A few days earlier:
Tingen, Khoy University.
The history department office.
"Dear Mr. Azik,"
"Hello."
"Please forgive this unsolicited letter, but I am writing because something has puzzled me, and I hope to find an answer..."
When the letter arrived, Azik was sitting at a faculty desk. It happened to be his turn to stay behind that day.
He stopped sorting the books in his hands and scanned the rows of elegant handwriting on the white paper.
After reading the entire letter, Azik frowned slightly. A trace of confusion appeared in his brown eyes, which held an indescribable sense of age and experience.
Suppressing the inexplicable sorrow in his heart, he picked up a quill and began writing briskly:
"Dear Mr. Hastings,"
"Thank you very much for your letter and for sharing such a curious experience."
"To be quite frank, I had never heard of Ram Town before this, nor was I familiar with the deeds of the 'First Baron Ramd.'"
"As you suggested in your letter, this may simply be some mysterious coincidence, or perhaps the painter who created the forgery happened to use a model who resembled me..."
At this point, Azik paused, his gaze shifting between that sentence and the words "a small, inconspicuous black mole on his right earlobe."
He recalled meeting Mr. Hastings and Klein at the end of the previous month:
There was something discordant about Klein's fate, whereas Mr. Hastings... Azik could see nothing about him at all.
But whether he could see anything or not, it was enough to conclude that they possessed extraordinary, peculiar abilities, much like his own.
And when Hercules Hastings had greeted them after entering, Cohen might have assumed the greeting was meant for him, but Azik's intuition told him it might have been directed at Klein.