She nods. 

"Until we meet again, Saira." 

Before Saira can say anything else, she turns and vanishes into the forest, Twilly scurrying at her heels. 

"—wait, how do you know my—" 

Aaaand she's gone. Nevermind. That probably counts as a point in the 'hallucination' column, though. 

Anyway. Onwards to Oaklore Keep. 

She sees the keep up ahead through the trees long before reaching it. Oaklore Keep is on a slight hill, built around a lone, giant tree even older and taller than the ones in the forest around it. 

The path she's on is a dirt track, wide enough for a cart, with grass growing in between the wheel ruts. It goes right up to the gates and turns right to continue on alongside the walls, although it looks like the road past the keep is blocked by a wooden barricade. There's an armoured man with a spear guarding the barricade, and another one guarding the gates. More are visible up on the walls. 

Banners hang from the gatehouse, red with a golden dragon's head. Carved into the stone arch above the gates is the symbol of a circle with a segment, maybe around 60 degrees, cut out at the bottom. 

She goes up to the guard at the gates. 

"Hi, I have a message for Captain Rolith. Could you please direct me to him?" 

The guard looks her up and down, expression unreadable behind the visor of his helmet. 

She looks old enough that he's not immediately wondering where her parents are or why she has a job, but very young to be travelling alone through the woods. Especially since she's not visibly armed or armoured, and not dressed like any of the kinds of adventurer he knows about, so she's probably a civilian, except that civilian girls don't tend to wear trousers. Maybe it's a foreign thing; she looks foreign and so do her clothes. 

She seems way too calm to have survived some kind of accident that killed the rest of her travelling party. If she's not some kind of foreign adventurer he definitely wants to know what her parents are doing letting her walk through the woods alone to deliver messages. 

...not that it's any of his business. His job is just determining whether she's safe to let into the keep. Neither a foreign adventurer nor a foreign civilian is especially likely to be working with the Darkwolf bandits, he supposes.

"Is the Captain expecting you?"

If she says yes, it's probably a lie; Rolith would have told the gate guards if he was expecting a messenger. 

"...no." 

Hmm. Technically he did decide that was the less suspicious answer. 

"What's the message?" 

"Are you Captain Rolith?"

"No. But if you tell me what the message is, I can decide whether it's worth letting him know about. He's a busy man." And if random civilians were allowed to bother him he'd be even busier. 

That sounds kind of reasonable, but she has a MISSION. "Lady Celestia told me to give the message to Captain Rolith, not to a random guard who says he'll maybe pass it on." 

"Hey! You're speaking to a Knight of the Pactagonal Table, young lady. Show some respect!" 

Oh no, an important person. Or at least someone who thinks he's important, which is worse in a lot of ways. 

"Sorry, sir, I'm not from around here and I didn't know." 

"Hmph. That's better. Now, what's this about Lady Celestia?" 

"That's who the message is from. White robes, silver hair...?" 

"I know who Lady Celestia is," he says, talking over her.

Ugh, if the message really is from her, it might be genuinely important. He sighs. "Alright, go on in. Captain Rolith is in the main courtyard just inside the gates—he's the one with the dragon-wing pauldrons and the massive hammer." 

He steps aside to let her go through the gates. 

"Thank you. ...what's a pauldron?" 

Siiiigh. "This bit." He bangs a gauntleted fist on the armour plate covering his shoulder. 

"Oh, the shoulder bit, okay. Thank you."

Through the gate! 

Beyond the gates is a muddy courtyard filled with the hubbub of people going back and forth: more armoured knights, yes, but ten times as many servants. This courtyard seems to be the centre of activity for the whole keep, with stables on one side, an armoury on another, and maids going back and forth to what smells like a kitchen somewhere through an archway to the right. Through it all, children—most of them several years younger than Saira—dart about carrying messages. 

A group of knights on horseback streams past Saira and out of the keep in a clatter of hooves, a chorus of odd barks following them from a kennel against the outer wall. The air smells like horse manure and some kind of unidentifiable animal musk. 

She hastily makes way for the horses. 

And then just sort of...stands there, in as out of the way a corner as she can manage. Can she spot anyone matching Captain Rolith's description? 

One of the few still points in the chaos is an older blond guy in armour, who's holding three conversations at once over on the far side of the courtyard. The shoulder pieces of his armour are sculpted and decorated to look like dragon wings, while still being basically normal-shoulder-piece shaped.

She can't see from here whether he has a massive hammer, but he's the only one visible with dragon-wing motifs on his armour.