He would in fact like to go for a drink with the Mortalitasi, experience a bit more of Nevarra City, see what he can learn with their lips loosened with wine, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the atmosphere. On the other side of the room, Hezenkoss is bending her head in discussion with another Riftwatcher. They’re being chivvied along, politely but firmly encouraged toward the exit. It has the feeling of a job done, a set of workers dismissed. This isn’t a place to linger.

But Strange lingers, looking at the half-ruined hall that Cedric pointed out.

“The architecture doesn’t match,” he says first thing, musing. Like something cut-and-pasted, carved out of another landscape and then seemingly dropped here through the rift. Not that he knows Nevarran architecture, but he knows precisely what this does remind him of; he’s spent enough time there, after all, mapping impossible roads and gravity-warping anomalies and supervising eluvian transportation and being bothered by spirits.

“Those arches, the doors. It’s more like—” A beat, making sure they’re out of earshot. “More like the ruins in the Crossroads.”