Arda was listening to the sea.

When the tinker had directed Ardashir to this inn, Arda had not expected it to be so close to the harbor. It was dusk by the time he reached the wharf. The waves beat against the weathered stones of the piers. Arda stood on the waterfront and listened. The steady boom and crash of the surf, like a great drum, rolled in ceaseless rhythm. The Farseeker touched the reed flute tucked into the red silk sash that wound around his waist. His gloved fingers tapped the tone holes, playing a silent harmony in counterpoint to the singing of the sea.

For a moment, there in the soft grey twilight, his burnoose sodden with ocean spray, Ardashir felt that it was almost in reach: whatever secret of ages past he had been chasing since he had first glimpsed it in the eyes of his Sidfir teachers. Arda had chased that secret through ancient scrolls, inscriptions - even shattered seals like the one the tinker had given him. Now, as his fingers played their silent music, those relics suddenly seemed futile to the point of absurdity. What Arda had seen in the eyes of his undying teachers wasn't some historical text; it was enlightenment, a sacred wisdom beyond the cycle of life and death and time and war. 

The sea did not live, did not die. It was unmoved by time or war. For a moment, Arda allowed himself to entertain the possibility that he had spent half his life looking in the wrong places - that he should have spent all this time listening to the music of the sea.

No. Perhaps it was true, though? Yes, perhaps. Yes, almost certainly. But Ardashir of Navavasta had not been born to listen. He had been born to search. He knew that about himself, knew it in his bones. He could not rest from searching. Not even to find what he sought.

"Hm." The young man chuckled softly. He shook his head. He thought of a snippet of poetry - Tinwë, he thought, early Silver Age. "Áni amúle i-nor, naite omentielmo esë." [i]How sharper than a thorn, the mind that knows itself.[/i]

A passing Stromish sailor blinked in surprise and squinted at Arda, for Sidfirian sounded but little like Mitradaevaka. The Farseeker glanced back at him, and straightened his back. The hilt of a scimitar rustled through the folds of his burnoose to glint in the twilight: an ivory handle long enough for two hands. Sapphire eyes winked from a golden lion's-head pommel. The sailor grinned and made a little open-palmed gesture with his hands - [i]meant nothing by it[/i] - and continued on his way.

Arda turned. The sea was the sea again: beautiful, no doubt, but it did not sing. He sighed, and in two long steps passed to the door of the inn, and stepped inside.

Mitradaevaka were not an uncommon sight, here in Ealdormuda: the Empire lay directly to the south, and much of its gold and incense and silk flowed through this port to the rest of the North. Southern traders followed wherever such goods passed. But Ardashir of Navavasta did not look like a trader: not with a tabbādeh of midnight-blue watered silk beneath the road-stained burnoose, and with a glinting steel vambrace encasing his left forearm, and with that kingly sword at his side. Nor did Arda carry himself like a man who dealt in trade: there was an easy assurance in his bearing that could not be taught or feigned. No - despite his dusty boots and well-used knapsack, this was a lord of the Empire past all doubting. The inn's barkeep took the newcomer in with a single practiced look, and smiled, and offered a respectful nod. 

Arda inclined his head in response, and bought a bottle of decent Arventian wine, and paid in silver. Then he turned to the business that had brought him hither. The tinker had said that a sylph was staying at this inn -  a sylph who had come into town with Turakindian artifacts. There was only one sylph here that Arda could see: a slip of a girl with amber hair and grey-blue eyes and great ink-black wings folded behind her. 

She kept strange company. Ardashir made out a young man in an Arventian tunic, and an older man, scarred and scruffy, with a well-made spatha at his side. Then there was an elf: Firindorian, Arda thought, though so fair that for a moment he took her for one of the Fae. But there was something a bit too human in the way she waved away some blandishment from the Arventian. And as Ardashir watched, a fifth joined the group: legless, slithering, sheathed in a ragtag coat of homemade armor. One of the Scale Folk, Arda realized with surprise: for he had come but recently from the Morgador, and creatures like this one had served him well as guides there.

Ardashir approached the table. In doing so, he overheard the strangers introduce themselves. Aderynel, the sylph, sought history; Hagen, the soldier, sought adventure; Quintus, the Arventian, had taken an oath; and Tárwen, the elf, gracefully but definitively declined to say just what she sought. Arda smiled briefly, and walked up next to Vashra, the beastman. 

"Ardashir of Navavasta," he announced, "if I have arrived in time to join in introductions." He smiled a bit ruefully. "Pardon the interruption." A handsome man, this, and that smile said he knew it: warm olive skin and bright green eyes, a bit boyish despite his beard, with a swift flashing grin and a faint scent of agarwood and dried limes. Arda held out the bottle of Arventian red, and placed it on the table. "In my defense, I come bearing gifts." 

Then his leaf-green eyes settled on Aderynel. "Word around town is that you found something in the mountains," Arda remarked. He reached into his burnoose and retrieved a small stone seal, half chipped away; the Mitradaevaka's gloved finger traced the runes around its rim. "I believe you said that you are a historian, Aderynel. So am I. I can read these runes. If they resemble those you found up in the mountains, then I think we could help each other. What do you think?" With a quick turn, Ardashir glanced around to include Aderynel's other companions in his question.