going to hand over forty years of research for free, out of pure scholarly generosity."

"So we go in carefully. Same as everything else."

"Same as everything else." She managed something close to a tired smile. "We’ve gotten reasonably good at that particular skill, out of necessity."

Their daughter stirred in the next room, murmured something too soft to catch, and settled again. Rama listened for a long moment, checking the particular rhythm of her breathing the way he’d learned to check it every night since the crossing, before turning back to Sekar.

"Tomorrow," he said. "I’ll find him tomorrow. Alone, first. See how much he’s actually willing to say before we decide how much we’re willing to say back."

"Be careful how you approach it. He’s spent forty years being patient with fragments. He’ll notice if you’re rushing him."

"I know how to be patient."

"I know you do." Something eased slightly in her expression, exhaustion and affection tangled together. "I just worry about you carrying this particular conversation alone. This one’s close to home in a way the others haven’t been."

Rama left before their daughter woke the next morning, telling Sekar only that he’d start at the palace library, the most obvious place a keeper of old rites might be found during daylight hours.

The palace grounds felt different in morning light, quieter, servants moving through their routines with the specific unhurried efficiency of people who’d done this exact work for years. He asked a passing scribe for directions, received a vague gesture toward the eastern wing, and made his way there with the careful, measured pace of a man who wanted to look like he was simply exploring his new surroundings rather than hunting purposefully for a single elderly scholar.

The library itself surprised him. Not the cramped, dusty room he’d half expected, but a genuinely spacious hall, high windows letting in clean morning light across rows of shelved scrolls and bound manuscripts, the specific hush of a place built for concentration rather than display.

He scanned the room slowly, searching for white hair among the handful of scribes already working at their tables.

He didn’t have to search long.

Wirasena sat near the room’s far end, at a small table positioned precisely where the morning light fell strongest, a single manuscript open in front of him that he wasn’t currently reading. He was watching the doorway instead, patient and unhurried, the specific stillness of someone who had been sitting exactly that way for some time already, waiting.

He looked up as Rama crossed the threshold, and something in his weathered face shifted into quiet, unsurprised satisfaction, as though the morning had simply delivered exactly what he’d expected it to deliver, on schedule, without any need for surprise at all.

"Traveler," Wirasena said, gesturing toward the empty seat across from him. "I wondered how long it would take you."

Rama stopped a few steps into the room, the specific cold certainty settling through him that he hadn’t found Wirasena at all. He’d simply arrived at the place Wirasena had already decided he would come, and the old man had done nothing but wait.