Arriving (Open)
It had been easier than he'd thought to get the Queen's permission to come here. To explore on the caveat that he report back to her everything that he saw and did. She knew as well as he did that once he was outside of her territory, he would do as he pleased, but there wasn't much that she could do about it. She would wait for her information, and he would feed her what little he could and still get by with. He needed to be able to stay as long as possible, and if she got too much too quickly, she might think that the end of it. Call him back. He could disobey to some extent, but in the end, she was still his Queen. There were still politics.
Almost immediately upon his arrival, Eric knew that there was something much bigger going on in this place than he'd imagined. It felt different than any other place he'd ever been in his life. His entire life. It was as if this place crawled over his skin, tugged at him and pushed at him at the same time.
Yet it all looked so absurdly normal. To the point of boring.
Eric looked at the sky, at the moon, he'd seen York from overhead only moments ago. It had not looked any more significant from up there. Now, at street level, Eric was looking for signs of life, and starting to suspect that everybody who lived here went inside as soon as it got dark. He didn't think he'd seen a place so abandoned at night since the middle ages.