They saw the figure at first light, standing just beyond the shimmer of the protection dome.
He was still. Perfectly still. Like he'd been placed there hours before dawn and simply chosen not to move. One hand rested on a tall staff etched with charred rings, the other held a faded cloth satchel. His skin—what little was visible between thick wrappings—was the color of baked clay, dry and cracked in spirals. His eyes were covered with a blindfold, cloth pulled tight, marked with black symbols in a language none of them could read.
He made no gesture. No sound. Just stood.
Sira was the first to spot him from the tower.
"Riku," she called down. "We've got a visitor."
Riku was already outside, feeding ash into the forge trench. He looked up toward the ridgeline where the dome shimmered in pale morning light and saw the silhouette.
"Is it human?" Kael asked, appearing beside him with a ration log still half-unrolled.
"No," Sira called back. "Not even close."
Riku motioned for Tharn and two others to flank the perimeter from within the dome, but not engage. Then he walked to the edge of the barrier, boots kicking loose black gravel as he approached.
The figure didn't react.
Even as Riku came within two meters of the dome's edge, the being stood unflinching. The blindfold never shifted. His fingers, long and dirt-stained, twitched once against the satchel.
Then he spoke.
Not loud. Not dramatic. But every syllable landed like a dropped coin on a still table.
"You are young," he said.
The voice was gravel run through oil. Not friendly. Not hostile. Just... heavy.
"You know what I am?" Riku asked.
The being tilted its head, as if listening to something beneath the earth.
"You are flame buried in ash. Not yet reignited. But old. Familiar."
Riku didn't answer. He studied the figure. No weapon. No armor. Not even proper shoes. But the stillness of him—the quiet—felt practiced.
"What do you want?"
"I trade," the being said. "Equal for equal. Truth for tool. Memory for heat."
He reached slowly into his satchel and pulled out a bundle wrapped in brittle bark.
He set it down just outside the dome.
Riku stepped closer, careful not to cross the boundary.
The bark fell away to reveal a gnarled root—deep red, veined with orange. It looked half-alive, like it had been carved from lava and cooled just enough not to burn.
"Fire-root," Kael said quietly behind him. "I've only read of it in old alchemy scrolls. It burns without flame. Fuel and heat in one."
Riku didn't speak. He looked from the root to the trader.
"What do you want for it?"
"One blade," the trader said.
Riku stared for a long moment.
"Any blade?"
"One that has failed," the trader clarified. "One that remembers being broken."
Riku turned, walked back to the forge quietly, and retrieved the rusted axe from the earliest days. The one he'd used to chip stone before he had anything better. The head was cracked. The grip half-splintered. Useless now.
He returned and placed it just inside the dome's edge.
The trader waited.
Riku took the fire-root and stepped back.
The being knelt, picked up the axe, and held it in both hands for a breath. Then—unblinking, still blindfolded—he said, "Your ground remembers a throne that never burned."
Riku froze.
The trader turned slowly, staff striking stone once.
Then he walked away. No fanfare. No noise. Just disappeared into the southern haze until his shape dissolved into the horizon.
Riku stood at the barrier for several minutes after he was gone.
Then he looked down at the root still cradled in his hands. It pulsed. Not glowing. Not warm. But alive. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
He didn't know what it would become.
But the moment he held it, he understood something instinctive.
It wasn't just a fuel source.
It was a key.
That evening, Kael planted it in a shallow pit beside the forge where the heat wouldn't burn it. No tools touched it. Just ash and earth.