This is, in many ways, the one you've been dreading.

Emet-Selch, for all his flaws and griping, is easily convinced, because not only do you know who he is, but he knows who he is. His compatriots...

Well. You don't know if there is anything to be done, for Lahabrea. The idiot's been carrying a piece of auracite around in his pocket for ten thousand years, and it has worn him down and twisted him like every other. If you're to have any chance of putting him to rights, you're going to need the help of the others, and a crystal that you just have to wait to have wash up upon your shores.

Perhaps you can get Emet-Selch to fish it out of the lifestream for you.

But you can only face those problems one at a time. And in this case - you've prepared yourself as best you can.

And so he does not catch you unprepared, the shadow of a figure in white robes, his hood up and a red mask - such as you can only remember him wearing like this - on his face.

You tip your head. "Emissary."

He tilts his own at you, a faint hint of confusion on his features. "Strange, to need no introduction. Though hardly unexpected, given my comrade's recent preoccupation with you."

"I should hope he's been preoccupied," you say. "Twould be embarrassing otherwise."

The night is brisk. Dravania is a harsh land made harsher by the recent Calamity, the winds colder, though not so cold as they will be by the time they fall upon Coerthas. You are near the border of Sharlayan, or at least what Sharlayan once claimed, now lost to the wilds. In the morning, Sohm Al will cast its long shadow over you.

Elidibus will not draw arms against you - not in this, your first encounter - so you continue onwards, allowing him the sight of your back. The goblins haven't fully taken the valley and the remains of the city for their own yet - the wild beasts and broken bridges own the most of it. The small encampment to the north is not yet torn apart by cheese wars and Quickthinx's prophecies.

It's impossible to read him beneath both hood and mask, in the silence of your trek. You continue down onto the old Sharlayan paving, until you find your objective, or at least the first piece of it.

"All the tasks you claim are before you," Elidibus says, "and yet here you are, righting an aethernet shard in a forgotten city."

"Who is to say this isn't one of them?" you ask. The dead aetherstone tilts as you set it into its base. "Teleportation magic is one of my specialties, after all."

You breathe deep and channel deeply of the well inside you, funneling it into the blue crystalline. It lights and lifts under your fingers.

Elidibus says nothing, until you turn to him and say, finally, the pale blue light casting just enough light that shadows climb across your face, "I lay claim to the Fourteenth Seat, as the successor of Pandora, who left none."

Elidibus says, "There is no Fourteenth Seat." His voice is cold. If you did not know him - in so many shapes, in so many times - you would miss the way it almost quivers.

You say, "The Seat of Azem, the Traveler. It is mine by right."

"It was abolished," Elidibus counters. "Azem betrayed us in our hour of need." There is definitely tension in his voice now.

You say, "I claim it. If you want to debate my claim on the merits, Emissary, by all means, but you uplift fragments of the other seats to your numbers for less. But the only other with a claim has recognized it."

"Hydaelyn." There's no small amount of hatred to the name.

You say, "So you remember that much, at least."