"I don't know how long your world has left but apparently this one has until the end of the year. And if you don't know what the Emperor's swoop looks like I can have someone find you a picture—Tifinn—" she gestures at one of the people hanging around, who nods.

"I do not, thanks."

"Follow Tifinn then. And good luck." And she turns back to her conversation, which soon afterward multiplies into two.

He follows Tifinn.

Tifinn finds him a picture of the Emperor's swoop, hanging in a gallery a few corridors away.

It's a member of the smaller, sleeker class of winged boats - there are always a few of those in the air over the continent, which he will have glimpsed in passing. This one in particular is made of dark reddish-brown wood with silver detailing, the outlines of feathers painted onto its solid wooden wings, with a pale green glimmer depicted in the air around it. The colour of the wood is unusual among swoops, and the style of those clean silver lines is extremely distinctive.

"Okay. Thanks."

"Good luck," says Tifinn, already heading back toward the Rose Room.

Zoom.

Zoom!

It is getting towards evening by now, the sun sliding down the sky into the gap between the mountain ranges in the west, and when he reaches Dawnbrook the Emperor's swoop is sitting in plain view on the roof of a fancy hotel, parked on a landing pad next to a couple of lesser specimens of swoopkind.

He coalesces out front of the hotel and goes in.

"Hello!" says someone with the look of a hotel employee. "Do you have a reservation?"

"No, I'm looking for the guy who landed the Emperor's swoop on your roof."

"Ah - what for?"

"I was told he was the person to find if one has a bizarre emergency."

"I see. Well, I'm afraid I don't know where to find him, but I assume he'll be back at some point since he took a room here."

"Can I wait in the lobby?"

He hesitates, eyeing Cor's rather non-fancy outfit, but then: "Yes, certainly."

"Thanks. Do you have pen and paper I can borrow?"

"Ah - hm. Let me see," he says, and after some rummaging produces a small notebook with the look of hotel stationery and a fountain pen with an internal ink supply.

"Thank you."

And he goes and takes notes.

A few hours go by. The sun sets, and the elaborate windows - everywhere in Dawnbrook has elaborate windows - paint the room with coloured light.

The woman he saw sleeping in the park floats in through the wall. She is seven feet tall and not at all translucent at the moment, and there is a band of black iron over her eyes, attached to a chain that fades into nothing as it trails away behind her.

"...hello?"

She doesn't seem to notice she's being addressed; she drifts to a halt a few feet in front of the door, waiting.

Possibly for the teenage boy who walks in the door shortly afterward carrying an enormous book with a braid of nine chains down the spine. They fade into nothingness as they trail from the end of their braid, most of them all in one direction, one reaching forward toward the floating woman, and one reaching backward—

—toward the man floating in the door, tall but not nearly as tall as the woman, with a half-open shirt showing the iron disc set into his chest, its chain stretched out toward the book.