Hector met Paris at the harbor.

Lysander knew this because Fylon mentioned it in the morning briefing — not as intelligence, as a fact of the day’s harbor schedule. *The ship from the eastern passage arrived at the first hour. Hector was at the dock.*

He had asked Hector to speak with Paris first and Hector had done so. He did not know what they had said to each other. He would find out some of it later and the rest he would understand from how Paris spoke when he arrived.

Paris came to the supply office in the late afternoon.

He came alone — not with the two attendants he sometimes brought to formal palace spaces, not with the purposeful efficiency of a man arriving to deliver a report. He came the way he had come to the training ground before his first departure: because he knew where Lysander was and had decided that was the right place for the conversation.

He sat in the chair across the table.

He looked older.

Not dramatically — not the difference of years but the difference of weight. Something had settled in his face that had not been there before. Not unhappiness. The specific quality of a person who had seen something they could not unsee and had spent the journey home deciding what to do with it.

Lysander said: *"How was Hector."*

*"Careful,"* Paris said. *"He asked good questions and listened to all of my answers before asking the next one."*

*"What did he ask."*

*"What I saw. What the people at the second house understood about what was happening. Whether the traders who arrived from the east seemed to know where they were going or whether they were simply moving."*

*"What did you tell him."*

*"That most of them did not know where they were going. That the ones who seemed to have a direction were following information they had received from people ahead of them in the movement — rumors, reports, the kind of thing that travels person to person faster than any official network. And that the ones who had been moving longest — the ones who had left earliest — seemed the most organized. As if the act of moving had taught them how to move."*

Lysander thought about that.

*"The ones who left earliest,"* he said.

*"The administrator who arrived at the second house with his family and his office records. He had left his regional center eight months ago. Not when the pressure arrived — before it arrived. He had been reading the agricultural reports for his district for two years and had seen what they meant before anyone around him had. He left before his neighbors understood why. When I spoke with him he was not calm exactly. But purposeful. He knew where he was going. He was using the movement to find a new place to be useful."*

*"And the ones who left later."*

*"More frightened. Less organized. Moving because they had no choice left rather than because they had made a choice early."*

He said it plainly. Not drawing a conclusion — reporting a pattern he had observed and was still thinking about.

Lysander said: *"Tell me about the second house."*

---

Paris described it the way he had written it in the letter but with the texture that letters could not carry — the specific smell of a trading house that had been receiving people from the east for weeks, the quality of silence in a market space where the buyers had run out of things to sell. The traders who arrived with empty carts and the particular way they stood at the edge of the courtyard as though they had not yet decided whether their journey had ended or only paused.

He described the owner of the second house — a man he called Kephon, who had built his operation over twenty years and who received Paris with the wariness of someone who had too many problems to add a Trojan prince to the list. Kephon had taken two days to decide Paris was worth talking to honestly. Then he had talked for three hours without stopping.

*"He said: I have spent twenty years making myself essential to the routes between east and west. I know which road the grain takes from the interior markets to the Anatolian coast. I know which road the copper takes, which road the dyed cloth takes, who controls each junction and what their fee is and how to reach them in a dispute. I have this knowledge in my head and in my records. And in the past year I have watched everything I built become less and less relevant not because anyone attacked it but because the eastern end of it is dissolving."*

*"Dissolving,"* Lysander said.

*"His word. Not collapsing — dissolving. The way something dissolves in water. Not broken. Dispersed. The populations that sustained the markets that sustained the routes have moved or are moving. The knowledge of the routes is still intact. The routes themselves still exist as physical paths. But the thing that made them routes — the regular movement of goods and people along them — is stopping. What remains are paths through empty space."*

He was quiet for a moment.

*"Meron wrote to Ampelos. I carried the letter. I have not read it — it was sealed. But Kephon told me what Meron was saying in it. They have been corresponding for years. Meron told Kephon what he was writing: that the inland routes would not return. Not this season, not in five seasons. The conditions that produced them are changing permanently. Anyone building a strategy on the assumption that the eastern trade network would eventually stabilize and resume was building on the wrong ground."*

*"Permanently."*

*"That was his word. He said it the way someone says something they have been avoiding saying for a long time."*

Lysander sat with that.

He thought about Arsini’s harvest numbers — the slow consistent decline that was not catastrophic enough to alarm anyone until she had assembled four years of data into a single picture. He thought about the Lycian fishing decline. The Carian king relocating settlements six months before anyone else understood the problem clearly enough to act.

Every piece of information he had been receiving for two years had been describing the same thing from a different angle.

Kephon’s word — *dissolving* — was the same thing described from the inside.

*"Ampelos has the letter,"* he said.

*"I gave it to him this morning. He read it and said nothing and sent me here."*

*"That means it confirmed something he had been thinking."*

*"Yes,"* Paris said. *"That was my understanding."*

He looked at his hands.

He said: *"There is something else I want to tell you. Not about the routes — about something I understood on the ship coming back."*

*"Tell me."*

*"I spent three months at Meron’s house learning how a trading operation works. What makes it run. How you build relationships with suppliers and buyers and the people in between. How you manage a disruption without losing the relationship on either side. Ampelos was right that it would teach me things."*

*"Yes."*

*"But what it actually taught me — the thing I did not expect — was what it felt like to be in a place where the work mattered and the results were visible and the people around you could see what you had contributed. At the second house with Kephon, in the middle of a situation where everything was under pressure, I found myself solving problems. Small ones — a supplier who was frightened and needed someone to speak with directly, a cargo dispute between two traders who had known each other for years and stopped trusting each other under the pressure. Things I could address. Things I addressed and they stayed addressed."*

He stopped.

*"I am telling you this because when I look at the wider situation — at what the region needs — I find myself thinking in the same way. About which problems I am specifically positioned to address. What I have that others do not."*

Lysander looked at him.

He did not say what he was thinking.

He said: *"That is the right way to think about it."*

*"I know it worries you."*

*"What I think about it is less important than what you do with it."*

*"I know,"* Paris said. *"I am not doing anything with it yet. I am telling you because I told you before my last departure that I trusted you, and I meant it, and trust is not only for things you want to hear."*

Lysander sat with that for a long moment.

*"Thank you,"* he said. *"Keep telling me."*

Paris stood.

At the door he stopped — his own stopping, the lighter one.

He said: *"Kephon asked me to come back. The same thing Meron asked. He said: I have spent twenty years building knowledge about a network that is dissolving. I need to rebuild that knowledge about whatever comes next. Come back when you understand what comes next."*

*"What did you tell him."*

*"I told him I did not know yet. But that I was working on it."*

He went out.

Lysander sat alone in the office.

He thought about Paris solving small problems in a trading house under pressure and finding that they stayed solved. He thought about what that feeling did to a person who had spent his life looking for a context in which he was genuinely useful.

He thought about Cassandra.

He did not finish the thought.

He picked up his shard.

Nine hundred and twenty-eight words.